Science of Curiosity: How Your Brain Gets Hooked

Science of curiosity: How your brain lights up + 1 trick to spark it!

Did curiosity really kill the cat? I’m sure you’ve heard this expression before, but what is curiosity and how does it work? Albert Einstein once said:

I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.

What exactly goes on in our brains when something piques our attention?

A study which was published in Neuron magazine suggested that as we become curious, our brain’s chemistry changes and in turn, helps us to retain information and increases our learning.

What Happens to Our Brains on Curiosity?

The study conducted by Ranganath, a psychologist at the University of California found that the human brain retains information better if we’re curious about it.

What Ranganath did was ask 19 volunteers to review over 100 trivia questions such as “What does the term ‘dinosaur’ actually mean?” and “What Beatles single lasted longest on the charts, at 19 weeks?”. Next, participants were asked to give the questions a rating on a scale of how curious they were about the actual answer.

Interestingly, they found that when monitoring their brain activity using an MRI machine, the area of the brain that regulates pleasure and reward lit up when the participant’s curiosity was piqued. Even more cool was the increased activity in the hippocampus which is the area that is involved in the creation of memories.

Therefore, the area of the brain that energizes people to go out and seek rewards is the same when we are curious and it’s when this circuit is activated is when our brains release a chemical called dopamine which gives us a natural high. The dopamine appears to play a role in enhancing the connections between cells that are involved in learning.

Tweetable: Curiosity is like a mental itch and the only way to scratch it is to seek out new knowledge

Boring Stuff? No Problem- Just Get Curious!

An interesting aspect in Ranganath’s study was that all throughout the experiment, the researchers flashed photos of random faces without giving any explanation. It was found that those whose curiosity was already piqued were the participants that remembered the faces the best.

The researchers were surprised to learn that it was the curious brains that were better at the topic at hand and even boring information!

Bonus: Stop Being Boring

Spark Your Brain’s Curiosity Engine

Someone can turbocharge their curiosity by rigging their day with oddball triggers that jolt their brain awake—no dull “read more” fluff here. Step one: they stash a quirky object—like a rubber duck or a wind-up toy—on their desk, and every glance at it prompts a quick “Why?” game: “Why do ducks float?” or “Who invented this gizmo?”

Step two: they hijack their phone—set a random alarm labeled “Dig This,” and when it buzzes, they chase a wild question: “Why do cats hate water?” or “What’s the weirdest fish alive?” Real trick: a guy stuck a fake eyeball in his car; every drive, he’d wonder, “How do eyes even work?”—bam, hooked. Step three: they scribble one answer on a sticky note—“Cat fur sucks at repelling”—and slap it somewhere dumb, like the fridge, to smirk at later.

They test it—three triggers a day for a week (duck, alarm, eyeball)—and tally how many rabbit holes they dive down. If it’s less than five, swap the duck for a weirder bait, like a glow-in-the-dark skull. It’s not about forced learning; it’s a sneaky hack to make their brain itch for answers all day.

What We Still Don’t Know

Why are some people more naturally curious than others? Scientists are researching lots of factors including stress, aging and certain drugs that affect the dopamine processing in the brain.

Curiosity is like a mental itch and the only way to scratch it is to seek out new knowledge. This mental itch is an impulse that is shared by humans and it is deemed an important skill that can help make better predictions about what will happen in our lives. However, we all know what happened to Pandora when she opened the box!

Crave more? Check How Not to Be Boring!