In the early 17th century, there was a room in a house in Copenhagen bursting with hundreds of objects: bones and shells and taxidermised birds, not to mention weapons and rocks and a stuffed polar bear cub hanging from the ceiling. This was the Museum Wormianum, collected and curated by the Danish physician and philosopher Olaus Wormius, or Ole Worm to most. Four hundred years later, this quintessential cabinet of curiosities still inspires philosophy professor Perry Zurn and bioengineering professor Dani S Bassett, identical twins. What provoked Worm to collect? Which electrical signals were firing in his brain? How would the Enlightenment eccentric have behaved given access to Wikipedia?
These are questions asked in Zurn and Bassett’s latest work, Curious Minds: The Power of Connection, in which they investigate the neurological, historical, philosophical, and linguistic foundations of curiosity. What exactly is curiosity? Where does it come from and how does it work? In a manuscript peppered with questions, the academics explore everything from Plutarch to Google algorithms, to argue that curiosity is networked. “It works by linking ideas, facts, perceptions, sensations and data points together,” they write in the book, “Yet it also works within human grids of friendship, society and culture.”
Arguably it all started with their grandmother, a modern Ole Worm. Bassett describes her as an “ultra-collector” – she had a basement and crawlspace full of antique paraphernalia such as chairs, books, crystal glasses, silverware, paintings and buttons. “I viscerally remember Dani and I crawling in there on our hands and knees and getting lost in these mazes upon mazes of old things,” Zurn says – once, Bassett burst into tears when they realised they couldn’t remember how to get out. The twins say this unofficial cabinet of curiosities influenced their young minds. “Time and history becomes so real when you see something that’s really, really, really old when you’re four,” Zurn says.
Neither Zurn nor Bassett are technically historians, but you wouldn’t know it from reading their book. The former researches political philosophy at American University in Washington DC while the latter is a professor of physics, astronomy, engineering, neurology and psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Still, Curious Minds is full of historical titbits, such as the Roman essayist Plutarch’s antidotes to the “disease” of curiosity (leave your letters unopened, don’t have sex with your wife, walk away from intriguing sounds in the distance!)
In fact, the book is outlandishly multidisciplinary – where else could you read about the motivation circuit of the brain 25 pages before diving into the work of the Japanese poet Naoki Higashida? Just like the twins’ interest in Ole Worm, the book’s multidisciplinary approach was informed by their childhoods.
“We were home-schooled in a way that provided a lot of flexibility in what we could learn,” Zurn says – the twins grew up with nine siblings in the Pennsylvania countryside, and had “an immense amount of freedom” with their reading; they also did a lot of hands-on learning outdoors. “And yet at the same time,” Bassett adds, “There was a tight constraint on who we could be socially and how far that learning could go.”
The twins’ parents believed that men should go to college and have careers while women should instead get married and “serve and obey” their husbands. Bassett and Zurn were assigned female at birth – the twins now use they/them and he/him pronouns respectively.
“School was just really my heartbeat. And I knew from as far back as I can remember that this had to be a part of my life,” Zurn says. “I remember being incredibly frustrated and disappointed when we came up against this expectation that we not continue on into academics.”
Thankfully, the seeds that had been sown couldn’t be uprooted: the twins’ home schooling made them curious about everything, and as they pursued academia, they became curious about curiosity itself. “It wasn’t clear at the beginning of our careers that we would even ever have a chance to write a book together because our areas were so wildly different,” Bassett says – but then, as postgraduates, Zurn was studying the philosophy of curiosity while Bassett was working on the neuroscience of learning. “And so that’s when we started talking. That talking led to seven years of doing research together,” Bassett says. “This book is a culmination of that.”
How exactly do philosophy and neuroscience complement each other? It all starts with the book’s first, and most deceptively simple question: what is curiosity? “Several investigators in science have underscored that perhaps the field isn’t even ready to define curiosity and how it’s different from other cognitive processes,” says Bassett. The ambiguity in the neuroscience literature motivated Bassett to turn to philosophy, “where there are really rich historical definitions and styles and subtypes that we can then put back into neuroscience and ask: ‘Can we see these in the brain?’”
Yet whether discussing neuroscience or philosophy, Curious Minds reiterates the idea that curiosity is networked – “Knowledge is a network, and curiosity is the growth principle of that network,” the twins write in the book’s introduction. “To be curious is to connect ideas and people and to build knowledge together,” Zurn explains. But are he and his twin particularly keen on this theory precisely because they’re twins, connected by and since birth?
