Two cats are enjoying one another’s company as they walk down the street dressed in their Sunday finest. They pull alongside a store. One of the cats turns to his friend and says, “you know we absolutely HAVE to go in there!”
As I read the words in the speech bubble I cast my eyes up to the top of the frame of the cartoon to see the name of the store outside which the cats were standing. It was called, ‘The Closed Door.’
I saw this cartoon last week. My mind naturally went to the two cats my wife and I adopted. I guess we used the Delirium Tremens method of determining the correct size for our domestic cat population. The Law of Delirium Tremens states, quite simply, that ‘one is nowhere near enough, but three is far too many.’ Our cats are insanely curious, and I think they have a thing or two to teach us about the value of curiosity.
Recency bias is behind us suddenly seeing red minis everywhere as soon as we buy our own red mini. My red mini is curiosity. I think curiosity might just be a bit of a panacea.
Curiosity Can Help Break Bad Habits
When I listened to Judson Brewer’s TED Talk – A Simple Way to Break a Bad Habit – his 10 minute presentation covered behavior, mindfulness, and of course habits, but what I latched onto was curiosity.
He explains how habits are developed through a reward based learning process, positive and negative reinforcement – Trigger > Behavior > Reward: we feel hungry, see and then eat food, and then we feel good. Repetition of this process creates the habit.
If this were where it ended, if hunger were our only trigger, we might be ok, but our brains are sometimes too smart for their own good. They realize eating food can lead to feeling good, and figure eating could be a solution when we feel bad. The three part mechanism now becomes: we feel bad > we eat food > we feel good. Now we have two triggers for which the behavioral response is, ‘eat food.’
Judson Brewer has researched mindfulness to help break bad habits such as overeating or smoking. When he refers to mindfulness he encourages curiosity. Smoking mindfully means exploring the feelings, the smells, the tastes… When one of the participants tasted mindfully she found (to quote Judson Brewer), “smoking tastes like shit.”
A person can ‘know’ smoking is bad and yet feel compelled to continue anyway. When a person smokes mindfully it’s as if a different set of eyes are opened, and they experience true knowing. Curiosity is the key.
In one of the studies feature in the TED Talk, mindfulness was found to be twice as effective as conventional means in helping people quit smoking. I may have been guilty of recency bias in seeing ‘curiosity’ writ large and in neon when I watched this video, and maybe Judson Brewer is guilty of confirmation bias when he sees the results of one study supporting his hypothesis, but aren’t you curious to find out more?
Curiosity Helps You Complete Ironman Triathlons
I hadn’t realized I was practicing mindfulness in the way Judson Brewer describes when I was in the middle of the Wisconsin Ironman in 2016. With a 2.4-mile (3.86 km) swim, a 112-mile (180.25 km) bike ride, and a marathon run to finish, you have an awful lot of time in your own head. There are many dark places to explore during the the maximum of 17 hours you have to complete the course.
Anyone crazy enough to train for an endurance sport soon understands that using the term pain to describe any kind of unpleasantness is too one dimensional. Most of the time we are experiencing discomfort. It can even be an extreme discomfort, and you may even wish it were pain, but pain it is not.
If you’re in pain you are doing physical damage to your body; you have to stop. But if you are experiencing the kind of intense discomfort that makes you want to smack the nearest person in the face with a wet halibut, then that is simply your brain looking for an escape route.
Our bodies are stronger than our minds often think, but it’s acutely important to develop our radar’s sensitivity sufficiently to know the difference between pain and discomfort.
During my bike and run in Madison, Wisconsin I lost that sensitivity. Curiosity allowed me to rediscover it. When I observed something that felt like pain, I would get curious about it. What does it feel like? Is it sharp or dull, bright or dim? If the pain were a color, what color would it be? If that pain had children what would be the name of its eldest offspring, and what would the first born look like? (Like I said, I had a lot of time in my own company.)
I would immerse myself in the story of this pain in an effort to truly know it. When I looked up from the story I noted the pain had gone away. It was as if knowing it, truly knowing it, caused it to disappear. Through that knowledge my eyes were opened and I was able to see the pain for what it was, and for what it wasn’t; it WASN’T pain.
Curiosity Makes Us Smarter
On many a weekend I chat with a male friend over a Covid-induced Zoom call; Zoom has taken the place of our favorite Friday evening bar. After a couple of hours I’ll end the call and my wife will ask a few questions about the conversation I had with Mike.
I will usually say something like, “oh he’s well, and says hello.” But then my wife will ask a few perfectly valid and compassionate questions about events in Mike’s life, and I will feel like a fool because I have no answers. I wonder how on earth we filled those two hours when I didn’t ask any of these obvious questions. Did I spend 120 minutes doing nothing more than emitting Neanderthal grunts?
My wife isn’t trying to make me feel foolish – I should know the answers to these questions. My wife is smart when it comes to people, because she cares, because she is curious.
I’m more curious about how Hannibal won the Battle of Cannae, or why you get a small dome when you pour just a tiny bit too much water into a glass, or which movie Jack Nicholson said, “you make me want to be a better man.” My wife is people smart, and I am ‘useless-information’ smart.
I’ve been curious for as long as I can remember. It’s only recently that I’ve put a name to what I’ve been experiencing. At various points I’ve referred to it as wanderlust, eclectic taste, and a voyage of self-discovery.
Now I’m finding myself curious about my curiosity. If I see a closed door I don’t feel compelled to go inside, so it doesn’t seem to be a feline curiosity. But when and how does my curiosity manifest? How does it make me feel? If my curiosity had a child, what color would that first born smell like? (I still spend a lot of time in my own head.)
