Episode 62 - Curiosity (feat. Perry Zurn and Dani S. Bassett)

Transcript

Ellie: 0:06

Welcome to Overthink.

David: 0:08

The podcast where two philosophy professors put big ideas in dialogue with the every day.

Ellie: 0:14

I'm Ellie Anderson.

David: 0:15

And I'm David Peña-Guzmán.

Ellie: 0:17

And hello. Hello, listeners. David, can you tell us about the founding myth of Genesis?

David: 0:26

You mean like Adam and Eve?

Ellie: 0:28

You got it. Remind us of the facts of this narrative.

David: 0:31

Well, I mean, you have your OG humans, Adam and Eve, and they're hanging out in paradise in the Garden of Eden watching over the animals. They're fully naked and Eve meets a snake who suggests that she eat of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge.

Ellie: 0:50

Specifically the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, which for some reason always gets depicted as an apple in paintings.

David: 0:57

Yeah that's so basic, and I've heard some theologians argue that the, the term was just like fruit, a generic one, and just apple was the one that got picked up for the iconography.

Ellie: 1:07

So basic.

David: 1:09

Apples are so basic, they're so— They need like, I don't know, like a passion fruit, you know? That would be much more appropriate.

Ellie: 1:15

Yes. Or you know what my favorite fruit is lately is a sapote.

David: 1:18

Sapote? Oh my gosh, really? I've never— Okay, Ellie, major points. I've never heard a white person know that fruit.

Ellie: 1:28

Well it is, it is thanks to my partner's Indian mother that I know it. So I was, I, I was given the knowledge by a non-white person, but she's not— Yeah, she's not Latin American though. And sopates are from Latin America.

David: 1:40

Yeah. I don't know if they're Mexican, but I mean, I grew up picking them from trees in my hometown. They are delicious and I'm sorry for all of you who don't know what those fruits are.

Ellie: 1:49

Yeah. If you can't get about your local farmer's market, because you don't Southern California like me, you are missing out.

David: 1:54

Yeah. Actually, I don't know if you know this, but the Spanish translation of the Bible uses sapote instead of apple for the story of Genesis.

Ellie: 2:02

Wait, I can't, I can't. Are you serious?

David: 2:05

No, I'm lying. So anyways, let's, let's go back to the story of Adam and Eve because you do have this reference to the Tree of Knowledge. And this is the one tree that God has told Adam and Eve that they are not allowed to eat from.

Ellie: 2:19

Mm-hmm.

David: 2:20

But after meeting the serpent, Eve starts to get a little curious, you know, what is God hiding from me? Why doesn't he want me to eat this fruit? So, of course, she does what she's not supposed to do, and she eats the fruit. And eventually she and Adam get kicked out of the garden and they realize that it's pretty awkward that they've been naked this whole time. And so later she's doomed to the pain of childbirth and so on and so on after the fall.

Ellie: 2:51

Okay. Thank you for that highly compelling narrative. What I want to point out here is that what really led Eve into sin in this narrative that you have so wonderfully given, was her curiosity. It was her encounter with the serpent that drove her curiosity, and that's what led to the whole takedown of the garden. Interestingly, far from the only time a woman's curiosity has been blamed for ruining everything, right? We have Pandora's Box being another one.

David: 3:19

Oh, yes, you're right.

Ellie: 3:21

So perhaps unsurprisingly, right, kind of following this Bible story, curiosity has not been the most popular of attitudes in Western traditions of philosophy. It's kind of a good general rule of thumb that if anything is associated with women in ancient Western philosophical thought, it's like a bad thing. And Christian thought in particular has always had a fraught relationship with curiosity because it has often treated it as a vice. So Augustine, for instance, suggests that curiosity is a force residing in the soul that moves it away from God. And he thinks that it encourages us to obsess over the details and secrets of the world around us. Like, what the hell our upstairs neighbor is doing to make that much noise.

David: 4:03

Yeah, turning us away from God. That's interesting because that's also the definition in a lot of medieval, uh, work for sin.

Ellie: 4:10

Sin, yes.

David: 4:11

Sin is just a turning away from God. And now I'm thinking here about the evolution of this concept because by the time we get to the 17th and 18th centuries, the rise of the scientific method leads to a new investment in curiosity that stands in pretty sharp contrast to this suspicion that the Medievals had about this attitude. And so curiosity suddenly starts being described much more positively. And as science becomes a major player in social life, it's almost as if the value of curiosity changes because from the beginning, science establishes itself as a kind of curiosity about the world. And again, we can contrast this to theology, which in its Christian form at least warned against being nosy and curious and inquisitive and in the modern period. For example, in the famous book of Leviathan, which is about the social contract, the English philosopher Thomas Hobbs argues that curiosity is precisely what explains our drive to think scientifically. So when you're curious, you start asking "why" questions. Which is to say questions about the causes of things, and science is precisely that. It is an inquiry into the causal relationships that hold the natural world together. He calls curiosity and appetite, kind of following that Christian tradition, but now giving it a new evaluation. He says, "when you are curious, you are hungry for knowledge of causes."

Ellie: 5:44

Mmmm. And so in this sense, if the scientific method is driven by curiosity, it makes sense that in the early modern period, during the scientific revolution, the church would see this method as a threat, right? And as really antithetical its own methods. Hobbes is far from the only one in this period who thinks of curiosity as a driver from observation about the world to an attempt to discover what lies behind these observations. I'm thinking about Francis Bacon, for instance, who also extolled the value of curiosity as a driver of human progress, and he explicitly contrasted the Christian prejudice against curiosity with his view of curiosity, which was that curiosity is natural and useful.

