An op-ed about curiosity published in the New York Times yesterday will resonate with many philosophers.

Angela Palmer, Self-Portrait (scans engraved on glass)

Written by Anne-Laure Le Cunff, a neuroscientist at King’s College London, it uses the example of AI-generated answers to internet search queries as a launch point to discuss how we learn in the time between when we form a question and find an answer to it.

Google’s AI answers are fast, even if they are often wanting in quality. But suppose its answers were better. Le Cunff asks, “Could there be anything wrong with getting a reliable answer more quickly?” She answers: “There is. By shortening the time between asking a question and getting an answer, these tools are actually undermining curiosity—and paradoxically threatening our ability to understand the world.”

She writes: “Our technology is increasingly treating the territory between the query and the answer as dead space to be eliminated, when that territory is where most of the learning actually happens.”

Researchers have found that people in a state of curiosity, while waiting for an answer to an intriguing question, remember unrelated information they encounter during that time far better than they otherwise would. In that same study, the researchers also placed those people in brain scanners. They found that waiting for an answer activates reward circuits in the brain and readies the hippocampus to help form new memories. Similar findings have been reported by other researchers in studies involving infants, older children and adults.

In short, curiosity puts the entire brain into a mode of heightened receptivity—not just for the specific thing you want to know, but also for everything around it. Curiosity opens a window, and while the window is open, learning deepens across the board.

But the window stays open only as long as the question remains unanswered…

Scientific breakthroughs, artistic leaps, technological innovation—these rarely emerge from efficient retrieval of known information. They emerge from periods of undirected exploration, when people follow questions further than they need to and find things they weren’t expecting. 

There is, of course, an academic discipline that focuses on what could be described as “the territory between the query and the answer”: philosophy. Its specialty may indeed be in lengthening, rather than shortening, “the time between asking a question and getting an answer”. In part this is because we take a lot of time to work on and refine the questions, in addition to examining and reexamining what may seem to others to be a bewildering array of possible answers to them, to a bewildering degree of detail.

Curiosity is one of the virtues of philosophers. Could its development and exercise be one of the benefits of studying philosophy? Philosophers will no doubt think so, based on their own experiences and their observations of students. But it would be interesting to supplement anecdotal evidence with something more systematic. How would neurological studies similar to ones Le Cunff cites in support of curiosity describe the effects of philosophical inquiry?

Just for fun I put that question to Google to see what its AI answer would be:

Neurological studies similar to those cited by neuroscientist Anne-Laure Le Cunff would describe philosophical inquiry as a mechanism that engages the brain’s reward networks, promotes neuroplasticity, and reframes cognitive uncertainty. It shifts the brain into an exploratory state that optimizes learning and memory retention. 

Case closed—except that, despite its brief elaboration and links to sources, as far as I can tell none of the 24 mentioned sources discusses any neuroscientific study of the brains of people engaged in philosophical inquiry. Have there been such studies? If not, can we convince some people to conduct some?

Related: “How to Show that Studying Philosophy Improves Thinking Skills“