Curiosity Engine

How to Generate Your Own Curiosity Engine

Pulitzer Prize–winning historian David Hackett Fischer once said, “Questions are the engines of intellect—cerebral machines that convert curiosity into controlled inquiry.”

Start with questions.

A written set of questions gives you a way to approach new information. It can help you notice relevant details, connect ideas, and decide what to investigate next.

The list need not produce quick solutions. Reading and talking with others may instead reveal that a question is too broad, rests on a doubtful assumption, or leads to a more interesting problem.

Finding and nurturing this collection of problems and queries is a lifetime’s work and cannot be completed in an afternoon. But you can begin by deliberately carving out some quiet space in your world where you can contemplate and reflect. The brain needs time and space to work—give yourself that gift by regularly taking a moment to just think, free of distractions.

You might like to meditate, but it’s extremely useful to be able to also note down your thoughts in a journal or note-taking app. Use the following questions to guide your inquiry (even better if you can generate some questions of your own, naturally!):

What were you most interested in as a child? What fascinated you most, and what did you want to know?

• What topics and ideas have you always most enjoyed learning about?

• Can you identify things that interest you but which also challenge you?

• What fascinates you but you also don’t yet fully grasp?

• Who do you admire and why?

• What are the biggest challenges facing you right now—not just in work or your field of expertise, but more generally?

• What habits do you notice? What two areas of life do you see connecting up with one another?

• What has always seemed strange to you about society? About nature? About the “way things are”? Can you use this to generate some burning questions?

• If you had dinner with a wise and all-knowing entity whom you could ask any question, what question would you ask them?

As you explore these questions, remember that you are not asking them purely to get to the “right answer.” They are exploratory. Notice which avenues of inquiry really excite you, then follow those. As you keep asking questions, try to refine your queries by asking things like:

How can I . . .?

What is . . .?

What is the connection between X and Y?

Why does X happen?

What happens if . . .?

What does Y mean?

What caused . . .?

Basically, you want to try to narrow down broader categories into more specific questions. “What is the point of everything?” is, as you can guess, too broad a question—but it can certainly spawn many more focused ones, such as, “Why am I doing my work in this specific way every day?”

Feynman was interested in knotty physics problems. What are you interested in? It could be practical concerns such as how you improve performance or increase profits. It could be more about your personal life and relationships, and have to do with subtler psychological problems. It could be that you’re most interested in meaty philosophical questions about truth, meaning, knowledge, or ethics. Your question could be at one end of a problem (“What kind of work do I want to do?”) or at the other (“How can I learn to be even better at my current role?”). Whatever the case, questions will help you get closer.

Write down roughly twelve questions, or as many as you can usefully keep in mind. Put the list somewhere you can revisit it. As you learn, note what bears on each question and revise the wording when your understanding changes.

One day you might be reading a book on a topic you find interesting, let’s say the history of neurology and how humankind’s theories about the brain, nerves, and so on have changed over time. In the book the author briefly talks about fascia and its function in the body. You’ve never heard of fascia before, but it sounds interesting, so you dig a little deeper. You find a series of fascinating recorded lectures on the topic, and watch these, but as you do so, you are watching them through the filter of several other questions that are also on your list, primarily ones that concern the issue of chronic pain, of proprioception (the body’s ability to sense its orientation in space), and inflammation. Could there be a link between all these things, you wonder?

You ask the question directly—do people who have chronic pain have irregularities within their fascia? You set about trying to find the answer and read a few studies and papers, learning more and more as you go. In one paper, you find an anecdote about medieval medical practices. You note it and its source; it may later suggest a connection worth investigating.

But back to fascia: You encounter claims that connective tissue stores trauma and ask what the term means and what evidence supports the claim. Soon, you’re interested in the chemical bonds and molecule structures of the material making up the fascia, and want to know exactly what physical and mechanical properties it possesses that give fascia its unique characteristics. How exactly does fascia attach to the rest of the body? What is actually happening at a molecular level? Soon you are learning about the molecular structure of hyaluronic acid (and to understand that, you need to update your chemistry knowledge a little!).

On and on you go. On the surface, it appears that you are flitting from one topic to the other. A useful connection may emerge, though collecting related material does not guarantee a coherent explanation. One day, when you’re out walking, you see a child playing with one of those multi-colored plastic balls that can shrink and grow. A little Googling tells you that it’s called a Hoberman sphere, and it allows for the creation of structures that, via the movement of scissor-like joints, can remain fully connected but expand and collapse through a wide range of movement. The question appears: Do fascia cells work like this? And what does that mean for nerves that are associated with this tissue? Could that cause chronic pain?

The questions open a whole world of possibilities. You encounter the term “isokinetic” for movement at a constant speed and ask which kinds of mechanical behavior it describes. What properties of the extracellular matrix or connective tissue would be relevant to your question? On and on you go, looking for links between geometry and physiology—you can’t say why, but you suspect they’re connected, and your mind keeps telling you to poke around until you find answers . . .

As you can see, this is far beyond having a question and simply seeking to answer it. You could have simply asked a physiotherapist, “Hey, can faulty fascia cause chronic pain?” and they may have said yes or no and that would have been the end of it. But the process described above goes well beyond that! You can probably also see that the process is iterative—the questions you ask influence the kind of data you are exposed to and focus on, and this in turn influences the kind of questions you ask. To turn the exploration into an investigation, make the proposed links testable. Ask what observations would distinguish your explanation from alternatives and which findings would count against it. An analogy to a toy’s geometry can generate a question; it does not establish a mechanism for pain.