Why Is It Good to Be Curious

Curiosity is one of the engines of humanity! We want to know what we don't know! We want to know what's beyond the curtain! A well-known saying goes: "curiosity killed the cat" and not in vain: famous experiments were made on curiosity: people were willing to put their hand in a box in which they were told that they could be poisonous snakes just to find out what's inside!

What is Curiosity?

Why are we curious? Where does this inner disposition toward the unknown, the unknown, that we are supposed to be afraid of coming from? It is a paradox that violates the principle of survival because it means taking risks (potentially fatal).

It may be easier to think if we are not curious if nothing arouses our interest and willingness to make an effort or to take a risk for something that may or may not prove useful. known! Out of curiosity, I wouldn't read the news, for example. We wouldn't care what happens in the next episode of our favorite series! It wouldn't matter if someone forgot what he meant after he told us he had something interesting to say!

We should not try new things at all, for example, to taste a new dish! We would no longer be interested in the opinions and views of others, on the principle: 'I am curious - what does he have to say?" Without curiosity, we would probably stagnate in a stable pattern for eons if we could survive them. Even from a Darwinian point of view, the benefits of curiosity outweighed the risks! Curiosity facilitates knowledge and evolution! Curiosity once again makes us human and opens up new horizons for us!

Curiosity has taken us to the moon and will take us to Mars and Pluto. Curiosity makes us expose new territories, try new things we know nothing about, invest billions in research on seemingly useless things without an immediate pragmatic result.

Yes, it can also be a pragmatic component of curiosity: exploring new territories makes it possible to discover useful and useful things! But more correct than the utilitarian perspective is the humanistic perspective: curiosity is about the authentic experience of life, about mystery and discovery, about the joy of the new!

We are addicted again! The new feeds us just like bread and water! We cannot live without the new and without the new! Maslow's famous pyramid of needs is incomplete because each of the 5 major classes of needs he identified (physiological, safety, belonging, self-respect, and self-fulfillment) is marked by another need: the need for something new!

Even on the most basic level, that of physiological needs, who wants to consume the same food indefinitely, even if it is nutritionally perfect? The need for the new is undoubtedly a fundamental need of people from the first moments of life: we are curious beings and we get bored quickly! The new generations, under the impact of the avalanche of information and news, get bored even faster!

Curiosity = hunger again, a fundamental human need

Paradoxically, the scientific community has not reached a full agreement on the definition of curiosity !! We could therefore easily define curiosity as the psychological mechanism meant to satisfy the need for something new!

On the one hand, we could liken curiosity to hunger! Physiological hunger is a signal to the mind's conscious level that the body needs nutrients. Without this feeling, we could simply faint from starvation! Another similar mechanism is pain, which is a symptom of dysfunction and forces the mind to move to the sensitive area and needs attention.

Curiosity could be understood as an internal sensation that signals a lack of news/information: "hungry for new" meaning "hungry" for information! This perspective is interesting because then we should see if there is acyclicity in the appearance of this sensation and if once this new type of need/hunger is not satisfied, the feeling of satiety appears. The feeling of satiety is clear, after satisfying the curiosity the "new" object no longer interests us.

But can we be just as sure about cyclicality? We get hungry about 2–3 times a day! But hungry again? The hunger again seems to be continuous and insatiable! Sure, we get tired, we get bored of one subject or another but basically, the hunger again never stops! To be curious means to be "alive" (literally and figuratively) because the new means change and change means movement and movement means life!

Curiosity supports a need as intense as the need for food! Of course, without food, we die in a few days but this is a physiological limit of the body. If we were to imagine beings without a body, then they would certainly never cease to be satiated by being curious!