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Why is curiosity useful?
helps you process information deeply and remember what you learn. It鈥檚 also correlated with happiness. Here鈥檚 something I wrote about the topic recently for as a :
鈥淐ows don鈥檛 get cavities.鈥�
鈥凌别补濒濒测?鈥�
鈥淣ope. They don鈥檛. Surprising, right? They eat all day long. And obviously, they鈥檙e not brushing their teeth.鈥�
Mark was getting excited now.
And so was I. It wasn鈥檛 that I had strong preexisting convictions about cows and cavities. But nonetheless, I leaned forward, eyes wide, eager to know more.
鈥淣either do horses,鈥� Mark continued. 鈥淯nless you feed them sugar cubes, of course.鈥�
Mark Wolff is the dean of Penn Dental Medicine. He has known for a long time that refined sugar is a massively important cause of cavities鈥攎uch more important than I鈥檇 realized.
At dinner with my family that evening, I couldn鈥檛 wait to share my new fun . And after dinner (decaffeinated coffee, no sugar), I found myself on an hourslong 鈥渨ild Google chase,鈥� learning about how sugar feeds the bacteria that naturally live in our mouths, which leads the bacteria to multiply. They digest the sugar, producing acid as a waste product鈥攁nd the acid erodes the enamel on our teeth.
What good is 鈥攖he emotion that dilates our pupils and propels us to ask questions and pay special attention to the information we hunt down?
Recent suggests that consistent curiosity goes hand in hand with happiness. For 21 days, participants kept a daily diary in which they responded to several different measures of well-being and, in addition, two curiosity questions:
Today, I viewed challenging situations as an opportunity to grow and learn.
Everywhere I went today, I was out looking for new things or experiences.
On a scale from 0 (not at all) to 10 (very), the average rating for these curiosity questions was about 3鈥攓uite a bit lower than I would have expected鈥攂ut there was a lot of variability, both across days and between people.
It turns out that consistently high ratings on these curiosity questions were correlated with higher ratings of life satisfaction, flourishing relationships, feelings of competence, and physical exercise.
Of course, with a diary study like this one, it鈥檚 impossible to tell whether curiosity causes happiness or, in fact, happiness causes curiosity鈥攐r if some third variable encourages both curiosity and happiness. I suspect that, as with so much of life, all three possibilities have at least some truth.
For me, a day when I ask a lot of questions is a very good day. And the two questions in the diary study are a wonderful reminder of how I want to live my life.
Try kicking off tonight鈥檚 dinner conversation with this question: 鈥淒id you learn anything new today?鈥� Be ready to go first with something you learned. And make sure everyone takes a turn. As Albert Einstein once observed: 鈥淭he important thing is not to stop questioning.鈥