David: 6:31

Yeah, and the natural and the useful, I think is important. Although, interestingly, Bacon was a little bit ambivalent about the value of curiosity because he thought curiosity could be a double edge sword. For him it can be an expression of vanity. He says that sometimes we can let ourselves be curious about things only for the wrong reasons. For example, for the pleasure of just inquiring about new things and for reasons of vanity, rather than for the advancement of human values and human life and so on. So there is this danger to curiosity in the Baconian Corpus.

Ellie: 7:08

Well, and that's really interesting because it's definitely the case that the early modern period didn't suddenly embrace curiosity wholeheartedly. It rather had a pretty ambivalent relationship to it. And so Bacon is representative, I would say, following what you said, David, in this respect. As it turns out, one of my former professors from undergrad, Barbara Benedict, actually wrote a book about curiosity in the early modern period, and the main theme is the ambivalence of curiosity during this period. Sidebar though, I want to talk about the phrase curiosity killed the cat. David, what do you hear when you hear curiosity killed the cat?

David: 7:49

I honestly hear the voice of my grandmother like coming from the back of the house, because she used to say that to me a lot when I was a kid.

Although of course in Spanish: 7:57

la curiosidad mató al gato. And so I just, I think of my grandmother correcting me and sometimes, what's a term in English for when you like tell a kid what not to do? Reprimanding.

Ellie: 8:11

Don't eat the sapote of the tree of good evil.

David: 8:14

Yes, exactly. Stop eating the sapote. No, but I think being reprimanded by my grandmother, that's what comes to mind.

Ellie: 8:21

Interesting.

David: 8:23

Why are you asking that?

Ellie: 8:24

Because I wanted to just get your initial read on where you thought this came from, because I find this proverb actually kind of strange when you think about it. Like I always imagined some cat going into a secret room and then dying there, which is

David: 8:43

What?

Ellie: 8:44

I, I don't know, like getting, getting caught in some sort of jam, but I figured there must have been a classic fable that gave rise to it once I was actually thinking about it. In fact, however, I couldn't find one, so I went down this deep curiosity driven rabbit hole into the origins of the proverb curiosity killed the cat, and I discovered partly thanks to Professor Benedict's book that scholars believe it's a spinoff of the Renaissance maxim care killed the cat and somewhere down the line care switched to curiosity. I still don't really know the cat connection to be honest, but not for lack of trying to find out. My curiosity kind of failed me on that one.

David: 9:22

Yeah. In this case, curiosity killed the inquiry. It just led nowhere. Well, that's pretty interesting that the proverb came originally— did you say the word care? Care killed the cat?

Ellie: 9:35

Yeah, care killed the cat.

David: 9:36

Now, this is making me think of an article, a philosophy article that I read for this episode about the philosophy of curiosity that made the argument that curiosity is a combination of two things. It is on the one hand a form of attention because you give something, your sustained attention when you are curious about it. And on the other hand, care, because when you're curious about an object, it's because you fundamentally care about it rather than being indifferent to it. There can be no curiosity without care. They are quite close in this way. And so I can imagine maybe our early modern ancestors, or in this case you said Renaissance figures, maybe not even differentiating all that much between curiosity and care.

Ellie: 10:25

Yeah.

David: 10:25

To the point that the term is just one or the other, or eventually morphs.

Ellie: 10:30

And does the author differentiate between care in the sort of positive sense like, I care for you versus just a neutral caring about something? Because I think a lot of the ways that curiosity often gets represented have to do with the idea that there's almost, um, neutral to negative valence of somebody caring about, like, you wanna find out the truth about somebody, you just wanna get to the bottom of it. Do you know what I mean?

David: 11:00

I see. I don't know if the author differentiates between the two, although I suspect he has a positive conception of care as you care for something when you see it as potentially enriching your life, and that's what magnetizes your relationship to the thing. It draws you almost by a force analogous to desire.

Ellie: 11:19

Yeah. I suppose we might still wonder though, about what it means for it to enrich your life. For instance, if I'm interested in finding out about the anatomy, let's use a cat. The anatomy of a

David: 11:30

A dead cat in particular.

Ellie: 11:32

Yeah. No, no, no. Actually, I'm, I'm thinking violence here. Like what if I kill that cat in order to figure out what its anatomy is. That I'm doing that because I care about the topic and I'm interested in enriching my life, but I'm not caring for the cat's wellbeing in doing that.

David: 11:49

Yeah, and this is what, in one of my publications actually in the past, I, I referred to as the curiosity of the master.

Ellie: 11:55

I didn't know you published on curiosity our very topic. David, you should make me read this.

David: 12:00

Yeah. No, and differentiating the curiosity of the traveler from the curiosity of the master and the curiosity of the master representing a kind of curiosity that dissects and cuts and organizes. And, I think that also is the kind of curiosity that we often see associated with science. So in this case, curiosity literally kills the cat. In the sense that it opens it up to the gaze of the master who, who wants to know what is inside, no matter the cost.

Ellie: 12:29

Wow. Well, on that note, let's let our curiosity lead us into our discussion with a scientist who does not have this curiosity of the master, but who wants to open it up really differently. And they're twin, who is a philosopher.

David: 12:46

Today we are talking about curiosity.

