You're listening to Part Time Genius, the production of Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio.

Guess what Will?

What's that?

Mango?

If you've ever made a decision then wondered what might have happened if you'd made a different decision, you've experienced something called counterfactual curiosity.

Is that something that's familiar to you?

Yeah, that means nothing for me.

I mean when I make up my mind, that is it.

There is no second guessing, Mango.

Yeah, Well, you are very unusual, and counterfactual curiosity is also unusual because, unlike other types of curiosity, pursuing that line of thinking never leads to a reward.

Knowing what could have happened has zero real world benefit unless you own a time machine, and often it has negative impact because it makes you feel regret.

So you think that if there's something with no reward and a high risk of negativity, you'd want to avoid it.

But studies have shown that just isn't true.

In one test, people were shown in an animation of a balloon and they had to choose a number of times to pump the balloon, and if it burst, they lost, if it stayed intact, they won.

So Afterwards, participants were given the option of seeing the correct number of pumps that would have inflated the balloon without bursting it, and over and over and over they requested that information, even though they also reported that knowing the answer made them feel worse if their guests had popped the balloon.

Wow, so that counterfactual curiosity was just too strong, unlike the blown I suppose exactly.

And today we are kicking off a week long series all about curiosity, why we have it, how it changes over the course of our lives, whether animals experience it, and where that saying curiosity killed the cat really came from.

We've got lots of questions and all most as many answers, So let's step in.

Hey, their podcast listeners, welcome to Part Time Genius.

I'm Will Pearson and as always I'm here with my good friend Mangesh hot Ticket and Mango.

You won't believe this one thing our Palin producer, Dylan Fagan is doing over there in the booth today.

What's he doing?

He's doing one thing that'll blow your mind.

Mango, I cannot see from where I'm saying.

Will you just tell me?

Well, do you really want to know, yes, of course, I want to know you sound that you actually sound maybe a little bit annoyed.

I have annoyed.

Well, then my experiment is a success, Mango, I've successfully trapped.

You in an information gap.

That's a concept of curiosity, developed by behavioral economist George Lowenstein, who incidentally is the great grandson of Sigmund Freud.

Now, according to him, curiosity is a form of cognitive deprivation that occurs when you have some concrete information.

But you don't feel like you have enough.

So it's not a total absence of knowledge, but it is an absence of satisfaction because the other key thing is you're aware that this gap could potentially be filled.

So in your case, just now, I gave you a small, but you know, super tantalizing piece of information, and I told you that Dylan was doing a specific activity in the booth.

I made it clear that I knew what it was that primed you for a sudden rush of curiosity.

Now, if I just said Dylan isn't here today, I don't know where he is, you might still wonder what he's up to, but you probably wouldn't feel that strong urge to find out even though in the end it's the same basic scenario.

Dylan's doing something and you have no idea what it is.

Mango.

That is fascinating.

But also I have this feeling that you're never going to tell me what he's doing.

I'll tell you what at the end of the episode.

We'll have Dylan self fill you in.

That is an incredible treat.

It's a deal.

Okay.

So, as I mentioned earlier, this is the beginning of our week long exploration of curiosity.

And I'm really excited because you know, I think we both are curious people.

Our lives are animated by curiosity, right, Like it's such a big part of our friendship too.

I mean I know that, like just hearing the topics you were fascinated by, like history, religion, et cetera, and the classes you were interested in made me want to befriend you because like you picked out interesting things and you always had some like curious, fascinating thing to talk about.

It's kind of wild to think about We're going on almost three decades of being curious about stuff together.

When you think about that.

First year dorm room in college and coming back from those classes, like you mentioned, having learned something interesting.

Cramming into a dorm room with other friends and talking about it almost makes me feel like we were a little bit nerdy, But I can't decide.

Yeah, not at all, just the time.

But you're right, it's the best feeling in the world to learn something new, to have somebody share something that they've learned, and just to exercise that curiosity.

We were also curious about stupid things, right, like that bouncy ball that came into our dorm room and our senior year, and we would just like all of us, wanted to see how many times you could bounce it from the ground to the ceiling and just keep it going.

And we wanted to know what the limits of this bouncy ball.

