What Makes Us Curious? - Dr Mario Livio - #042

The episode opens by establishing why its guest is an odd but useful choice for a subject like curiosity. Mario Livio is introduced as an astrophysicist, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a bestselling author and a public speaker, and his new book, Why? What Makes Us Curious, is presented as a deliberate step outside the physics and mathematics territory of his earlier work. The host's framing is that curiosity, which sounds like a single word, turns out to be "a whole host of very different and subtle things" that combine to produce what we casually call curiosity. That framing is the spine of the whole conversation: the interesting claim is not that curiosity is good, but that the word conceals a taxonomy.

Livio's own account of the book's origin is disarmingly modest. He concedes the departure immediately: "I'm neither a psychologist nor a neuroscientist." What drove the project was not a research programme but a personal trait that became a research question — he describes himself as having always been an extraordinarily curious person, and says that about five years before the interview he became "extremely curious about curiosity itself." The method that followed was that of a serious amateur with professional research habits: he read almost every article on curiosity produced in psychology and neuroscience, interviewed researchers, and visited laboratories.

He is explicit about the division of labour, and this is one of the more credible moments in the episode. The psychologists and neuroscientists "do the real work on curiosity"; his contribution is synthesis. He then makes a claim that is really a diagnosis of the field: some researchers are so immersed in very specific topics that "sometimes even they are not fully aware of the whole picture in terms of the research done in this field." The host supplies the charitable reading — that coming from outside affords "the learner's mind" and a fresh perspective — and Livio accepts it, while noting that specialists may be too deep in a sub-literature to see its edges. This is a defence of the outsider's book that also quietly identifies its risk: a synthesis is only as good as the coverage it claims.

The book's structure, Livio says, begins with a definition, and the definition "turned out to be more complex than I originally thought." His starting point is the psychologist Daniel Berlyne, who distinguished at least four types of curiosity; Livio adds that there are in fact more than the four, but treats Berlyne's set as a usable scaffold. The four are presented with examples rather than formal criteria, which matters: the taxonomy in this episode is intuitive and vivid rather than operational.

Perceptual curiosity: the curiosity felt "when something surprises us" — Livio's example is children in a remote Tibetan village seeing a white person for the first time. Epistemic curiosity: the curiosity "that drives all scientific research" and "also the best works of art," the mode in which we ask why and try to understand more deeply; Livio says everything he has done in astrophysics was driven by this type. Diversive curiosity: curiosity deployed against boredom — young people checking their phones for messages, or someone waiting impatiently to see what the new iPhone will look like. Specific curiosity: curiosity about a very particular fact, such as who wrote The Old Man and the Sea, or the name of the actress in a French film seen the previous week.

The geometry is not decorative. Livio reports that Berlyne placed perceptual and epistemic curiosity on one axis, then put diversive and specific curiosity on an axis perpendicular to it. The point of the two-axis arrangement is that these are not four points on a single intensity scale: being deeply epistemic tells you little about whether someone is diversively curious, and vice versa. The host's immediate question — whether the types map onto personality types — gets a qualified no. Livio's answer is that all people have all four "to some degree." Scientists may do more epistemic curiosity than others "because they really try to answer" the how and why questions more broadly, but everyone has moments of specific curiosity, everyone has been surprised into perceptual curiosity, and the diversive form is now close to universal: enter any coffee shop and half the people, "if not more," are on their phones.