Why Humans Are Hard-Wired For Curiosity

By Vivian Hemmelder and Tommy Blanchard, Harvard University This post was originally published on Footnote, a website that brings academic research and ideas to a broader audience. Humans are deeply curious beings. Our lives, economy, and society are shaped so strongly by a drive to obtain information that we are sometimes called informavores: creatures that search for and digest information, just like carnivores hunt and eat meat.1 What is it that drives our hunger for information? From an evolutionary perspective, there is a clear reason why animals would seek out information: it can be vital to their survival and reproduction. A bird that spent its whole life eating berries from a single bush and never explored its environment could be missing out on a much better food source nearby. Thus it is not surprising that exploration is common in the animal world. For example, monkeys will push a button at high rates for a chance to peek out of the window,2 and roundworms do not crawl to a food source directly, but rather circle towards it in a way that gives them the most information about their environment.3 What drives animals' information-seeking behaviors? One possibility is that each individual animal learns over the course of its life that a greater knowledge of its environment leads to rewards like food or other essential resources. However, while this is something we can imagine humans or monkeys learning, it is probably beyond the capacity of roundworms. Furthermore...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - Category: Science Source Type: news