Ellie: 12:49

What does it mean to be curious and where does curiosity lead?

David: 12:53

And how does our modern education system sideline this important attitude?

Ellie: 12:58

How can we understand and cultivate different types of curiosity?

David: 13:01

We bring on the authors of the new book, Curious Minds: The Power of Connection, to talk to us about the philosophy and science of curiosity.

Ellie: 13:16

Perry Zurn is associate professor of philosophy at American University. He is the author of a number of previous works on curiosity, including the book, Curiosity and Power, the Politics of Inquiry. Perry also actively works on trans philosophy, prison abolition, and the work of Michel Foucault.

David: 13:32

And Dani S. Bassett is J. Peter Skirkanich Professor of Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania. They are the author of, listen to this, more than 300 scientific research articles in neuroscience, physics, network science, and complex system science. Perry and Dani, it is such a pleasure to have you both here. Perry, you as a philosopher, and Dani, you as a scientist, doing really exciting interdisciplinary work around this question of the nature of curiosity.

Ellie: 14:06

Welcome.

David: 14:07

Yes, welcome.

Dani: 14:09

Thanks for having us.

Perry: 14:10

We're thrilled to be here.

David: 14:11

So let's jump right in. In your book on curiosity, you argue that scholars typically boil down curiosity to information seeking behavior or to what you call a desire to know. And you call this the acquisitional framework. And you argue that this is the wrong way to think about curiosity. Curiosity for you is not really about acquisition, but about what you call a practice of connection. So what does it mean to reframe curiosity in this way?

Perry: 14:44

Yeah so this work comes out of really thinking through the history of philosophy of curiosity, and noticing this consistent characterization of curiosity as this individual desire to know, which is then understood as this individual capacity to acquire knowledge. And that makes sense when you think about, you know, you Google something and you do, you get an individual piece of information that you might then share with friends, but you might not, but you'll typically take it and then go use it in a conversation or in your career or something else. Right? So this thinking about curiosity as this capacity to acquire information makes sense, but it limits us significantly in our understanding of curiosity's social character. And we mean social character, not only between people, but also between ideas. So ideas don't actually live all by themselves in space separate from one another. And we'll talk a little bit about the network behind ideas and concepts and language, but we characterize curiosity instead of a capacity to acquire, we characterize it as a practice of connection. When we are curious, we want to connect what we know right now with what we are about to know. We want to build those connections and through that we want to build some kind of scaffold of knowledge. Like it's not just like one or two connections, but lots of kind of dynamic connections between what it is that we've already known and our coming to know what it is that other people are sharing with us or that we are bringing to the table. And it builds connection not only between ideas, but then between ourselves and our world and ourselves and other people in the world and other things that they know or have thought in the past. So this I think is a much richer understanding of curiosity and lets us ask much more interesting questions. We can draw it and we do draw it from the history of philosophy, but then we really play it out through network neuroscience. So Dani, I don't know if you wanna jump in and explain kind of this from a network angle.

Dani: 16:27

Yeah, absolutely. So when you're thinking about connecting pieces of information with one another, you realize very quickly that the structures that you can build are potentially very, very large. So you can imagine having a pile of toothpicks next to you and a really big bag of mini marshmallows. And imagine sticking the marshmallows together with the toothpicks, and assuming your piles are large enough, you can create very large structures that have quite different architectures, and if you give those tools to many children, you'll get completely different architectures from each one. So that's a nice analogy for what we are doing when we search for new information. We're creating new connections from marshmallow to marshmallow idea to idea, and we're doing that in, in quite different ways. So the question is, how do we understand the architecture of those different creations in our minds, and how do we quantify them and study them and describe them scientifically? That's where network science comes in, is that it's a, it's a language that allows us to talk about how connective structures are different. For example, you would know that the Eiffel Tower and a telecommunications structure are organized very differently, and both of them are very different than the scaffold that you see on the building that's getting work done nearby, right? But if I were to ask you, how are those structures different, it would be hard to describe. You need a language for that characterization, and that's what network science gives you.

David: 18:03

Yeah, I noticed a lot of architectural metaphors in your writing, and I think these remarks really illustrate, for our listeners what you mean when you talk about curiosity. It is really about building structures that somehow hold together as organic holes that nonetheless have still built within them a principle of growth so that they're not static, but you know, they can be taken in different directions than they can give birth to new structures. So I, I really find that very useful as a way of picturing and conceptualizing curiosity.

Ellie: 18:37

Just to piggyback on that, David, I think that is such a nice comparison to the acquisition model that you two are resisting in the book. Because I think sometimes when we think about curiosity, at least for me, I think of the cabinet of curiosities where somebody is collecting things, maybe a shell from the beach or you know, something they found on their travels and bringing it back home with them and assembling it into a single cabinet. And I think that also is really similar to the way that philosophers thought about the mind for quite some time, especially in the early modern period. This idea that the mind is just a blank slate upon which things are collected or impressed upon. And this notion of the network, I think really explodes that because it's not a unidirectional bringing in of something from the outside, but rather reciprocal multiplicitous and so on.

Dani: 19:28

Yeah, and in that way it actually provides an affordance, I think, for the knowledge that you're bringing in. Because if you're just bringing in pieces of information and then you're storing them, let's say in a bag as like independent pieces of sand, what can you do with independent pieces of sand? Not a lot. You can maybe sprinkle them right. But if those pieces of of information are actually connected up in some way, then it's a structure that allows you to do something new. So I think it's Dewey who says that knowledge is such a network of interconnections, that any past experience can offer a point of advantage from which to get at the problem presented in a new experience. So every piece of information is connected back and then allows you to make predictions about the future. That's only possible because of the connections. If information was a pile of sand in your pocket, you wouldn't be able to either go back into history or to go forward in predicting the future.

