Where Does Curiosity Come From?
some ramblings on creativity, curiosity, collaboration, and interdisciplinarity
Dear Friends,
I have an activity I sometimes pull out when I teach research writing. I project a Wikipedia article on the whiteboard of something that might be perceived as “boring.” Then I show my students how to use the superscript citations to find sources via the References portion at the bottom of the article. The point of the assignment is to show them that a dalliance with Wikipedia is not prohibited, but it must be done to pique curiosity and find actual citations. More than anything, I hope to convey that nothing is truly boring, because there are almost always unexpected moments for learning in even the most mundane of places.
I’ll then write a bunch of “boring” topics on index cards and ask the students to look up the topics on Wikipedia, to find intriguing facts, and to let those facts lead them toward secondary sources. For example: once of the cards I always pick is “salt.” Despite people joking about it as the most uninteresting seasoning, it is arguably the most important flavor enhancer in the history of humans. Salt is also significant to brining and pickling processes. It was a prized currency for trading in many ancient cultures. In terms of human health, it’s vital to electrolytes, but can also contribute to heart disease if you have too much of it. Perhaps most interestingly (to me), it has a ritual history within many religions and spiritual practices—being used in everything from fertility to housewarmings to weddings to banishments.
While there are pedagogical undercurrents to this demonstration in terms of understanding secondary sources and their credibility, there is a more important lesson: research should be about an open mind leading to revelation. This seems especially important when teaching argumentation as a rhetorical device. Most of us have a tendency to already hold an opinion on topics and try to find sources to support our opinions—rather than engaging in research with a blank-slate mind and being informed by said research.
Look at what happened in the past few years during the Pandemic: there is much more scientific data out there on the benefits of vaccines over its detriments, yet debates over vaccination hinged almost entirely on pathos in public spheres. This is also one of the reasons I ask students to initially research topics like salt and quinoa and pigeons instead of topics like gun control and abortion and animal testing. Preliminary research seems to go better when students don’t immediately have any inclinations or bias toward the topic.
One time, when I ran this exercise, a young woman in one of my classes ended up with an index card that said “silk.” After the exercise was over, she asked if she could stick with it for her research paper (this was a four-week course for adult learners). I said I wasn’t opposed, but I asked her wasn’t there anything else you were curious about? Why silk? What about your major? Don’t you want to do some work related to the reason you’re in school? It was clear from our conversations that she wasn’t necessarily interested in silk, but because she had completed some cursory research she thought she might as well stick with it. My biggest concern came to fruition about halfway through the term: she had no enduring investment in this topic, and thus became bored with it. Her paper suffered because her inquisitiveness on the topic failed to exist. This can be a challenging perspective for me as not only a teacher, but a human. I tend to be a naturally curious person, so if someone tells me, say, that salt is a component of a Jain cremation ceremony, I’d like to know more about why and how it’s used.
Which made me wonder: is curiosity innate to humans? Do we all possess it? Where does it come from? Can it be malnourished, like some invisible conjoined twin attached to us, ungrown?
I’d wager most children express an innate curiosity on top of imagination and playfulness. Is said curiosity wrung out of us as we enter adulthood though? How do we feed it, sustain it? What is the connection between curiosity and creativity?
Of course, when talking about undercurious students, we could talk about what some argue is a notable change in the academy where higher education is no longer about academic curiosity; rather, it’s more about paying for a vocational edge to survive in an increasingly expensive capitalist hellscape. We’ll, however, uhh, put that conversation on the back burner for now.
Speaking of magic and rituals, my friend @mariinami recently emailed me about a book she was reading on ancient Mesopotamian magic. She said the book came into existence because a number of scholars in many various fields came together and started conversing about their own individual interests in Mesopotamia and magic. What amazed my friend was how this interdisciplinary approach and willingness to converge with people from different backgrounds led to the creation of something new. She asked me if I thought this type of practice was common among creative writers. Which is what led me to thinking about collaboration, interdisciplinarity, inquisitiveness, curiosity, and playfulness.
What do you all think? Is interdisciplinarity something creative writers often pursue or allow themselves to be entangled with? My thoughts are: I know many people who came from interdisciplinary backgrounds who bring said backgrounds into art (e.g.: a mycologist who writes ecological mushroom poetry), but this generally seems to be an internal activity based on an intersection of one’s own multiple areas of expertise.
In terms of external, interdisciplinary collaboration, this seems like it would require a more refined formula. I’d say a person most have some modicum of the following:
Humility + zeal + curiosity (and perhaps an additional type of bravery for us introverts).
I was trying to brainstorm moments when I’ve engaged in writing in a truly interdisciplinary/collaborative way in the past, and those moments have felt rare. Coincidentally, my friend who asked about this (@mariinami), illustrated the cover of my short story collection, and we have a long history of creative collaboration. I’ve often thought the visual arts and literary arts share a lot of common vocabulary (image, repetition, balance, contrast…), so this type of betrothal makes sense to me.
The image above is from a one-day event I was part of in 2013. Anne Carson and her artist husband Robert Currie were doing a type of collaborative performance on Governors Island. If you’re not familiar, Governors Island is a strange, decommissioned military island that technically belongs to the borough of Manhattan. I’m not quite sure how my name got thrown into the ring, but I ended up being randomly paired with the artist @jworbeast. There were a bunch of us writer-artist pairings in an old, abandoned house on the island, and we were each assigned a different wall inside the house to create on together. I would write a phrase, or Jess would create a drawing, and across an afternoon we created a black-and-white dripping occult mass/mess on the wall. I would say this is perhaps the wildest type of interdisciplinary creation I’ve taken part in, because it involved the most nascent type of imagination coming into existence via collaboration, reaction, response. As soon as an idea formed, it was on the wall.