“Oh, yeah, yeah,” Zurn says. “It’s fascinating that we have two independent bodies and two independent minds, yet at the same time, we’ve constantly crafted our knowledge of our worlds together.” He adds that this didn’t drive the twins to their networked idea of curiosity, “but the more we’ve developed that connectional theory of curiosity, the more it resonates.”
So, how exactly do twins in different fields (not to mention different cities) write a book together? Curious Minds took six years, and Zurn and Bassett wrote it at different times, usually whenever one of them was on leave. “The number of emails I have from Dani saying: ‘Look at this quote from this book’ and ‘Look at this article’ is just a landslide,” Zurn laughs. The twins surprised their editors when they said they wanted to include hand-drawn diagrams to illustrate the theories in the book – they wanted the reader to feel as though they were sitting in a coffee shop with them, chatting and watching them sketch out ideas on to napkins.
“The editors initially thought it was a little bit strange,” Bassett says – but when shown examples, they became excited about the idea. One drawing in the book features two smiling faces looking at a screen labelled “Wikipedia”, the backs of their heads are missing and replaced with a series of connected lines and dots, to visualise how different people connect different pieces of knowledge. Do you, for example, surf tightly related pages when clicking through the online encyclopaedia, or find yourself somehow leaping from “Cream cracker” to “List of entertainment affected by the September 11 attacks”?
Depending on how you answer, you might be a busybody, a hunter, or a dancer. One interesting theory in Curious Minds posits that three basic modes of practising curiosity conform to three archetypes. The busybody makes it their business to know everything and anything – they want to know as much as possible, and like a butterfly flit about from topic to topic. The hunter, conversely, has a focused curiosity, and they tirelessly track down new discoveries like a hound. The dancer leaps creatively through knowledge, relying on their imagination.
Zurn developed these archetypes by looking back through the history of western intellectual thought. He read countless descriptions of curiosity in historical texts and found that busybodies, hunters and dancers were “words and terms and concepts that kept coming up”. Zurn says he’s “pretty sure” these aren’t the only archetypes of curiosity, but “they’re a good place to start.”
Bassett says at certain times they feel more like one archetype than the other. When reading for personal pleasure, they’re a busybody: “I’m very curious about a lot of different fields and read very eclectically.” When researching, they’re more like a hunter: “I wake up wanting to know the answer and search more and dig deeper.” Zurn concurs – at different points in our lives, even in our days, we can embody these different archetypes.
OK, sure, fine – but here’s a question you might suddenly be curious about: what’s the point? What does understanding the archetypes of curiosity actually do for us – how can this knowledge be applied? As interdisciplinary scholars, Bassett and Zurn both argue that education should be “de-disciplined”, meaning learners should be encouraged to drift between fields. The twins question how curriculums are decided and canons of knowledge are crafted, and reference the 20th-century education reformer Abraham Flexner, who advocated “the usefulness of useless knowledge”. Flexner questioned narrow approaches that forced academics to answer utilitarian questions, rather than sail into unknown waters.
“It’s just so important to be open about how the mind can move,” Bassett says. Curious Minds also keenly explores whose curiosity is encouraged and whose is policed – the twins examine marginalisation, power and privilege throughout the book. One compelling passage notes that not everyone is celebrated for having the same qualities as Leonardo da Vinci, who went “about his days compulsively note-taking and sketching” and flitted between maths, science, technology, music and art.
“The capacity to think across and beyond established frames of knowledge can be heavily disparaged, depending on who you are and where your curiosity takes you,” the twins write, before citing the work of the indigenous botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer, the disability theorist Alison Kafer, the feminist Gloria Anzaldúa, and the Native American philosopher Shay Welch, all of whom experienced being shot down by academic advisers early in their careers.
“Now cornerstones of their subfields, fields, or founders of new fields, these women, following the beck and call of their curiosities, rooted in themselves and their communities, were nevertheless told ‘no’,” the twins write. “Thankfully, they didn’t listen.”
Zurn and Bassett didn’t listen either – they escaped the narrow constraints of expectation and embarked on a meandering, half-decade expedition through the science and philosophy of curiosity. “It’s less, ‘here are all the answers,’” Zurn says of the book, “but rather an invitation to the reader to come along on the journey with us.”
Curious Minds: The Power of Connection by Perry Zurn and Dani S Bassett is published by MIT Press (£22.50). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
