Curiosity might be one of the most powerful things a healthy brain can do — and yet most of us were quietly taught to stop doing it.

In this episode, we're exploring the neuroscience of curiosity: why it's one of the newest and most openly uncertain frontiers in brain research, what happens in your reward, memory, and executive control systems when you follow a thread of wonder, and why your brain's own motivational kill switch may depend on it more than we ever realized. We're also looking at what our school systems, our workplaces, and our culture have done to curiosity along the way — and what it might mean that we're only just beginning to understand how much we need it.

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RESOURCES

• Systems Neuroscience of Curiosity — Roberto Lopez Cervera, Maya Zhe Wang & Benjamin Y. Hayden
• On Curiosity: A Fundamental Aspect of Personality, a Practice of Network Growth — Perry Zurn & Danielle S. Basset
• Interest Development and Its Relation to Curiosity: Needed Neuroscientific Research — Suzanne E. Hidi & K. Ann Renninger
• Exploring Curiosity in Neuroscience: A Contextual Analysis of Key Studies from 2020 to 2024 — Dragoș Grigorescu
• A Shared Novelty-Seeking Basis for Creativity and Curiosity — Tal Ivancovsky, Shira Barorc & Moshe Bara
• Curiosity as the Impulse to Know: Common Behavioral and Neural Mechanisms Underlying Curiosity and Impulsivity — Caroline B. Marvin, Ellen Tedeschi & Daphna Shohamy
• The Psychology and Neuroscience of Curiosity — Celeste Kidd & Benjamin Y. Hayden
• Curiosity-Driven Exploration: Foundations in Neuroscience and Computational Modeling — Alireza Modirshanechi, Kacper Kondrakiewicz, Wulfram Gerstner & Sebastian Haesler
• Curiosity in Childhood and Adolescence — What Can We Learn from the Brain — Matthias J. Gruber & Yana Fandakova