I hope my definition of an interdisciplinary creative writing approach isn’t too circumscribed or conservative. What sometimes excites me is this reverie of what types of collaboration could potentially occur when the arts intersect with the sciences (social, natural, formal…). Earlier this week I received an email via my university’s listserv about opportunities for NASA to fund fellowships for graduate students working with NASA’s current fields of study. While this was obviously geared toward STEM majors, I joked to some friends that I should submit some science fiction about heliophysics and space weather impacting humans on Earth. There was nothing in the call that said creatives couldn’t submit, after all. While I didn’t go through with this, I rather liked the thought of a poet being awarded a grant to sit at a table with a murmuration of scientists while they talked about helioseismology. It’s a funny image, but on some level it did make me wonder what type of unforeseen epiphany could come out of putting a bunch of thinkers and creatives in the same room.
I know I’m spitballing (AKA rambling) here, so let me turn this post around on you all with a few questions:
How do you sustain curiosity as a creative?
Does part of your creative process involve collaboration with non-creative-writers?
Is there anything inherently limiting about being alone with your monodisciplinarity?
Are we, as a creative culture, adequate in our curiosity? Are we playful enough?
When I thought about curiosity (or rather—became curious about it), I put on my academic hat to see what others had written on the topic.
One article from the 1950s on early childhood development suggested that curiosity is tied to our senses. For those who are sighted, maximum stimulation comes from objects that are bright, colorful, dynamic, distinct. “…When the child tears pages out of a book, crumples paper, spreads paint over a surface, or twirls the cat around his head, he is not merely bringing the existing environment to bear upon his sense organs, as in curiosity or exploration, he is changing the environment and increasing its stimulating capacities.” The child, like early humans, experience a connection between curiosity and creativity. This is where fire-starting came from, where crude tools were originally formed.1
I recently watched Science Fair: The Series over the holidays and was completely enamored with it. There’s a type of magic (or magical thinking) to watching teenagers who are on the verge of graduating high school move about the world with so much aspiration and hope. I don’t know if you ever had that phase, but I remember feeling indomitable and that my youth presented me to infinite pathways. It’s almost like the antithesis of sehnsucht. These teens in particular were vying for spots at the International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF), positioned as the Youth Olympic Games for those in STEM. While it is true that the arts are often the first to go when public schools lose funding, it also reminded me that creativity is not inherent to the arts (while I acknowledge that all science is curious, I sometimes forget that it can be creative in ways that even surpass the arts). One of the students in New York was trying to use science to predict and prevent teen suicide. Another student in the boonies of Florida was lost in his engineering world of making strange vehicles out of trashed electronics. He ended up constructing an alternative, cheaper electric motor. My brain is scientifically minded in an extremely limited capacity, so it was mind-altering to witness these other pocket universes that were founded via a type of curiosity that is foreign to me.
Lev Vygotsky, a Soviet psychologist, coined the term “the Zone of Proximal Development.” What this meant is that there was a distinction between what a learner could accomplish on their own versus what they could accomplish with an adept partner (or teacher). From the aforementioned docuseries, the cognitive development and boosted achievement came from schools and teachers where these students were nurtured and encouraged in their wild scientific dreams. It made me think of all the articles I’ve read that call our schooling system outdated and present alternative models such as “[dispensing] with … bell systems, grade levels, [the] compartmentalizing of curriculum, and predilection for independent rather than collaborative performance.”2 I think I must have attended three different talks on “ungrading” by this point in my life. There seems to be a desire to break free of the education structure we’re all most familiar with, but still, we are all beholden to its power.
As someone who teaches in higher education, I often do wonder if some of my students were failed in their K-12 years by obsessions with grades, GPAs, standardized testing…. It’s an unfortunate testimony, but in most of the classes I teach it seems most students are just there for the “A.” Those who enter the classroom with a desire to learn from and be changed by readings are increasingly rare birds. If no initial desire for the material in my classes exists, I hope to whet it. Part of what I do in my literature and writing classes is try to stoke a curiosity that may be dormant. Often my classroom is a laboratory where I attempt to de-emphasize grades, but that’s often a tricky balance because removing the pressures of the grade point average doesn’t magically make my students more interested in reading literature.
I find it striking that when researching curiosity as a concept, many of the articles ultimately centered on child development and education. One article even defined curious people by these attributes:
They nudge conversations with new ideas
They take pleasure in learning about other people and openly show this
They focus on the person they are with
They use jokes and humor to liven things up
They accentuate the positive about what they like about their conversational partner or the conversation itself3
One pattern that came out of these readings is noticing how collaboration was integral to curiosity. My takeaway was that curiosity should not be siloed, and that the greatest cognitive growth comes from external stimulation, collaboration, partnership, and mentorship. Of course, when it comes to creatives, many writers would probably argue that they achieve this growth via reading books by other authors, participating in public readings and literary events, going to an MFA program or participating in workshops, etc.
However, when we go back to @mariinami’s original inquiry, it does make me wonder if creative writers are collaborative enough, interdisciplinary enough. Is there a pleasure and cultivation we are cheating ourselves out of when we exist entirely inside our own fields—or entirely inside the arts? What would it mean to sit with a heliophysicist, to listen to solar storms? What would it mean to sit by someone who throws salt into the fire, who speaks to the gods?
Perhaps there is not much difference between magic and science, between education and transcribing a poem into existence from the voice inside you that says, “Yes, but what if?”
Yours,
JD
Leuba, Clarence. “A New Look at Curiosity and Creativity.” The Journal of Higher Education, vol. 29, no. 3, 1958, pp. 132–40.
Miller, Donna L. Cultivating Creativity. 2015.
Henley, Burke Randy. Curiosity and Creativity as Attributes of Information Literacy. 2004.