219 | Dani Bassett and Perry Zurn on the Neuroscience and Philosophy of Curiosity

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

Sean Carroll | Wondery

Society & Culture, Physics, Philosophy, Science, Ideas, Society

4.8 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 28 November 2022

⏱️ 63 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It’s easy enough to proclaim that we are curious creatures, but what does that really mean? What kinds of curiosity are there? And how does curiosity arise in our brains? Perry Zurn and Dani Bassett are a philosopher and neuroscientist, respectively (as well as twins), whose new book Curious Minds: The Power of Connection explores these questions through an interdisciplinary lens. We break down the different ways that curiosity can manifest — collecting and creating loose knowledge networks, digging deeply to create a tight knowledge network, and creatively leaping to make unexpected connections.

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Perry Zurn received a Ph.D. in philosophy from DePaul University. He is currently an Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at American University. He is the co-founder of the Trans Philosophy Project and the associated Thinking Trans // Trans Thinking Conference. Among his previous works is Curiosity and Power: The Politics of Inquiry.

Dani Bassett received a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Cambridge. They are currently the J. Peter Skirkanich Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, with appointments in the Departments of Bioengineering, Electrical & Systems Engineering, Physics & Astronomy, Neurology, and Psychiatry, as well as an external professor of the Santa Fe Institute. Among their awards are the Macarthur Fellowship, the Lagrange Prize in Complex Systems Science (2017), and the Erdos-Renyi Prize in Network Science.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll.
0:04.1	And if you're a regular Mindscape listener, I think that it's not too much of a stretch
0:09.3	for me to guess that you probably would consider yourself a curious person.
0:14.2	Curious about the world, curious about how things work and so on.
0:17.4	And if that's true, you've come to the right episode of Mindscape
0:20.9	because we're going to get meta on the concept of curiosity
0:24.2	by talking about curiosity itself, by being curious, about curiosity.
0:29.1	What it is, how it works, the different kinds of curiosity that motivate us
0:33.9	and the different purposes to which we can put our own curiosity.
0:38.3	We also are doing a little bit of an experiment.
0:40.4	We do this occasionally, we've done it a couple times,
0:42.7	but we're going to have more than one guest today.
0:45.9	Danny Bassett is a physicist, slash engineer, slash neuroscientist, complexity theorist,
0:53.4	if you like, at the University of Pennsylvania.
0:55.9	And Perry Zern is a philosopher at American University
1:00.0	who has previously written about curiosity
1:02.2	in a book called Curiosity and Power, the Politics of Inquiry.
1:06.4	And the punchline is that Perry and Danny are twins.
1:10.5	So they have been talking about this stuff with each other for many, many years now
1:15.6	and they share some of their thoughts with us
1:18.4	from these two different interdisciplinary perspectives.
1:21.9	They have a new book out called Curious Minds, the Power of Connection.
	...

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