Yeah, yeah, exactly, and we had the strong arms to test it out.

My favorite part about that whole story, though, was, if you remember this, we lived upstairs from this certain fraternity at Duke and they had come upstairs right at the beginning of the school year and they were like, guys, we just want to give you heads up.

Sometimes we're really loud and I we like to party.

I hope that doesn't bother you too much.

And we're like, it's cool whatever, and then like night three of being there is when we did this bouncy ball thing and two of the guys walked up from that frat and they were like, guys, what is going on?

And they walked into a room and we were.

Like one, two, three, four or five except watching the ball bounce between the floor and the ceiling.

Yeah, boo boo boom boo boo boo boo boo.

It was such a thrill, But that's what we were up to.

Yeah, you're right, that seems like worthwhile curiosity to me anyway.

So each episode for the series is going to take a look at different aspects of curiosity, and we're kicking things off with neuroscience and psychology, like what really goes on in our brains when we experience curiosity, How does that affect our minds and our behavior?

And what does all of this have to do with impulse shopping.

But before we get into the science, we asked our friend Mitra to take her microphone around the streets of Brooklyn to find out how some everyday people define curiosity.

Curiosity to me means interest, whether it's being curious about a person, about a subject, about an object, whatever it is.

It means interest, I would say maybe excitement for the unknown.

I think it's a discipline because I think it needs to be cultivated, but like a discipline that ensures that I am not doing the same thing over and over again, and I'm staying open to new ideas, new places, new thought processes.

Curiosity is the desire to learn, to keep evolving, changing, collecting knowledge and insights some sort give.

In my head right now, curiosities associate with like growth, you know, just trying to expand and learn more.

For me, it's an actual need.

I don't think I can go a day without being curious about almost everything.

I guess curiosity is just acknowledging all the things you don't know and letting yourself wonder about them instead of being bummed you don't know it.

I don't know.

So I really like that quote that curiosity is desire to learn to keep evolving and changing, because I one thing I found with my grandparents and actually my great grandmother is that they were most alive when they were curious, you know, like they were reading the paper till the end.

My grandfather was learning this language kinda just because he had a story he wanted to write.

And he thought it would be best written in that language, you know, And so like, I think there's something incredible about curiosity that is really life affirming.

Yeah, I think so too.

It's also fun to watch people whose curiosity may be exercised in a slightly different way than ours, Like for us, I think most of the time it's just knowing information.

But I also love watching people who are maybe fascinated by gear or how electronics work, or the types of things that it's not really how my brain works.

I can't figure it out.

But like watching somebody who's super into and it's like this watch is broken, I'm going to open it up myself and try to figure out how to fix it, or that sort of curiosity.

I just I love watching people exercise their version of curiosity.

Yeah.

I mean I had an uncle who, uh in India, microwaves weren't available in the seventies, I think, great indies, and he went to the buy and got two microwaves and one was to use and one was just to take apart.

Yeah that's so cool.

No, I love that.

That's pretty great.

So in terms of curiosity, when it comes to the scientific definition, it's not as easy as you might think.

Some studies measure curiosity by tracking eye movement.

In other words, they're saying that if you choose to look at something, that means you're curious about it.

Many researchers define curiosity as the self reported desire for information that has no clear purpose or utility.

Doctor Celeste Kidd is the director of the Kid Lab at UC Berkeley, where she studies curiosity and knowledge acquisition, and she says, there's actually one big flaw with this approach.

It's very hard to know in advance of encountering a particular situation whether a particular piece of information is going to be useful or not.

A more concrete way of saying that is, maybe, to example, you might for some reason become fixated on tracking down a particular move that you remember seeing Usher do in the early two thousands and go on a deep dive trying to locate this clip.

You don't need that runny direct purpose.

However, knowing that piece of information could lead you to be interested in other pieces of information that's serve a function later.

Okay, no disrespect to Usher, but I don't see how tracking down an old video of him dancing would make an impact on your life.

Well, clearly you haven't watched enough Usher, But what if that video reawakens your love of dance, so you start looking for adult dance classes in your area and eventually quit your job and build a new career as a backup dancer.

