Blogpost #5: Inquisitiveness is Curiosity

Curiosity is the feeling we get when we want to know more details about certain stuff. But curiosity leads us to great things. Mankind would not have achieved the things we have right now if no one was curious about this and that. Electricity wouldn't have been discovered if Benjamin Franklin wasn't curious

I have read an article entitled The Itch of Curiosity by Jonah Lehrer. Curiosity is one of the important mental habits because great things start when people are curious. Most successful people are curious giving them the motivation to find out something useful for man. For example if a person who is curious about how he/she will do everything to quench his/her curiosity. In this article also states that they have an experiment about the fMRI are an interesting it’s a neutral process of creativity. The first thing that they found is that curiosity obeys an inverted U-shaped. This experiment support the information gap theory of curiosity, by George Loewenstein of Caregie-Mellon, according to Loewenstein, curiosity is just a simple matter. When we feel a gap with the matter of we know and we want to know. In this gap, emotional enters; she said that it feels like a mental itch. She compares it to a mosquito where bite on the brain, its itch that that why we seek out knowledge and that itch he talk about is the curiosity.

According to Jonah Lehrer, in the same article "Our curiosity about the world remains mostly a mystery (According to one review of the literature, the amount of research on curiosity peaked in the late 1940s.) Einstein would not be pleased: “I have no special talents,” he once declared. “I am only passionately curious.”

This quote discuss about curiosity. I agree that curiosity is important in the development of our world. Curiosity is the central motivation. In my own perspective we people have own curiosity that’s why we experiment and seek for our own answers.

I also read an article entitled Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything  by Philip Ball he used the term haute vulgarization as an perfect example it is a  French word which means high class popularization. He break down the different ideas, until he reach the 17^th century with Charles Darwin wad to famous the Origin of Species. He says that curiosity was seen as risky and fated as such, and when pretty well anything of human concern was fit to study.  Even Karl Marx as shocked by Charles Darwin’s materialist view of nature as isolated survivalism in “On the Origin of Species”. Beneath Darwin’s isolated vision, however, was a childlike sense of wonder at the mysteries of the natural world and a delight in extracting order out of madness.

According to Philip Ball on the same article “curiosity appears to be under threat from the internet and “the empty immediacy of the virtual now”, writes Ball. With such a profusion of “choice” available to us on screen, the impulse to explore experimentally is in danger of being diminished. Still, the desire to know and learn will surely remain a part of what it means to be human.”

In my own perspective it true because nowadays, almost all of the thing that we want to know is searchable through the internet. But we should not take advantage the internet because it our own way to choice to search it, because not all in the internet was helpful and useful. We should responsible on what we search about because not all curiosity is good, it our own choice to make our own decision in every curiosity.