Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends on It

Product Information

Yes, it was. The position of a lot of theologians in the Middle Ages was that there was no need to be curious, because everything we needed to know was in the scriptures, or in Aristotle and Aquinas which had acquired the status of quasi-scripture. The idea was that there was no need to look any further than that. In Curious, author Ian Leslie puts together research, anecdotes and knowledge from various fields including history, psychology, education, and science to explain the nature of curiosity, how it works, and how to cultivate it.⁣ Curiosity is recursive. It builds upon itself. If you want to become a more curious person, you need to start somewhere, slowly, and recognize that the more curiosities you pursue, the more curious you will become over time. Okay, not everyone was equally charmed by my style in those days. I was a little scared of Nardino, but not scared enough to stop shouting out the window. The greatest way for a parent to use books to spark curiosity and inspire a love for learning is to spend lots of time talking and listening to your child,” says Stoufer. She suggests listening carefully and taking note of their interests. You could even follow up with your child’s teacher to find out what’s coming up at school so you can explore those topics more at home together.

Calley would say, “Grazer, come sit in my office.” He’d put me on the couch, and I’d watch him work. I think it’s because no matter what happens - and some are really quite hard-hitting - they end with a note of hope. Ultimately, a book wraps its arms around you and says, “it will all be okay”. Funny, big-hearted books do this x 1 ZILLION. When I’ve been overwhelmed, I’ve curled up with my two little people and a funny book at story-time and it’s been just the thing I needed. Rob Biddulph is always a winner for us and so is this new one - This Book has Alpacas (and Bears) by Emma Perry and Rikin Parekh. I hope T-Rex will do that for someone somewhere too. Sparking curiosityWhenever you can connect real life to reading, your child will have a greater understanding of the world around them, says Stoufer. She recommends exploring books from the National Geographic Kids and Who Would Win? series to get started, then heading out for a walk around the neighborhood or nearby park to let curiosity — and discovery — run wild!

I like it when a book teaches me new things. I really like it when it expands my sense of possibility, and whets my appetite to go deeper (epistemic-me). I love it when a book can unsettle me enough to allow for growth to happen. I would recommend this book to parents or educators who would like to refresh some common sense reflections on why we work daily to create an environment of inquiry, and how we can keep it alive as adults as well. Curiosity can be trained, and nurtured, or stifled, depending on how much we work on it and feed it. So that is where Rosicrucianism came from, and in this book Francis Yates argues that the early enlightenment – the emergence of science in the 16th century – drew on part of that tradition. It’s widely agreed that Francis Yates pushed this idea too far, into realms that can no longer be upheld. Nevertheless, the idea that there was some kind of link between the development of science and the emergence of secret brotherhoods in the early 17th century has to be taken seriously. You see this motif of secret brotherhoods appear again and again among the writers of that time who then went on to be influential in the history of science, particularly Francis Bacon. There are two types of curiosity: diversive and epistemic. There are actually three types of curiosity with the third being empathetic, but the author barely gives empathetic curiosity airtime.

Something else happened during that year of being a legal clerk that was just as important. It was the year I started to actively appreciate the real power of curiosity.

Eve visits the tree, and discovers that “the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom.” 10Watching him was intoxicating. I thought, I want to live in this man’s world. Who needs a life of brown accordion files? I want to work on a sofa, follow my curiosity, and make movies. 15 I went to see F. Lee Bailey. Bailey was the most famous criminal trial attorney in the country at that point, having been the lawyer for Sam Sheppard and Patty Hearst. The second part of the book rehashes that material in ‘seven ways to stay curious’. The idea is to provide practical guidelines to develop and maintain a spirit of curiosity. Leslie seems to veer a bit from his initial position of relentless advocacy for epistemic curiosity in that he aims for a balance between the diverse and epistemic, hence for a cognitive investment in detail and the big picture, in the mundane and the abstract, in theory and practice. I had an idea for a TV series, what I was calling F. Lee Bailey’s Casebook of American Crimes—kind of a judicial version of Walt Disney Presents, using an expert to narrate the stories of these great cases. Build the database. Eureka moments: they arise from the gathering and working over - the slow, deliberate, patient accumulation of knowledge.