Be Curious

The Jakarta Post
Features - 1 April 2007
Published as "Curiosity isn't just about asking questions"

Kayee Man and Dewi Susanti, Contributors, Jakarta

When was the last time you stopped to think about what you saw?

When was the last time you jumped with excitement over something you found amazing or wondered about something you encountered, became curious about it, and discovered something new about it?

Look at children around us. Ever seen a child intently absorbed into observing and tinkering with something? Children have a sense of wonderment and curiosity for the everyday world around them.

If you have been with a child, or have children of your own, you would know that they ask a lot of questions on things you no longer think about.

We are pretty sure that it would be hard to find a sense of excitement, wonder, curiosity and freshness in adults, while most children have these traits.

Even if time were available in abundance, do adults have a sense of childlikeness to ask "why"? Do adults become curious when met with seemingly trivial happenings?

Life is such a mad rush for most of us nowadays that we might feel it's a waste of time to stop and think about something as trivial as, for example, melting chocolate.

Back in the 1940s, Percy LeBaron Spencer observed that his chocolate-and-peanut bar had melted in his pocket after he had walked past a microwave-emitting device called a magnetron (a device to produce microwaves for use in airborne radar).

Intrigued, the story goes that the curious scientist placed popcorn kernels (that popped) and an egg (that exploded) near the magnetron.

What Spencer observed was the heating effect of the microwave beam. A patent was granted to him in 1950 for the microwave oven.

Do curiosity, experimentation and discovery have to be confined within the walls of the laboratory? After returning from a walk, George de Mestral of Switzerland observed cockleburs (a herbaceous plant) sticking to his clothes and his dog one day in 1941.

Intrigued, de Mestral examined the cocklebur under the microscope and observed that the plant had hooks that hooked onto the loops of the fabric and the dog's fur. He eventually invented Velcro (which means `hooked velvet' in French), the ubiquitous fastener, which was granted a patent in 1955.

Both Spencer and de Mestral had a sense of curiosity to follow up on what some of us would have dismissed as everyday happenings.

Adults ask fewer questions

In our view and from our personal experience, the most difficult parts of childhood to hang on to as we grow up are our curiosity and sense of wonder.

A loss of curiosity seems to be a symptom of growing up. John Plomp said: "You know that children are growing up when they start asking questions that have answers."

In Victoria Wagner's words: "A young child is, indeed, a true scientist; just one big question mark: What? Why? How?"

Because there isn't yet a way the world should be, stereotypes do not color the way the world is viewed by children. There are many ways to explain everyday phenomena, there are many queries of the existing state of affairs, there are questions of why things can't be otherwise.

Kayee's friend spent a few months studying the topic of curiosity and uncovered a UCLA study that found "five-year-old children ask 65 questions a day, whereas a 44-year-old adult asks six".

Rodney Hill also cited research on this topic: "A child asks 105 probing questions a day. The average adult asks a mere six."

No matter what the numbers are, we think the general message is clear. We could blame the accumulation of knowledge and understanding of the world on the declining rate of adults asking questions and being curious. Is it really because we know everything already? Hardly.

Kayee's dad, although not a rocket scientist, is one of the most curious adults she knows. Kayee can never walk down the street or the aisle of a mall with him on a straight path, because anything that her dad hasn't seen before will attract him like food scraps attract ants.

He makes his way over to the object of curiosity and stays there until he has something to take away with him -- mostly the satisfaction of knowing.

Kayee is grateful for her dad's curiosity, because he also happens to be a very good cook. How does this relate to curiosity?

When asked what he would like to order when dining out, Kayee's dad would answer, "This -- never tried this before."

His insatiable curiosity, even when dining out, has resulted in the creation of new recipes at home. Kayee can't think of a better benefit for someone's curiosity.

Curiosity isn't just about asking questions. We can set ourselves a quota of questions that are asked every day. "A question a day keeps the brain ticking away" is how we see it. However, the real skill in being curious comes not in the posing of questions but in seeking the answers.

Think back to the last time you heard a question asked by someone else (or even yourself). Did you immediately give an answer to the question? Or did you say "I don't know."

If you didn't know the answer, your motivation to find the answer may have led to you an answer and widened your pool of knowledge. The real challenge in being a curious being is in remaining open to an answer that may surprise us even if we think we know the answer already.

Going beyond the obvious

After living in Jakarta for several years, Dewi still finds the city difficult to grasp. Being trained in architecture in the West, she probably has this preconception about how a city should be understood and navigated.

But this does not seem to apply in Jakarta. Curious, she started to study the city and how people move around it. She found that Jakarta has layers of organizing systems that make the city disjointed.

We could also think of these typical work situations: Why is she not performing? (Answer: She's lazy and incapable).

Why are sales decreasing? (The distributors can't get the goods to the stores in time).

Why hasn't work behavior changed after so much investment in training? (The training was ineffective).

If we stopped ourselves from giving the obvious answers, we may have discovered that performance in a colleague has declined because she is getting conflicting instructions from different departments, sales are decreasing because production isn't matching demand and that training didn't lead to the desired change in work behavior because leadership isn't supporting the desired change.

Deferring judgment is very much part of the art of being curious. Curiosity isn't just about asking questions.

Recently, our curiosity led us to research the effects of creative thinking training on university students. We remained open to the answers down to the last minute of analysis. Our findings: our training had both positive and negative effects.

Apparently, even creativity training can be conforming if not taught and learned mindfully in the Indonesian context. If we had not remained open to the possibility of being surprised by the results, we would not have gained as much insight as we would have.

Being curious keeps our minds active. Being curious creates opportunities for us to learn and discover beyond the obvious.

Get yourself into the habit of asking a question a day, resist answering the question immediately, and go about finding an answer with an open mind.

A young curious mind once asked "Why are car tires black?" They are black so the dirt from the roads will not show up. Wrong. Carbon black is the compound that gives tires their color. It is added to the rubber of the tires to give the tires durability and agility.

The young curious mind's next question was "How can car tires be made colorful while maintaining their durability and agility?"

Curiosity can work like a twister -- it starts small and whips up more and more questions and answers and is difficult to stop.

We can look to the child for a model of being curious. They are not confined by their knowledge (or lack of it), they have not accumulated a mass of stereotypes and the way things should be. The beauty of this model is that we can be sure that we can get there, because we have all been there before.

There's a saying that curiosity killed the cat. We would argue that a lack of curiosity kills our capacity to grow.