What if the Usher video sends you down a rabbit hole of nineties R and B and use that knowledge to make a killer playlist for someone you're dating, and that helps you eventually get married.

I mean, they're also got this whole.

Thing that I think you just explored your dream there, and I mean it may seem a little far fetched, but I guess stranger things have definitely happened.

Yeah, I mean, that's I guess Kid's point.

Right.

We can't say with one hundred percent certainty that any given piece of information won't have meaningful value in the future because all of this is so subjective.

Instead of trying to land on one perfect clinical definition, it actually might be simpler to focus on different flavors of curiosity.

So over the years, there have been various attempts at categorizing curiosity, but one of the most prominent frameworks separates it into two types, state versus trait curiosity.

Actually this came up just this morning because we were looking at a list of the states, and I would say, my biggest state curiosity is why is Arkansas pronounced that way?

Do we want to spend the rest of the episode exploring that?

Yeah, I mean it's because it was derived from the French name for native tribes who lived in the region.

The folks in Arkansas kept the French pronunciation and up the river in Kansas they decided to anglicize it.

But that is not.

I love you knew the answer to that.

That's impressive.

State curiosity is when your curiosity is activated by a particular topic or situation, Like if you realize that you have a deep interest in the origin of place names, that would be state curiosity.

Trait curiosity is what it's called when you're just naturally curious about lots of things.

So basically, some people are curious all the time, like it's part of their personality, and then other people are only curious when something comes along that.

I don't know that really interests them exactly.

So I guess you and I would rank pretty high on the trait curiosity scale.

Yeah, definitely, I mean, it's why we do the show.

So as someone who experiences a lot of curiosity, one of the things I wanted to know was why does it feel so good to get an answer to a question you're curious about, even if it's something you know is kind of pointless.

And according to doctor Kid, it's because satisfying your curiosity releases all these feel good brain chemicals, including dopamine, which is the newer transmitter that's associated with feelings of pleasure and motivation, reward, all those things.

Yeah, I mean, I did some reading about that, and there have actually been studies that try to show exactly how this process works.

So I think my favorite was one where they put people in an MRI machine and then they made them read trivia questions.

It's kind of cool, right, like a terrible trivia I'm glad I wasn't one of them, but I'm also glad they did this.

But perhaps unsurprisingly, people who reported higher level of curiosity about the trivia questions showed clear activation in the parts of the brain associated with reward anticipation, so.

They were all ready for that big dopamine hitting.

Yes, that's exactly right, but brains are complicated, and our brains on curiosity appear to be very complicated.

For example, in another experiment, people were shown blurry images, which made them curious about what they were looking at until clear versions of the images were finally revealed.

Now, during that test, researchers found the activation in the parts of the brain related to unpleasant events.

In other words, from a neurochemical standpoint, curiosity can be a quest for that good feeling that comes from getting information you really want, or it can be more like an aversion, an attempt to avoid the bad feeling of not knowing something.

So in two thousand and five, a psychologist named Jordan Littman suggested that there are actually distinct types of curiosity, which he called interest curiosity or eye curiosity, and deprivation curiosity or de curiosity.

That's really fascinating.

I can definitely think of times when not knowing something has energized me, right like even late at night you fall into a rival hole or whatever, and you're more excited to learn.

But other times, not knowing the answer to a question can be really negative and often a frustrating experience.

And that's true, but remember curiosity isn't always tied to specific questions.

So as humans, we crave novelty, and if our brains don't have enough stimulation in general, we can also get really frustrated.

Like I read about these experiments at McGill University back in the nineteen fifties, where researchers paid healthy college students twenty dollars a day to sit in a room.

They were comfortable, they had plenty of food, but there was nothing to see, hear, or touch, and for the first four to eight hours people were fine, but then the need for stimulation, any kind of stimulation, became pretty unbearable, so subjects were offered recordings of incredibly boring material, like a lecture for kids on the dangers of drinking or an outdated stock market report.

One student asked to listen to the drinking lecture twenty times and a already hour period.

That's how desperate he was.

Wow.

So we really are hardwired for mental stimulation and we want to engage with the world beyond ourselves.

It's exactly right, And it seems that curiosity benefits our brains in other ways beyond just boosting dopamine and helping us avoid the discomfort of being uncertain or bored.