Perry: 20:22

Also, it gives us a nice way of re-understanding what students say when they hopefully take one of our classes and say, "you blew my mind." Because you know, I think on the acquisitional model we might have thought, well, I've given you a piece of information you never had. And that's amazing, right? That that's that piece of information that you've now acquired is the thing that blew your mind. But what's really happening, and I think this is more existentially true, is that the class itself has rearranged a whole structure of things they know or thought they knew the whole thing is now in a different shape than it was before. It has been transformed. So it's not that single piece, but it's really the structure that has had to adjust to a new network of knowledge.

David: 21:04

Yeah, and when you think about the connection, or rather the difference between a grain of sand and the image of a marshmallow that you use, Dani, the former is impermeable. It is hard. You can't really do much with it. Whereas a marshmallow is something that is supple and that can be folded and made to hold something in place, and it, it just reminds me of some discussions in critical pedagogy about the importance of moving away from what is called the banking model of education, where you just store things in a bank. Again, that that model of bagging sand as opposed to trying to build something. Even if it still has, again, and I think this is important in your book, that mobility, that dynamism and that softness, I don't think that's a concept that you use, but I think it makes sense in this case.

Ellie: 21:53

And I wanna come back to the pedagogy point a little bit later because I think it really is so interesting, the implications that your argument has for education. But for now, I want to invite you to tell us a little bit about some of the really rich images that you use in your book or, or we might call them archetypes. You talk about three styles of curiosity that you say are relatively consistent across time, and you know, these are not the only three but they are three that you think are particularly identifiable over the course of time. One is the busy body, one is the hunter, and the other is the dancer. Can you tell us about these archetypes of curiosity?

Perry: 22:30

Sure. This work began when I was invited to speak to a group of high school artists about curiosity, and I thought, gosh, how can I provide something that is visually stimulating, right? And I started to think, well, it would be cool to introduce curious characters. So I thought about going back through the history of philosophy and thinking, well, who are the real curious characters? And I mean character in like this rich, like kinda like weird folks sort of way. And as I was doing that, what I, what I really noticed was that there are not characters so much as styles that keep coming up among these characters, styles of curiosity that are fairly regularly rehearsed throughout the history of philosophy, but also kind of western intellectual thought in general. And those three are the busy body. So the busy body is someone who's interested in lots of different things, doesn't have a whole lot to restrain their, their interest and involvement in knowledge. But the hunter is someone who's much more focused. In fact they're, they're typically interested in one or two things, but they wanna know a lot about that. So they're not everywhere and anywhere like the busy body, but they're really centered somewhere in their, in their kind of epistemic interests. Then the third style is the dancer, which is someone who takes these kind of creative leaps of imagination and is much more willing to risk putting two things together that weren't thought or expected to happen together intellectually and, and they tend to be more aesthetic in nature. So these are the three styles and yeah, we, I mean this work is really centered in philosophical history specifically, and then western intellectual thoughts. So therefore it is necessarily limited. I'm sure there are other styles in other traditions, and we end up turning to animals and creatures at the end of the book to say, well, we don't even have to go to literatures of centuries old. We can start looking at the creatures all around us today and learning a lot about styles of curiosity from them. So we're very open to multiple styles, but these three seem to be, there seems to be something really to them, and we've been able to test them out experimentally with further research. Dani, you might wanna jump in and talk a little bit about that.

Dani: 24:33

Yeah, absolutely. So one of the questions for us was are these archetypes that are present in the philosophical literature from the last 2000 years also present today? Or has the technology that we all engage with in our everyday life sort of ruined curiosity for us forever? And so what we did is that we worked with David Lydon-Staley, who is a professor in the Annenberg School of Communication at Penn. And in collaboration with him, we studied how humans walk through Wikipedia. So they browse Wikipedia for 15 minutes a day for 21 days. And we're able to watch which pages they walk between. So there will be some people who go between pages that are relatively nearby. For example, they'll start on a page about rhododendrons and maybe move to a page about azaleas or oak leaf hydrangeas, or holly bushes or some other bushy type plant that you put in front of your house. So those are relatively short steps. In contrast, there are other individuals who will go to the rhododendron and then go to Queen Elizabeth and then go to game shows. Those are huge steps, right? So we can watch this stepping action. And with that stepping action we can quantify the degree to which the person is more of a busy body jumping between very diverse pages versus a hunter really tracking down information in one particular area. And what we see is that the participants span a wide space. Some are very busy body like some are very hunter like. What we also see is that if you watch for three weeks, people who tend to be busy bodies, Will stay roughly like a busy body, but they might move a little bit more towards hunter or a little bit away from hunter over time. And the person who tends to be a hunter will stay there mostly, but they may move a little bit toward busy body or a little bit away from busy body. So that means that there's some temporal flexibility in the kinds of curiosity styles that we might evince when we're engaging with Wikipedia. And more broadly, it addresses this question of whether technology is completely changing our styles and the answer is no, we can still see those same styles today.

