It's Not Just How Smart You Are: Curiosity Is Key To Learning

Scientific American reports that a UC Davis study (paywalled) on how learning interacts with curiosity indicates that curiosity can lead to demonstrably better recall. From the SciAm article: Neuroscientist Charan Ranganath and his fellow researchers asked 19 participants to review more than 100 questions, rating each in terms of how curious they were about the answer. Next, each subject revisited 112 of the questions—half of which strongly intrigued them whereas the rest they found uninteresting—while the researchers scanned their brain activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). During the scanning session participants would view a question then wait 14 seconds and view a photograph of a face totally unrelated to the trivia before seeing the answer. Afterward the researchers tested participants to see how well they could recall and retain both the trivia answers and the faces they had seen. Ranganath and his colleagues discovered that greater interest in a question would predict not only better memory for the answer but also for the unrelated face that had preceded it. A follow-up test one day later found the same results—people could better remember a face if it had been preceded by an intriguing question. Somehow curiosity could prepare the brain for learning and long-term memory more broadly."

Comments

I was never curious about a test

[JacobA.Munoz]

I just wanted to get the test over with and move on to something interesting and worth remembering. Now we have an official report to prove the self-evident. meanwhile - we cancel art, music, electronics, workshop, anything a student would really want to learn. How about combine music. electronics, and math into a short but immersive synthesizer course. They don't have to build anything huge - but they could physically see what all this algebra and electrical stuff means by hearing it, something worth remembering. A biology/art/science course growing plants? Workshop and physics combined into so many possible ways? - no, we just cancel these sorts of things and impose a standardized testing routine with no experimentation. Poor kids, I heard some elementary schools got rid of recess too. Tragic.

Re:.. and this is new ?

[jandersen]

Isn't this some of those things that kind of is a 'given' ?

Of course it is. For some reason, all popular science articles try to spin everything as 'A Great, New Discovery'. Scientific research is almost always about checking and measuring the details in the big picture we already know - that is why they keep measuring the gravitational constant, the speed of light etc. And the other side of the coin is the scientific method: you state a theory, then test its predictions. In this case the farily obvious seeming prediction, that curiosity makes you better at learning. In fact, this is not quite as trivial as it may sound: curiosity makes you want to learn, but does your objective ability to learn increase measurably?

Already known

[towermac]

"Curiosity is more important than knowledge." - Albert Einstein

My advice: Don't waste a lot of time studying things that are already known to be true. (Pretty much everything he said, I take at face value.)