Some of those blurry image studies I mentioned earlier found the link between curiosity and enhanced memory, so people had an easier time recalling images that they saw when they were curious about what they were looking at.

So after we take a quick break, we'll talk more about what triggers curiosity and how that can affect everyday situations like drinking oat milk and scrolling through cat photos online.

So don't go anywhere.

Welcome back to Part Time Genius.

It is day one of our week long dive into the fin phenomena of curiosity, and I hope you've enjoyed what you've heard so far.

If you have, we are curious for how you feel about the show.

Please leave us a nice rating and review and share this episode with a friend.

We appreciate it so much, so will.

Before the break, we were talking about how curiosity can give us a hit of dopamine.

It can also improve our memory and of course make us better at trivia games.

So if curiosity is so good for us, why aren't we curious about everything all the time.

Well, Celeste Kid, the academic we were talking to before, says that triggering curiosity requires a specific set of conditions that vary from person to person.

One of the things that we know from my lab's research is that you are not just curious about anything.

Any information gap is not equally attractive.

You are, in particular drawn to resolve the information gaps that are just right with respect to what you currently know.

So the things that are the most attractive were things that are a little different from what you currently understand, but not so different that it would be difficult to encode them.

I don't know the entire Swedish language, and while I do think it would be cool if I learned some Swedish, I'm not super motivated till I drop everything and do that right now.

Because I don't know any of it.

That makes it less attractive than learning something about a topic that I have some background in.

And apparently the inverse is true too, so if we think we already know everything about a topic, it's less likely to make us curious.

In a study involving trivia questions, people who had no clue about the answers and people who were confident they knew the answers were least curious during the test.

Curiosity was highest among participants who thought they might have some idea about the answers.

But weren't entirely certain, you.

Know, I know when we would do live trivia events and things like that related to mental flows.

I always thought that was fun, like that sort of the science of coming up with just the perfect question.

So people like, maybe I don't know, I want to know that, but I feel like maybe I could guess it, but I really.

Want to know the answer to that.

Yeah, yeah, all right.

So we know that certain things pique our curiosity more than others, and that getting our curiosity satisfied rewards us with a rush of dopamine.

But actually wanted to know how does all of this affect our behavior?

And to answer that question, we turn now to a group of people who are extremely interested in this topic, marketing experts, not scientists.

Well, marketing often involves psychology and behavioral science, and people who study consumer behavior spend a lot of time thinking about curiosity because it's such a powerful motivator.

You obviously know the term impulse by right, Yeah, of course, what's actually the last thing that you impulse bought?

I keep buying gadgets and gear related to tennis because I'm like, oh, maybe this could help me improve a little, but maybe this will dampen the strings.

As I play and I see some demonstration, I'm like, oh, yeah, maybe I tried that out.

I wish mine was healthy like that, and I could make up one.

But I'm going to be honest.

It's always just a candy bar, right, just always, always a candy bar.

What's so funny is you're so much more fit than.

It's just they're so good, and you sit there and you're like, I don't need it, but there it is, and I haven't had that one, or it's like yesterday, I was like, I bet it's been five years since I've had a butterfinger.

So I had a butterfinger.

You know, it was curious.

It tastes still good, still good, same formula thing from what I can tell.

But anyway, obviously, sometimes we make impulse bies to satisfy a different kind of need or want.

So you're at the checkout, you see that candy bar and you realize you're hungry and that lunch isn't for another couple of hours.

But marketing studies have shown that curiosity itself is a powerful driver of impulse purchasing that's really hard to resist.

Like you're at the checkout, you just ate lunch.

But you see your favorite candy bar, has you know some new seasonal pumpkin spice flavor?

Is it any good?

You want to know?

And there's only one way to find out?

And if I buy it, I got that little jewelt of satisfaction from finding out what it tastes like.

Even if, like me, you don't like pumpkins.

I'm with you.

I'm with you.

We're probably gonna get so much hate mail for that, but I feel the same way.

And you know, because curiosity in the quest for novelty do go hand in hand, this can also plan to our enthusiasm for new brands and new products.