David: 26:43

And let me ask you a follow up question on this point, because I love Wikipedia, controversial point, um, going on air here. But I think I am a busy body. I think I meet the criteria in terms of my usage of the platform. But now I'm wondering how you, in your studies differentiated between the busy body and the dancer. I understand the difference between the busy body and the hunter. One is much more controlled, focused, making short leaps that are logically connected. The busy body is like me all over the place. But what's the difference then between the busy body and the dancer, and how do you tell the difference between them?

Dani: 27:23

Yeah, that's a great question. So in that particular study, we did not include the dancer, but in ongoing work, the way that we think about the dancer is more related to this blow your mind idea that Perry brought up earlier, which is the dancer will take some structure of information and connect it up with a different structure of information such that the two may change in their shape. And that that is what, what a dancer might do. So that requires a little bit of a different experimental structure to detect. We've been developing the theory for it and the mathematics for it, and now we're just getting ready to do that experimentally.

David: 28:01

I think you're a hunter, Ellie, and together you and I are a hunter and gatherer society with gender roles, inversed.

Ellie: 28:08

I know. Well, I, I, I was curious because I feel like I'm such a hunter, which is also funny, like you said about the gender roles because I think the busy body, I think of that as pretty feminine coded, especially when you talk in your book about, the historical vilification of the busy body. We did a, an episode on gossip a while back where we talked about the feminization of gossip. And I, I see that a little bit in some of the, the claims that the busy body just like wants to know everybody's business and is seeing in order to see rather than in order to understand, which is a, a point that Heidegger makes that you quote in your book.

Perry: 28:43

Exactly. And this is part of what was interesting for me about curiosity to begin with. It was that passage in Heidegger and it was the implicit kind of anti-feminist vibe I was getting from that passage. Right?

Ellie: 28:54

From Heidegger? Shocking.

Perry: 28:55

Yeah, because this kind of curiosity is like, or is practiced by women, therefore it's bad. It's sort, sort of the undercurrent I heard as a very young grad student. I was like, that's not right. So that, that is why I think it was a vilification of the busy body that got me in this rabbit hole in the first place.

David: 29:12

Yeah. And so, okay, we've established that David, me, I am a busy body. Ellie is a laser sharp hunter, which I think is accurate. And now I'm going to venture here and say that Perry and Dani, both of you are dancers because you described the dancer as somebody who takes two different structures, brings them together, and then reconfigures both structures through the interaction. And that's precisely how you present the book as the coming together of philosophy and systems theory, network theory, as a way of producing this new nonacquisitional model of curiosity. Do you think that's, that's a fair statement?

Ellie: 29:54

David, that was such a dancer move. I was about to ask them. I was about to ask them what their styles are, which might be a hunter move. Okay. Anyway, I'm curious.

Perry: 30:04

Yeah, I love it. I, I, I totally buy it. I mean, we, we talk about this all the time. I think we identify as each one in different ways at different moments, but I think both of us are most excited about being academics because of the dancer, like curiosity, allows.

David: 30:21

Mm-hmm.

Dani: 30:22

Yeah, and definitely I think the book is a dancer move. I agree with you, but I would also say that there are other parts of my life, So for example, my reading tendencies are very busy body, like extremely eclectic. There's not really a through line.

Ellie: 30:35

And would you say that your work in physics is hunter like?

Dani: 30:39

Slightly more hunter like, yes. Yeah.

David: 30:42

I like the idea that we're all one or another in different aspects of our lives. I'm yet to find my hunter persona. To be honest, I don't think I have one, but I I, I dream that one day I will find it. But I want to go back, uh, Dani, to a point that you made earlier, because you noted that when doing this research about the different archetypes of the curious character, you came to the conclusion that you could use mathematics to try to understand the nature of curiosity. And in the book you do make the claim explicitly that curiosity is mathematizable and this is where you turn to your background in network theory to develop this claim. Can you explain to us what network theory is, first and foremost, and then talk to us about how it helps us mathematize curiosity.

Dani: 31:35

Yeah, so it's a great question. So network science has a really interesting history. It began in the study of social systems. So we often talk about our social networks. I'm hanging out with this part of my social network, or I'm on Facebook and I can see this part of my social network, et cetera. And so network science was sort of began as a way of understanding the pattern of connections between items in a very, very large system that you might not be able to see with your eyes. And for that reason, it developed into a mathematical language that is relatively abstract or can be applied to abstract things, so it doesn't have to be marshmallows and toothpicks as we were talking about earlier. It can be the relationships between humans or the relationships between concepts, for example. And so what network science does for us in the frame of curiosity is to say, what is the structure of knowledge and how are we building it? Curiosity is a practice of building these knowledge structures or building these knowledge networks. And so network science allows for us to say how that building is happening, and particularly how it's happening differently in each of us. And the reason I think that that is important and exciting is that it provides us with a way of more concretely appreciating the diversity among people, and particularly in the context of mentoring or teaching, understanding the diversity of curiosity in the students that we engage with.

David: 33:05

And when using the image of a network, of course we think about a number of units being connected. We think about those marshmallows holding the toothpicks together. And so can you just say a little bit about how you envision the units or the building blocks of these networks? Are they bits of information like I read a new factoid in Wikipedia, and then that becomes one of the elements that I can add to my growing network of curiosity, or are there other kinds of elemental units in your thinking about curiosity other than just facts and information?

