The more I examine it, the more I conclude that curiosity is the ‘engine’ of our mental health. When it is active, we are open to the world – to new impressions. When it stops, we are stuck with whatever impressions we have already acquired, and even those gradually become stagnant. If they are negative, we sink into mindless depression; if they are positive, we sink into mindless comfort. Often, though, we are stuck with a mixture of those two.
What is it that ends curiosity in some people? Why do they just ‘turn off’? How do they arrive at the assumption that they know all they need to know? How do they get to the point where even new information is but a brief entertainment?
For some people, curiosity is insatiable, as it is in young children. Everything they learn ends up opening new vistas of more to learn – more to try to understand. For others, curiosity is a tool that they employ only long enough to remove a ‘discontinuity’ in their inner world. Once it has built a suitable buffer, it ceases.
Curiosity is not only the engine of our own mental health, it is also the engine of our society. It drives innovation and invention. It suggests solutions to problems. And that, perhaps, is one clue as to why it stops. After all, if you don’t see any more problems, or if they are all ‘without solution’, then curiosity might be either an unaffordable luxury or a source of further suffering. But either case bespeaks a rather unhealthy obsession with one’s inner world: an obsession with getting things ‘right’ for oneself, regardless of the rest of creation.
Entropy is a reality of the universe in which we live. Everything changes into something else. Everything that grows destroys in order to fuel its growth. Even the ‘free’ energy of sunlight comes at the cost of a process within our Sun that moves energy from one form to another. Eventually, our Sun will run out of fuel for that process, and will then slowly cool. So when we become attached to certain outcomes, in contradiction of entropy, we identify with an impossible state. But that doesn’t stop us from trying; it doesn’t stop us from deciding it ought to be possible.
That very word, “possible,” comes from old Latin: “posse”, meaning “able (to do or be done).” It reflects a whole mental attitude of ‘doing’ and – by extension – identification with ‘doing’, or with the results of ‘doing’. When we identify strongly with achieving certain outcomes, then knowledge is relegated to a mere tool, with which we can construct and hone our ‘cunning plans’. It is decidedly ‘secondary’ to the plans themselves, and it is constrained to look only at areas where the plans are, or seem to be, deficient.
There is an old saying, that “When your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.” But the reverse is also true: when your problem looks like a nail, every tool will be used as a hammer. Using curiosity merely to fix a hole in a ‘cunning plan’ constrains it not to ‘think outside the box’ and perhaps ditch the entire objective. It limits curiosity to the point where it really doesn’t function at all, and only ‘constrained reasoning’ with a sprinkles of imagination is left. And, moreover, all of that is turned ‘inward’ by the hole in the plan and the emotional attachment to that plan.
So here, I think, is the nub of the ‘curiosity gap’. Curiosity – to be healthy – needs to be unconstrained: looking outward without any problem to be solved. It doesn’t seek knowledge for the ‘pure’ purpose of knowledge itself; that would be like an egg collector, who doesn’t care what damage he causes but seeks only to be the ‘one’ who possesses something that others do not. Pure curiosity seeks knowledge because knowledge is how we travel the web of cosmic ‘being’.
Carl Jung identified four personality traits, for each of which there is a spectrum of expression, or motivation. One can, for instance, be introverted (preferring one’s own ideas to those of others) or extraverted (preferring to share ideas and reach a group consensus), or anywhere in between. One can be intuitive (focused on how things work) or sensitive (focused on how things are experienced), or anywhere in between. The other two dimensions are thinking (reasoning) versus feeling, and judging (forming a predictive mental ‘model’) versus perceiving (going with the flow). These aren’t ‘real’ traits, of course; they are just a helpful model to compare the way different people approach interaction with the world as a matter of habit.
Curiosity, however, runs across all four of these traits. It is neither a result of, nor a bias within any of these traits. When healthy, it powers all of them. Indeed, it even weakens the habitual ‘lock’ that limits our expression on the axes of these traits. The source of that habit is a largely unconscious assumption of either truth or benefit in a certain form of behaviour: a perception of increased chance of ‘reward’. Curiosity leads one out of the unconscious and into – at the very least – the domain of drawn attention.
If you want a tip for good mental health: “Stay curious!”
Steven Wheeler's Blog 