Why? ONE Curious INDEPENDENT OF THEIR LENGTH, SOME stories can leave lasting impressions. "The Story of an Hour," a very short tale by the nineteenth-century author Kate Chopin, opens with a rather startling sentence: "Knowing that Mrs. Mallard was afflicted with a heart trouble, great care was taken to break to her as gently as possible the news of her husband''s death." Loss of life and human frailty all packed into one punchy line. We then learn that it was the husband''s close friend, Richards, who brought the bad news, after having confirmed (by way of a telegram) that Brently Mallard''s name was indeed leading the list of those killed in a railroad disaster. In Chopin''s plot, Mrs. Mallard''s immediate reaction is a natural one. Upon hearing the sad message from her sister Josephine, she starts weeping straightaway, then retires to her room, asking to be left alone.
It is there, however, that something totally unexpected happens. After sitting motionless, sobbing for a while, her gaze apparently fixed on a distant patch of blue sky, Mrs. Mallard starts whispering a surprising word to herself: "Free, free, free!" This is followed by an even more exuberant "Free! Body and soul free!" When she finally opens the door, yielding to Josephine''s worried requests, Mrs. Mallard emerges with "a feverish triumph in her eyes." She starts to calmly descend the steps, clutching to her sister''s waist, while her husband''s friend Richards awaits them at the bottom of the staircase. That''s precisely when someone is heard opening the front door with a latchkey. Chopin''s story contains only eight more lines beyond this point. Could we perhaps stop reading here? Needless to say, even if we wanted to, we probably wouldn''t, certainly not without at least knowing who was at the door.
As the English essayist Charles Lamb wrote, "Not many sounds in life, and I include all urban and all rural sounds, exceed in interest a knock at the door." That is the power of a story that pulls your attention with such force that you don''t even dream of overriding that pull. The person entering the house is indeed, as you might have guessed, Brently Mallard, who, it turns out, had been so far from the scene of the train accident that he didn''t even know it had happened. The vivid description of the emotional roller-coaster ride that the temperamental Mrs. Mallard has had to endure in the span of just one hour turns reading Chopin''s drama into a riveting experience. The last sentence in "The Story of an Hour" is even more unsettling than the first one: "When the doctors came they said she had died of heart disease--of joy that kills." The inner life of Mrs. Mallard remains largely a mystery to us.
Chopin''s greatest gift, in my opinion, is her singular ability to generate curiosity with almost every single line of prose, even in passages describing situations in which apparently nothing happens. This is the type of curiosity that results from chills running up and down your spine, somewhat similar to the sensation you feel when listening to exceptional pieces of music. Those are subtle, intellectual cliffhangers that constitute a necessary device in any compelling storytelling, lesson at school, stimulating artistic oeuvre, video game, advertising campaign, or even simple conversation that delights rather than bores. Chopin''s story inspires what has been dubbed empathic curiosity--the standpoint we adopt when we try to understand the desires, emotional experiences, and thoughts of the protagonist and when her or his actions incessantly bother us with the nagging question Why? Another element that Chopin aptly uses is that of surprise. This is a sure stratagem to kindle curiosity through heightened arousal and attention. New York University neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux and his colleagues managed to trace the pathways within our brain that are responsible for the reaction to surprise or fear. When we encounter the unexpected, the brain assumes that some action may have to be taken. This results in a rapid activation of the sympathetic nervous system, with its familiar, associated manifestations: increased heart rate, perspiration, and deep breathing.
At the same time, attention is diverted from other, irrelevant stimuli and is focused on the key pressing element under consideration. LeDoux was able to show that in surprise, and in particular in fear response, fast and slow pathways are concurrently activated. The fast track proceeds directly from the thalamus, which is responsible for relaying sensory signals, to the amygdala, an almond-shaped cluster of nuclei that assigns affective significance and directs the emotional response. The slow track involves a lengthy detour between the thalamus and the amygdala that passes through the cerebral cortex, the outer layer of neural tissue that plays a key role in memory and thought. This indirect route allows for a more careful, conscious evaluation of the stimulus and for a thoughtful response. Several "types" of curiosity--that itch to find out more--exist. British Canadian psychologist Daniel Berlyne charted curiosity along two main dimensions or axes: one extending between perceptual and epistemic curiosity and the other traversing from specific to diversive curiosity. Perceptual curiosity is engendered by extreme outliers, by novel, ambiguous, or puzzling stimuli, and it motivates visual inspection--think, for example, of the reaction of Asian children in a remote village seeing a Caucasian for the first time.
Perceptual curiosity generally diminishes with continued exposure. Opposite perceptional curiosity in Berlyne''s scheme is epistemic curiosity, which is the veritable desire for knowledge (the "appetite for knowledge" in the words of philosopher Immanuel Kant). That curiosity has been the main driver of all basic scientific research and of philosophical inquiry, and it probably was the force that propelled all the early spiritual quests. The seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes dubbed it "lust of the mind," adding that "by a perseverence of delight in the continual and indefatigable generation of knowledge" it exceeds "the short vehemence of any carnal pleasure" in that indulging in it only leaves you wanting more. Hobbes saw in this "desire to know why" (emphasis added) the characteristic distinguishing humankind from all other living creatures. Indeed, as we shall see in chapter 7, it has been the unique ability to ask "Why?" that has brought our species to where we are today. Epistemic curiosity is the curiosity Einstein alluded to when he told one of his biographers, "I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.
" To Berlyne, specific curiosity reflects the desire for a particular piece of information, as in attempts to solve a crossword puzzle or to remember the name of the movie you saw last week. Specific curiosity can drive investigators into examining distinct problems in order to understand them better and identify potential solutions. Finally, diversive curiosity refers both to the restless desire to explore and to the seeking of novel stimulation to avoid boredom. Today, this type of curiosity might manifest itself in the constant checking for new text messages or emails or in impatience while waiting for a new smartphone model. Sometimes, diversive curiosity can lead to specific curiosity, in that the novelty-seeking behavior may fuel a specific interest. While Berlyne''s distinctions among different types of curiosity have proven to be extremely fruitful in many psychological studies, they should be regarded only as suggestive until a more comprehensive understanding of the mechanisms underlying curiosity emerges. At the same time, a few other types of curiosity have been suggested, such as the empathic curiosity mentioned earlier, which do not neatly fall into Berlyne''s categories. There is, for instance, the morbid curiosity that results in rubbernecking; it invariably impels drivers to slow down and examine accidents on the highway and prompts people to gather en masse around scenes of violent crimes and building fires.
This is the type of curiosity that reputedly generated a huge number of Google hits for the gruesome video showing the beheading of British construction worker Ken Bigley in Iraq in 2004. In addition to the potentially different kinds, there are also varying levels of intensity that one can associate with assorted genres of curiosity. Sometimes just a snippet of information would suffice to satisfy the curiosity, as in some of the cases of specific curiosity: Who was it who said, "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere"? In other instances, curiosity can propel someone into a passionate lifelong journey, as is occasionally the case when epistemic curiosity shepherds scientific inquiry: How did life on Earth emerge and evolve? There are also clear individual differences in curiosity, in terms of the frequency of its occurrence, the intensity level, the amount of time people are prepared to devote to exploration, and in general the openness to and preference for novel experiences. For one person, an old bottle washing ashore on Amrum Island on the German North Sea coast may be just that: a disintegrating symbol of pollution. For another, such a find could trigger an opportunity for a glimpse into an earlier, fascinating world.