Curiosity is characterized by a desire for novelty and is considered a basic trait of the human species. Motivation and drive depend heavily on curiosity, as humans experience feedback from the body’s reward system when their curiosity is satisfied. In dementia, for example, reduced curiosity can occur with symptomatic loss of motivation.
What is curiosity?
Curiosity is characterized by a desire for novelty and is considered a basic trait of the human species. Curiosity is a stimulus-like desire to discover new things. Often curiosity is equated in particular with the desire for knowledge of what was previously hidden. The Greek philosopher Plato described curiosity as the beginning of everything. People like Galileo judged it to be the strongest motor of problem solving, and Einstein attributed his talent for discovery to curiosity. For the advancement of the human species, curiosity has played one of the most decisive roles. Accordingly, curiosity constitutes a basic human trait and is considered one of the most character-defining traits of human personality. Neurology has known for a long time that the frontal lobe of the brain plays a role in character traits. As a character trait, curiosity should thus also be found in the frontal brain. According to recent studies, however, scientists no longer assume that curiosity has a fixed place in the brain. Instead, the medical-neurological definition of curiosity now invokes an entire network, such as the human brain itself.
Function and task
As the University of Bonn has found, curious people have better-connected brains. Individual connecting pathways in the study participants’ brains correlated significantly with their reported levels of curiosity and curiosity behavior. In the study, curiosity had a particularly decisive effect on the connection between the hippocampus and the striatum. The striatum houses the body’s reward system and thus corresponds to the part of the brain that spurs people to action, provides motivation, and arouses interest in action. The hippocampus, on the other hand, primarily houses memory functions and also secretes neurotransmitters that act on the reward system. The stronger the connection between the striatum and the hippocampus, the more likely people are to desire to try new things. Presumably, the basic connection between the two areas is innate, but does not fully mature until the first months or years of life. In this context, it is probably above all impulses that the young child receives from its environment that are decisive. Such stimuli arouse attention and may be responsible for the extensive consolidation of the connection between the striatum and the hippocampus. This could explain the varying degrees of curiosity that people fundamentally possess. Curiosity has a positive effect on people in many ways. The more curious a person is, the more open he is to new things. He learns more easily, is often happier and does easily in problem solving. Since when curiosity is satisfied, messenger substances such as dopamine cause a strong feeling of happiness via the reward system of the striatum, curiosity is considered one of the most important drives and motivations. Curiosity, according to the University of California, even gets you high in some ways. Thus, a person whose curiosity has once been satisfied may even become somewhat addicted to the feeling of satisfied curiosity. Satisfying curiosity thus ultimately makes one more and more curious.
Diseases and ailments
People with pathologically reduced curiosity suffer primarily from listlessness. They feel less motivation to perform actions or live their lives. Different diseases can minimize curiosity. Physical causes are present, for example, in dementia. As soon as the connections between the striatum and the hippocampus break down in the course of dementia, the patient’s curiosity rapidly declines and loss of motivation occurs. Damage to this brain network can also occur in the context of other diseases. In this context, strokes should be mentioned as well as brain hemorrhages due to trauma, bacterial inflammations, tumors, autoimmunological inflammations, congenital brain malformations or cerebral hypoxia.In addition to these causes, reduced curiosity with symptomatic loss of motivation can occur in the context of depression, of schizophrenia disorders, or in stupor. Stupor is probably the most radical example: it is a state of rigidity that patients experience while fully conscious. It often follows severe depression or schizophrenia. Since some medications as well as drugs affect the reward system in the striatum, a person’s curiosity and motivation can also decrease in the context of medication use or addictive disorders. Hormones also have an impact on various processes within the brain. Hormonal disorders caused by diseases of the thyroid gland or other glandular organs can thus also affect a person’s curiosity. Pathological changes in curiosity and motivation must always be distinguished from physiologically low curiosity. As noted above, curiosity is probably formed by impulses during early childhood. Thus, the degree differs from person to person without pathological value depending on the attentional impulses experienced. In contrast, those exposed to deprivation in the sense of social impoverishment during early childhood experience a pathological reduction in curiosity. In situations of deprivation, adolescents do not receive sufficient attention and thus do not receive sufficient stimuli that would allow physiological brain development.