Dani: 33:44

A great question. So definitely you can think about facts and information or concepts as being the units that are connected, but you can also think about bodily movements or emotions or gestures or facial expressions that you begin to see and notice, and notice the transitions between them. There's some really interesting work to suggest that we learn about emotions by watching the transitions between facial expressions, the tone of voice, bodily movements, et cetera. So even, even our emotions and the way that we understand them and the way that we grow in our experience with them can be thought of from the network perspective as well. But maybe for the listeners to just get a feel for how this works in the area of concepts, you can do what's called a free association task, and this illustrates to you the way that you've already connected up ideas in your mind. So a free association task is where you begin with one word that's in front of you, or one idea that's in front of you, and then you just say the next word that comes to mind. So let's do this for a couple words, just so the audience can get a feel for it. So for example, on my desk are my keys, so I'll start with keys and then I'll go to car. And then from car, I think about transportation mechanism. So I go to plane, and then from plane I'll go to clouds and then to rain. And rivers and then mountains, and then glaciers, maybe. I love Glacier National Park. Um, then I'll move to climate change and then maybe think about climate in business or in educational settings. Then I'll move into cultures of inclusion, not just climate, but cultures of inclusion, of diversity, equity, or justice. That brings me immediately to the Supreme Court and Ruth Bader Ginsberg, who is one of my favorite people. Um, and then from there I'll go to Virginia Wolf. Also another favorite person. So in those like few different, those very few seconds, we go from the keys on my desk to through climate change and glaciers to Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Virginia Wolf. Right? So these are huge spaces, but if you look at any of those steps, there's a clear reason why I went from one word to the next. That's a connection. It's a conceptual connection that's present in your mind. But each of us may have a different walk that we take through that space, in part because we've constructed that space differently based on our experience and our engagement.

Ellie: 36:05

And Dani, when you share that network of connections between Keys and Virginia Wolf, which I also just love all the, all the thoughts should come back to Virginia Wolf at some point.

Dani: 36:15

I agree.

Ellie: 36:17

It strikes me that what you're describing seems pretty neutral, but I think in a lot of cases in our daily lives, the connections that we make actually are not neutral at all and might express things like implicit bias. And so I'm thinking for instance, about studies that have been done among young children who are asked to say what they would identify with a really dark skinned baby doll, dangerous for instance. And that kind of connection then reveals the implicit bias in our society of anti-black racism. So I wonder what you think about cases where sort of curiosity is trading on implicit biases and or reinforcing them when that happens is something kind of outside of curiosity itself entering in, or is curiosity intrinsically dangerous?

Perry: 37:06

Yeah, I'd love to jump in here and say one of the connections between my earlier work and this book is that here we're talking about structures and networks of knowledge. And in my previous book, Curiosity and Power, I talk about, uh, curiosity formations, so shapes and formations of curiosity, and one of the shapes is this kind of spectacularization of difference, for example, or objectification of the other. Those are two different shapes of curiosity that inform how a knower comes to a potential form of knowledge, right? Some other object of knowledge and kind of positions, the relationality of the knower and the known and their capacities to relate or not to each other, and who gets to speak about what and why. So I think there are formations and structures and shapes of curiosity that have been particularly damning in the history of western colonial cultures specifically that we can talk about from this kind of network perspective. Or we can talk about it from, you know, leaning on, uh, women of color feminisms, which I have talked a lot about, I think this objectification or spectacularization of difference in the other.

David: 38:15

And can I ask another version of Ellie's question? Because now I'm thinking about the dangers of curiosity, right? Which is, uh, a really fascinating topic.

Dani: 38:24

It killed the cat, right? It's very dangerous.

David: 38:28

And, I'm thinking about the way in which curiosity plays out in our algorithmic age, let's say, where, you know, we're moving through social media. I'm here thinking about TikTok, I'm thinking about Instagram, about Facebook posts. And I have the lift feeling of really pursuing a line of inquiry that is guided by my interest and by my curiosity in the present when in reality, I'm just following a path that has been laid out for me ahead of time by algorithms, right? So I have the illusion of of being creatively curious when in reality I might be the opposite of that. So I'm curious about curiosity online in the age of algorithms.

Dani: 39:14

Yeah, I think that's a really good question and definitely you don't even have to go to the age of algorithms to have your curiosity feel like it's following a track that's been laid down for you. One of the other areas that Perry and I collaborate on is understanding, the pattern of citations among scholarly works. So who are we citing in the reference lists of our papers, and who do those people cite and who do those people cite, et cetera. And there's a lot of growing evidence across the sciences and into non-scientific fields as well, demonstrating quantitatively that women or non-binary trans scholars or people of color, scholars of color are undercited compared to what you would expect given where their paper was published, when it was published, a lot of other factors about that paper. So this suggests that even the way that we're moving through ideas in our scholarly work is tracing back over structures of privilege that have been passed down to us and, and we're not perhaps being as creative as scholars as we could be or as open and inquisitive as we could be. So I think that's a place where we can channel a curiosity that breaks the boundaries of the lines that have been laid down.

Perry: 40:28

Just as much as there are these lines of curiosity that have been laid down for us that we may need to resist in particular ways, I also think that it's important to recover certain lines of curiosity that have been laid down for us, or laid for us by our ancestors in the past, and I think about this as a central component of feminist curiosity. Part of it is not just that those of us today working in this area have to start asking new questions and breaking all the boundaries we've inherited. But we also have to go back and appreciate some really amazing invitations in the past by thinkers who have left us and kind of recover those paths, kind of pick, pick out those paths of curiosity and, and find our way through a different network of knowledge.