So several years ago, there was a study that looked at what might motivate Americans to buy plant based milk and also what might make them willing to pay a premium for it, because plant milk is often pricier than dairy.

So the study authors came up with a list of hypotheses like, you know, quote, people are concerned about animal welfare and people think plant based milk is better for the environment.

Well, it turned out that people did think it was worth paying more for products that are environmentally friendly and good for animals, but overall, these things didn't make them interested in picking up a gallon of oat milk.

But you want to know what did curiosity?

You nailed it.

People were motivated to buy plant based milk because they were curious about it, and they were so curious, in fact, that they'd said they'd be willing to pay higher prices for it.

But oat milk isn't even that, I mean, I guess not.

But imagine how powerful this dynamic could be when you're selling bigger ticket items or when you're trying to grab people's attention, which, as you know, is a valuable commodity.

You remember, these curiosity gap hadlines that started popping up everywhere back in twenty twelve twenty thirteen around that time.

It's like what you and I did at the.

Top of the show, like this toddler grabbed a knife and what happened next will shock you.

I mean, it's so stupid, but you end up clicking because you got to know what that tyler did with that knife.

I mean, what did that toddler do?

This?

We're gon we're going to read after this episode.

Obviously, half the time that doesn't really shock you, right, Like it's always like a letdown and it's total bit and switch.

But it works every time because that combination of curiosity and strong emotion is almost irresistible.

And we see this tactic all around us, especially online.

So producer Mary called up one of the most online people we know, former BuzzFeed editorial director Jack Sheppard.

Jack told us that he and his team tried to avoid curiosity g app headlines because there's such a big risk of disappointing your audience.

You do it time and again and people stop trusting your headlines, and then you know, it erodes that trust and discourages sharing on social media.

But he said they did find other ways of using that powerful curiosity and emotion combo to make things go viral.

A type of post that I would do all the time would be like one of my most popular posts of BuzzFeed was the one hundred most important cat pictures.

Of all time.

I remember that, and you know, again, in terms of like promising and delivering, like I don't want to say that this was a serious journalism, but I spent days making sure that each and every one of those one hundred pictures was indeed important.

The emotion that you're going to experience is the emotion you experience when you see something really cute and the curiosity is like, well, what's the best one?

You know, that's the classic curiosity of a list like that, which one's made the cut?

And then another one would be an identity play, which is something that we did a lot, things like twenty five Things.

You'll only end understand if you grew up the youngest sibling.

There's a curiosity play there too, exactly where it's like, Okay, is this going to speak to my identity?

Are they going to say the thing that's like you never got to sit in the front seat or whatever that actually triggers that sort of real identity response, and then, of course, in BuzzFeed's case, that eventually translated into quizzes.

So that's literally a question, you know, which avenger are you is?

You know, it's like I need to know.

I want to know which avenger I am.

I mean, it seems so obvious, right, but it sounds like people put a lot of thought into how a specific story or headline or type of content will elicit curiosity in the audience.

Yeah, and you know we do it too, Like a lot of our episode titles are questions as Jack was saying, though, we always try to deliver what we promise, so if you listen to the episode, you will in fact get the answer to the question.

But by appealing to your curiosity, we're hoping to get your attention.

So to take some time away from your busy day and hang out with us so you can learn a little something new and hopefully something fun and ridiculous.

And speaking of delivering on what we promise every day, this week we have a curiosity related activity for our listeners, and anyone who participates will have a chance to win a part Time Genius Prize pack.

Mega you heard that, a part Time Genius Prize pack.

So today, inspired by our conversation with Jack, we've made a quiz that is absolutely designed to activate your curiosity and your sense of identity.

It's called which part Time Genius co host are you?

Yeah?

I bet people are wondering that for NonStop.

Yeah, for years, So it makes so many questions.

Well, now you can finally get the answer.

So you take the quiz and share your results with us on Instagram or Blue Sky at Part Time Genius.

We'll pick one person at random to win a prize.

Deadline is Sunday, October twenty sixth, and all the details and links are in the show notes and on our social media accounts.

Do you remember when we did that?

It was like Ben and Jerry's flavors that have been retired or paint colors or something.

And then I think Ben from Ben and Jerry's took it and got like seven under.

