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Slide 2 RSA Research And Ideas Paul Greatbanks Slide 3 A quality related to inquisitive thinking (e.g. Exploration, investigation) A desire to know/learn something Essentially noticing and being drawn into a subject that interests you Possession of sense of wonder and doubt Motivation from essence itself What is curiosity? Slide 4 A Look At Previous RSA Shorts The Power To Create Growth Is Not Enough Does Brainstorming Work? Food Rules For Healthy People And Planet (Runner-Up) Slide 5 Now storytellers understand this principal of information gaps instinctively. And they are masters at creating information gaps and opening them up and closing them and opening them up and closing them. That's basically how a narrative works, that's how it unspools. So Agatha Christie will tell you in her opening chapter that Mr. Ratchet was stabbed to death in his compartment, that engages your attention and the information gap (you don't know who did it) sucks you in. And every chapter she will give you a bit more information and open up another gap and she'll sort of pull you through the narrative. So that's basically her narrative and storytelling, by opening up information gaps, closing them, opening them up, closing them. Idea 1 Slide 6 Slide 7 And so we seem to realize, even right when we are babies, that we need to learn stuff if we're going to survive because we need to become part of this culture world, and we need to learn a lot so we ask a lot of questions. And then we go to school, and schools of course should be crucibles of curiosity. But the evidence suggests that we ask fewer questions at school than we do at home. And natural curiosity seems to wane. There is a correlation causation question here, "just because curiosity declines when kids get to school doesn't mean schools are causing that decline, and to a certain extent some of the boredom and frustration most of us experience at school is a by-product of a hard truth, which is that learning stuff is hard work". One of the things that children learn with great reluctance is that it takes effort to learn and remember, but epistemic curiosity, not just seeking the new building stocks of knowledge requires focus and persistence and discipline, and teachers and parents have to work hard to help kids work at it. And as adults, of course, it's not just children, as adults we have to keep working at that ourselves. Idea 2 Slide 8 Slide 9 Idea 3 To the curious person, everything is interesting. The French writer George Perec was an advocate of getting curious about the mundane, about the everyday stuff that surrounds us, the stuff that is so familiar to us that it becomes invisible. He calls it the infra-ordinary, so you can't really see it, it's the opposite of the extraordinary. And he urges us to question your teaspoons. Here's somebody who does that for a living; Jerry Seinfeld was asked where he gets his material from, and he just said "from around me. Chairs are inherently amusing. I find the fork very funny". Again, It's another reason that curiosity is that well spring of ideas and creativity, so makes you see things that other people can't see in the ordinary. Slide 10