Ellie: 41:10

Yeah, and I think your answers about the practices of scholarly citation and how we are tracing our own history as feminist scholars leads me to also think back to the education question that David kind of raised earlier with his mention of the banking model of education, which I associate with Paulo Freire. And, um, Freire whom you cite in your book says that we have this kind of dominant model of education known as the banking model of education, which is precisely acquisitive, where we imagine students as sort of vaults into which to deposit things. And you point out in your book that this kind of model is a perfect recipe for the destruction of curiosity. And even though curiosity is an extremely important skill to cultivate in young minds, the education system doesn't really seem to foster it. And you even talk a little bit about how, we haven't even mentioned it until now, but you are twins, and how you grew up homeschooled and you had a really different kind of education that allowed you to pursue your curiosity. So I wonder what you think about why curiosity so often get sidelined in our educational system and how might it change.

Dani: 42:26

Um, so we were homeschooled from kindergarten through 12th grade. And our mom, who organized most of the education, really focused on allowing us to determine the areas that we were most excited about. So at the beginning of every school year, at the beginning of every unit, she would say, what do you wanna learn? What do you wanna learn about? And then she would collect references or materials to help us learn about that thing. She was also particularly interested in finding ways to connect different disciplines around the same topic. So, for example, Perry wanted to study mushrooms, one unit. And so she found, you know, history of mushrooms, science of mushrooms, art of mushrooms, photography of mushrooms

Ellie: 43:06

Cool.

Dani: 43:06

was all brought together as part of the, the unit of learning that semester. Um, and I, for example, did one on bones. And again, she helped to connect different disciplines around that same concept. So I think it was a really exciting way of, number one, foregrounding individual inquiry, what is it that you want to know? And then also foregrounding this interdisciplinary nature of inquiry. What are the different ways that you can think about that same topic? What are the different methods? Which now as older scholars, we realize people often, you know, push aside the methods of different disciplines and say, no don't use a philosophy method to ask a science question. Definitely don't use a scientific method to ask a philosophy question. But I think our, our mom sort of trained us to say no, if you, if you're excited about a question, ask it from all the different ways. Use every method that you have available to you. Um, so I think that that has stuck with us.

Ellie: 44:05

She sounds like an incredible educator.

Dani: 44:07

She was.

Perry: 44:08

She's fantastic. Yeah. That past definitely informs how we think about curiosity and the, you know, cause it was such an experience of curiosity, but then also education today. And so we do press in the book that we need a much more interdisciplinary approach to education. Where we don't have such strict boundaries between, Oh, this is this field and that is that field, and we do this here and we do that there. There's really such a loss of the edges and a suppression of kind of the imaginative dancer, like qualities of putting two things together that would be unexpected. So we need more, a more interdisciplinary approach to education and to our own fields, and we definitely need this kind of attunement to how does a student themselves experience or practice their own curiosities. So we were very, or are very introverted and so we're not likely to be, to have been seen as curious as, as young students, you know, we were very quiet. We would not have sat in the front of the class. We would not have raised our hands, we would not have asked a lot of questions. But obviously we are oppressively curious people. But we need to start thinking as educators about these styles that Dani and I share, but perhaps many other sorts of styles of curiosity, especially among people who are neuro-atypical or neurodiverse. Because how people put concepts together is really, really, really different. And I don't think we fully appreciate that and that has to change how we enter the classroom as facilitators of learning. So that's, that's one of the sort of big take homes. And that maybe a last big take home is that there are different traditions of knowledge that we need to think about as sort of hubs in the network. So it's not that there's only one network of knowledge and we're all building it, right, but there are actually competing structures of knowledge that have particular hubs where a lot of things are happening and they may not be consistent with one another or in agreement with one another, or even be able to fit together. And at that point we need to start thinking, I like to pull in, uh, Maria Laguna here. We need to start thinking of world traveling, but through this kind of network understanding of knowledge, how do we kind of honor the different structures of knowledge and curiosity in different social groups? And that's gotta change how we teach too. I think especially K through 12 folks teach much more. This is knowledge, right? This is the universal, uh, story of knowledge opposed to these are these competing worlds.

Ellie: 46:28

And I think that's a great call to action, Perry, for reframing those of us who are educators, reframing the way that we think about education, but also for those of our listeners who are not educators, to go about the world in a bit of a different way. Find out what your styles of curiosity are, create your own curriculum around mushrooms, and definitely pick up Curious Minds: The Power of Connection, which is Perry and Dani's wonderful, wonderful book. Thank you both so much for joining us today.

Perry: 46:55

Thank you.

Dani: 46:56

Thanks for having us.

David: 47:04

If you're enjoying, Overthink, please consider supporting the podcast by joining our Patreon. We are an independent, self-supporting podcast, and as a subscriber, you can help us cover our key production costs, gain access to our exclusive digital library of bonus content, and more.

Ellie: 47:24

David, what were your thoughts about this wonderful interview? I thought it was so fun. I loved hearing from both Perry and Dani.

David: 47:33

I know, and we mentioned it, but just so our listeners know, we had audio and visual access to them and they are twins. So it was really interesting to see them side by side talking about their very different expertise. Right, one of them is a philosopher, one of them is a scientist. And yet they work so well together. And one of the things that I thought in connection to the book is that it's a really good example of interdisciplinarity in action.