Yeah, I didn't didn't get them all.

That was so satisfied.

I'm really curious about I'm gonna be a will er Mango.

After I take this question.

You're gonna take the quiz.

All right, I'll take it with you.

We compare results, but all right, we have one last break.

But when we come back, how technology praise on our sense of deprivation curiosity and what we can do about it, plus why it's so easy for some of us to fall head first down research rabbit holes don't go anywhere.

Welcome back to part time genius.

Okay, Mango, you remember earlier I mentioned d curiosity or deprivation curiosity, and it turns out a lot of apps in social media are designed to trigger that particular type of curiosity, that nagging sense that you have to know what's happening and that you'll be deprived if you don't.

Yeah, I feel like it's almost like a type of fomo, right.

It kind of, but it can feel more in tends than that, Like all those pings and red notification alert signals that something urgent and unknown is out there, even though it's probably aunt susan posting or vacation photos or pundit sharing a link to an article that we don't even really want to read.

Our brains know that there is a chance something really important is going on, and in the past, not paying attention to something urgent and unknown could actually be life threatening, right, Like you don't want to be the one person who doesn't see the sabertooth tiger running down the hill or something scary like that.

So it's hard to override that instinct to grab your phone, start scrolling, keep scrolling, and keep scrolling.

Yeah.

I mean, I feel like I know this all too well, and I know that my phone kind of prays on me.

Are you saying there's no way to turn off this type of curiosity?

I mean maybe not, but we can read direct it and neuroscientists have looked at this one.

In particular, jud Brewer wrote a great article about this, And here's what he suggests.

When you feel that urge to check your phone, get curious about the urge itself.

Ask yourself, what does this feel like for me?

Physically?

Am I bored?

Am I anxious?

Why did this particular notification seem so appealing?

What this does is pivot you away from the grip of d curiosity, that feeling that you're missing out on something, and toward the realm of eye curiosity or interest curiosity.

So suddenly you're operating from a place of wanting to learn more on your own terms, instead of chasing after some sense of satisfaction that you may never really get.

Because there's an infinite stream of content online, there will always be more that you haven't seen, and you'll never be able to consume at all.

That's really good advice, although I know it's easier said than done.

Grappling with phone addiction is obviously a relatively new phenomena.

These bigger questions about the neuroscience and psychology of curiosity are things that scientists have actually been thinking about for centuries.

Pavlov, you know the guy with the dogs.

He thought curiosity was a sort of reflex.

The great psychologist William James called curiosity the impulse towards better cognition, placing it in the realm of knowledge and intellect.

However you view it, curiosity is a defining trait of human beings, and according to Celeste kid, the defining nature of our curiosity is how incredibly specific it can be.

Human curiosity occupies a lot of our time trying to resolve it.

People get very very deep, they get very very specific in curiosity is the driving force that allows us to do that.

The result is we as scientists, we have reporters.

We have people that specialize in Renaissance era costuming.

They know everything about the fabric.

What this means is that at a population level, we are much smarter than even our closest evolutionary relatives.

As a population, we have an incredible wealth of knowledge that venovos and chimps do not have that allow us to build computers and build and flight planes.

The cost of that is that we've lost the basic knowledge we would need to survive as individuals.

Yeah, I can't imagine there are many chimps that know anything about Renaissance era or costuming.

But we think about the average chum can survive in the wild by itself and a lot of us humans.

We rely pretty heavily on takeout.

Yeah, that's right, And because we like to think about highly specific ideas, humans have a tendency to fall down curiosity rabbit holes.

And that's when you start out with a simple question like why do rabbits have long ears?

And the next thing you know, it's two hours later you're reading an article about Chester Greenwood, the guy who invented ear muffs.

Right, and doctor Kid said, this happens when the initial piece of information we want is difficult to get, and as we work towards finding the answers we want, we encounter additional information, maybe something we hadn't even thought about before, and that opens up new questions or ideas we want to explore.

So these days, of course, it's easier than ever to do this because we have so much information at our fingertips.

Wikipedia is probably one of the best known rabbit holes sources on the Internet today, and last year some researchers actually studied the site in order to understand different patterns of curiosity.

