“Why? What Makes Us Curious” is the title of a new book. You can learn about at the link below which leads to a brief interview with the author whose name is Mario Livio. He writes about Feynman and Einstein who shared a common trait -- massive curiosity about everything there is. I have long held that curiosity alone should be the main driver of all education and that gratifying curiosity is among the most admirable of ambitions.

Here is the just-published Livio interview.

In point of fact, the interview tells us that the nuts and bolts of neuroscience are not really the subjects that emerged when Livio began to think about curiosity.

His mind turned to persons. Livio says he figured he could gain some understanding of curiosity in six months. Turns out that he spent four years.

Little interest

His first discovery was that there are very few persons who are actually making curiosity itself their specialty. This is not surprising since curiosity is not exactly seen as the main reason for learning these days. Try qualifying for a job. Or learning a particular, remunerative subject.

Factor in the decline of liberal arts education. Mix in some bureaucracy. Curiosity may be what killed the cat. It most certainly does not motivate a great deal of study.

More a summoning up

Another discovery Livio made was that curiosity has many costumes and guises.

While it may be a thing or phenomenon that arouses a desire to investigate and find out more, it can be a general attitude, a disposition to regard everything there is as curious. It can even be a sense of mystery, a sense that we will never know the whole of anything.

But even in the face of mystery, curiosity presses on. It is the very driver of science and other efforts to plumb reality.

It comes down to persons

Livio was driven to concentrate on persons dead and living. The most curious of all he believes to be da Vinci followed closely by Richard Feynman. As you gaze through this briefs your mind wanders to many more you may now see are also exemplars of curiously in action. Three who come to mind are Charles Sanders Peirce, Gregory Bateson, and Kate Millett.

Actually, all who think consciously are curious, which may be why education is a shambles.

Livio's live interviewees include Brian May, of Queen. It turns out May is also a Ph.D. in.astrophysics. Add in Fabiola Gianotti, another musician who was also involved in the Higgs-Boson discovery, All told nine were interviewed.

Why is the question

The title of the book begins with "Why" - the key word the author uses to explain why human beings are uniquely curious. It's because we can ask why.
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