Ellie: 47:59

Yeah. Yeah, I totally agree. One thing I had in mind, David, is maybe now for our listeners, we could think a little bit about a couple of the other figures that Perry and Dani talk about in their book. You know, we talked a lot about the busy body, the hunter, and the dancer. I was blanking on that last one, but they also talk about a couple of others and one of the other ones that they talk about is in fact the cat, which is a figure that we mentioned at the very beginning of the episode. So just to refresh your memory, because you've read the book, David, and also to alert our listeners who have not yet read the book, I presume maybe you have already, which would be amazing. It just came out early September, but they say in their book that if you know anything about curiosity, you know that it killed the cat, and this means that it is dangerous. But they point out that the poet, Alastair Reed, has a pretty different take on this proverb. He suggests that perhaps the cat was curious to know what death is like. So it was actually getting its wish in being killed by curiosity.

David: 49:04

So the cat killed itself through curiosity. As you know, I care a lot about animals and I work on animals, so this is right up my alley. And there is a lot of research about whether or not animals are curious, you know, we know that they of course, explore, they forage, all of that. But to think about a kind of curiosity that runs through the animal kingdom that is motivated by more complex desires, who knows? We can go to a desire for death maybe in the cat, uh, following this poet. But just a kind of interest in the surrounding world in other animals is really fascinating to me. And in fact, there are a number of animal characters that appear in the book, including a squirrel. So in the last chapter of their book, they talk about a story from Anishinaabe culture, and it's a myth about curiosity, where they say there is this kid named Binoojiinh, who goes out into nature and he sees a squirrel that is chomping on the bark of a tree. And the child becomes curious about why this squirrel is eating the bark of the tree and eventually they come to discover that it's because the tree has a certain taste, and so the child learns to extract the sap or the syrup from the tree and then brings that into their community, where then it becomes a staple of nutrition in the culture. And according to Dani and Perry, what we see here is an original curiosity that is non-human. The curiosity of the squirrel that discovers a new substance to eat crossing species boundaries and making its way into human culture. So building on that theme of connection for them, curiosity must be also about other ways of being curious. In this case, the child being curious, not just about the tree, but about why another creature. Was curious about the tree in the first place and that building, that network of knowledge. So I'm, I'm here moving from like the cat to the squirrel, to the child crossing all kinds of evolutionary boundaries.

Ellie: 51:18

Well, and what a wonderful counterpoint to the cross species curiosity that we get in Genesis where I don't even know if the snake is curious, but the snake is trying to elicit Eve's curiosity and you know, not for very good purposes.

David: 51:35

What, I don't know, I'm kind of team snake, uh, when it to Genesis because it is true that God has arbitrarily decided that they ought not have knowledge, and this is actually Erich Fromm's reading, psychoanalytic and Marxist reading of Genesis, that the snake is actually the first revolutionary. Yeah, because it's the first breach of the law that has been handed down by God.

Ellie: 52:02

But what's so wrong with the, you know, chilling in the garden and enjoying the fruits? All of the other trees except for the knowledge of good and evil.

David: 52:12

I know, but doesn't that strike you as an arbitrary law to which you must submit? Only because God gets pleasure in laying down the law?

Ellie: 52:22

Yeah. But I think all authority, all law originates with some level of arbitrariness. I say tentatively.

David: 52:32

No, I think you're right about that. I don't think we can imagine authority without arbitrariness, but that's also what makes the, the snake figure and the curiosity that it insights in Eve so exciting because the first act of revolt is also an attack on that arbitrariness.

Ellie: 52:50

This disagreement, David is getting at such fundamental differences in our personality in the same way that the hunter versus the busy body does, because I think I have a

David: 53:02

God complex who wants to lay down the law?

Ellie: 53:06

No, no, no. More like a Christian obedience that lingers and an interest in convention in a way that you, you do not, and you always have a little bit more of a rebellious streak than I do.

David: 53:21

Well, maybe, and you know, so I wanna think a little bit about that relationship to convention, because this is something that Perry mentioned. In connection to a feminist model of curiosity where there are some traditions that we sometimes submit to out of a sense of duty, but then there are also certain traditions that we can recover precisely as a way of, correcting is too strong of a term, but as a way of mending old injustices, recovering old wisdoms and knowledges that have been marginalized and excluded. In this case, he was referring to feminist networks of knowledge, and it made me think in connection to the discussion about archetypes of curiosity. Whether there is a fourth or a fifth model of curiosity, which we might call maybe the gatherer or the the recoverer or the archivist, the person who goes to the past and is curious about what has been lost in the past as a way of recuperating it, which is slightly different than like what you're talking about in connection to Christianity.

Ellie: 54:27

Yeah. I think the one worry I would have with that is that, just need to make sure that that gathering is not taking us back to the acquisitive model of curiosity that Dani and Perry want us to resist.

David: 54:39

Yeah, no, that's right. I think I see it more as, um, taking something from the past and planting it in the present so that it can take on new life rather than just, you know, storing it in our minds for the sake of saying that we know more now by virtue of our historical research.

Ellie: 54:57

Well with that, David, we should wrap up, although in our Patreon bonus video, which we are about to record, I wanna come back to the question of education with you and think a little bit about Nietzsche and Schopenhauer here.

David: 55:07

Ooh, I'm down for that. We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please rate and review us on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

Ellie: 55:21

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David: 55:26

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Ellie: 55:36

We'd like to thank our audio editor, Aaron Morgan, our production assistant, Clare A'Hearn, and Samuel PK Smith for the original music.

David: 55:43

And to our listeners, thanks so much for overthinking with us.