They tracked almost half a million Wikipedia users around the world, and what they found is that most people who go down Wikipedia rabbit holes fit one of three types.

Busybodies who zigzag through a wide range of vaguely related topics, hunters who are more focused and searching a smaller number of more closely connected pages, And dancers, who take a more abstract approach.

They hop between unrelated topics in an attempt to find new ideas and connections.

Which one of these do you feel like you identify with most?

I think I'm different things on different nights.

Oh okay, don't you.

I mean, like, there are knights where you're looking for something specific, and then the knights when you're like hopping around.

I guess so I do think the others may sound more interesting, like I love the idea of some of the others.

I do think most of the time I find myself in the hunter category if I'm being honest, where there's just a thing that you're like searching for and you're like, Okay, I'll learn more about that.

I'll learn more about that.

I'll learn more about that.

But the other types are really fun.

It's one of those where it's like if you felt like you had more hours in the day, I.

Think you're right.

And I think also like because our jobs involve learning so much all the time.

It's very specific information that we're seeking out totally.

Yeah.

So.

One of the authors of the study is a University of Pennsylvania network scientist named Danny Bassett, who's written extensively about curiosity.

They say it's not just about acquiring bits of information, it's about forming connections between pieces of information, a practice they call knowledge network building, and they believe we can learn a lot more about curiosity by using the tools of network science like mapping and modeling to get a concrete picture of how the hunt for one piece of information leads to another.

In fact, it has already been proven that our brains are capable of organizing concepts into a map, and that's because we have specialized neurons called grid cells that fire as we explore physical spaces, recording and integrating information about location, direction, and distance.

And it turns out that navigating physical space and navigating information light up similar regions in the brain.

Isn't that insane?

Yeah?

So, who knows, Maybe someday we'll be able to plot our next Wikipedia rabbit hole adventure in Google maps in an app of the mind.

It does sound really cool, but I am thinking this app needs some privacy settings because no one needs to know how much time I spent reading about the history of pop rocks when I was supposed to be working on this episode.

How much time did you spend doing that.

M I'd say that's between me and my browser, Maga.

But all right, mego before we call it a day, we need to close that information gap.

I left you with the very beginning of this episode.

What was Dylan up to when we started recording?

So are you ready to find out?

You know?

I'm so ready?

All right over to you, Dylan.

Hey, guys, I was building a life size replica of behavioral economist George Lowenstein, made entirely from marshmallows.

I don't know.

I just thought it'd be a nice way to arm the man who developed the information gap theory.

Also, we had a lot of marshmallows in the booth for some reason.

Anyway, great episode.

I learned so much.

But let's wrap it up now.

I want to make George into Smortars.

I not see that coming.

So is your mind blown?

Sure?

Well, because you were such a good sport about.

Being left in suspense, Mango, I'm awarding you today's trophy.

Congratulations.

I'll accept it, but of course I have to share with Dylan as long as he shares his s'mores.

It looks like there's plenty to go around, so we should be good.

But that does it for today.

Our week long celebration of curiosity continues tomorrow, when we'll be talking about the history of curiosity, from the Middle Ages when it was considered a dangerous threat to society to today when we're able to look up anything we want on our phones.

Plus we'll dig into the origin of the creepy phrase curiosity killed the cat.

Yeah, I can't wait, and don't forget to take our wich PTG co host are You Quiz and share the results with us on Instagram or Blue Sky and go our Genius.

Be sure to follow us because we're doing fun activities and giveaways all week.

You do not want to miss out.

Thank you to the wonderful Metro but Shahi for collecting field tape for us, And thanks to doctor Celeste Kidd and Jack Sheppard for sharing their insights today from Will Dylan, Mary Gabe and myself.

Thank you so much for listening.

Part Time Genius is a production of Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio.

This show is hosted by Will Pearson and me Mongage Chatikler and researched by our good pal Mary Philip Sandy.

Today's episode was engineered and produced by the wonderful Dylan Fagan with support from Tyler Klang.

The show is executive produced for iHeart by Katrina Norvell and Ali Perry, with social media support from Sasha Gay, Trustee Dara Potts and Viney Shory.

For more podcasts from Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.