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.”

A list of questions gives your learning a direction. It can help you notice relevant ideas in a book or conversation and identify what you need to investigate next. As you learn, you may find an answer, revise a question, or discover a more useful one.

Set aside some quiet time to write down what you want to understand. You can start with a few questions and return to the list as your interests develop.

Use a journal or note-taking app to keep track of your questions. These prompts can help you begin:

• What were you most interested in as a child? What fascinated you most, and what did you want to know about it?
• 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 your questions down concisely; a dozen is a starting point, not a required total. Keep the list somewhere you will revisit it. Having a question in mind can make a relevant passage or conversation easier to notice.

For a hypothetical example, imagine 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 a fascinating anecdote about medieval medical practices that you hadn’t heard before. You save a note because it may help with a later question.

Returning to fascia, you investigate claims about injury, connective tissue, and pain, asking what evidence supports each proposed connection. 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!).

Later, you see a child playing with a multicolored plastic ball that expands and contracts. You learn that it is 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 “isokinetic” movement—movement at a constant velocity—and ask whether the concept helps explain any of the mechanics you are studying. The toy supplies an analogy and a possible question, not evidence that fascia behaves like its joints. You would need anatomical and experimental evidence to evaluate that idea.

You could begin by asking a physiotherapist, “Hey, can faulty fascia cause chronic pain?” A useful follow-up is to ask what evidence supports the answer and which mechanisms remain uncertain. Each answer can change the next question. To turn that curiosity into a scientific investigation, you also need ways to test the explanation and look for evidence against it.