Curious Minds

The Power of Connection

By: Perry Zurn, Dani S. Bassett

Narrated by: Daniel Henning

Length: 10 hrs and 18 mins

Publisher's summary

Curious about something? Google it. Look at it. But is curiosity simply information seeking? According to this exhilarating, genre-bending book, what's left out of the conventional understanding of curiosity are the wandering tracks, the weaving concepts, the knitting of ideas, and the thatching of knowledge systems—the networks, the relations between ideas and between people. Curiosity, say Perry Zurn and Dani Bassett, is a practice of connection: it connects ideas into networks of knowledge, and it connects knowers themselves, both to the knowledge they seek and to each other.

Zurn and Bassett—identical twins who write that their book "represents the thought of one mind and two bodies"—harness their respective expertise in the humanities and the sciences to get irrepressibly curious about curiosity. They identify three styles of curiosity—the busybody, who collects stories, creating loose knowledge networks; the hunter, who hunts down secrets or discoveries, creating tight networks; and the dancer, who takes leaps of creative imagination, creating loopy ones. Investigating what happens in a curious brain, they offer an accessible account of the network neuroscience of curiosity. The book performs the very curiosity that it describes, inviting listeners to participate—to be curious with the book and not simply about it.

©2022 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (P)2023 Tantor

Curiosity-Satisfying & Mind-Opening

This is a beautifully written book to intrigue and inform. The authors approach curiosity from different angles and expand the understanding of why and how we are curious from neurologic, physiologic, cultural, behavioral, and emotional perspectives. In places, the contents are deep and require focus and pondering, which I enjoy very much.

I benefit both intellectually and emotionally from its themes of "being open and curious" and "everyone is curious in different ways". I also learned new ways to be curious, identify my intrigue, demonstrate my curiosity, and communicate my interests.

There is a missed opportunity for this book to have a male and a female narrator since it has two authors of different genders. The narration could also be softer at times.

If you are interested in the human mind and am curious in more angles, check out Touch Matters: Handshakes, Hugs, High Fives, and the New Science on How Touch Can Enhance Your Well Being by Michael Banissy (2023); The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life by Joseph Ledoux (2022); Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence by Anna Lembke (2021); and The Four Tendencies: The Indispensable Personality Profiles That Reveal How to Make Your Life Better (and Other People's Lives Better, Too), by Gretchen Rubin (2017).