We know how intelligent you are, but how curious are you?

Think about life’s most eminent skills.  Chances are, curiosity won’t make your top 10, but new research out of Europe maintains that curiosity is a critical personality trait, and not just in the classroom, in the workplace as well.  And Jonathan Mugan (author of “The Curiosity Cycle”) would quite agree, maintaining that as technology advances, human beings must strive to improve the most unique of human qualities: curiosity and creativity.

Let’s first step inside the classroom.  For decades, just two personality traits have been linked to academic achievement – intelligence and conscientiousness.  But research published last fall out of the University of Edinburgh has added a third: curiosity.  The research revealed that curiosity and conscientiousness (that is, the inclination to go to class and do your homework), when combined, have as significant an effect on performance as intelligence.  The study’s authors conclude: “Our results highlight that a ‘hungry mind’ is a core determinant of individual differences in academic achievement.” So it’s no surprise that lead author Sophie von Stumm encourages teachers to “inspire curiosity” in their students, “to make them engaged and independent learners.”

Stumm also draws a tie-line to the working world.  In an article published by the Association of Psychological Science, Stumm explained: "It's easy to hire someone who has the done the job before and hence, knows how to work the role. . . . But it's far more interesting to identify those people who have the greatest potential for development, i.e. the curious ones."

Now back to Mugan, whose new book “The Curiosity Cycle” seeks to highlight both the role and importance of curiosity. Mugan’s background is in psychology and computer science and he offered these insights in a Q&A interview with singularity.com:

• What robots can’t do (yet) – Said Mugan: “We humans have brawn, brains, and dexterity. In the workplace, machines first replaced our brawn. They then started to replace the primitive aspects of our thinking ability such as number crunching. We have highly precise manufacturing and surgical robots, but we still don’t have affordable robots that can manipulate objects in unstructured environments. This leaves us with the creativity needed for the arts, sciences, and high-level strategic decisions, and the dexterous ability needed for tasks like hairstyling.”
• Skills we should de-emphasize – Mugan explained: “With the steady improvement in computer intelligence, some skills such as memorization should be de-emphasized, while others such as creativity are becoming more important. With smart computers like Watson being able to answer arbitrary questions of fact, the asking of insightful questions becomes more important.”
• Socks and shoes (and why it takes kids so long to put them on) – In the Q&A interview, Mugan quickly stepped through the evolution of cognitive development.  His synthesis: “In the mid-20th century, Jean Piaget proposed a now-famous theory of cognitive development whereby children constructed new knowledge from previous knowledge, and their development progressed in stages. More recently, Leslie Cohen proposed an information processing theory of cognitive development in which children are endowed with a domain-general information processing system that they use to bootstrap knowledge. Jean Mandler refers to this information processing that children do to construct knowledge as ‘perceptual meaning analysis.’ Developmental psychologists have also described learning as a process of active exploration. Eleanor Gibson proposed that human children are endowed with systems to allow them to explore and learn about the world. She emphasized that it was this exploration that enabled cognitive development. Alison Gopnik stresses that children explore to learn new things while adults are more rigid and exploit previous knowledge. Presumably, this is why it takes young children so incredibly long to put on their socks and shoes.”

So how does one become more curious?  Perhaps by adopting the role of explorer, of a person who consistently examines, investigates and explores.  In short, we need only ask one question:  Why?