curisoty wowo

1. C u r io s it y
CLDM
Summer 2012
“I have no special talents, I am only passionately curious…” – Einstein (1952)
Source: Jaworski & Peter 1

2. Agenda
1. What causes curiosity or interest?
2. How is curiosity different than interest or openness to experience?
3. What are the positive (negative) consequences?
4. Is curiosity “field specific” (e.g., humanities scholar vs. high tech exec)?
5. Is it possible to be both curious and “execution focused”?
6. Does society have “thinkers” and “doers” – or can they coexist?
Source: Jaworski & Peter 2

3. Question:
So, what is curiosity?
Source: Jaworski & Peter 3

4. Definitions for Curiosity:
• “William James differentiated between two types of curiosity. The first
entailed an emotional blend of excitement and anxiety with respect to
exploring and enjoying novelty.” The second was scientific curiosity or
metaphysical wonder, evoked by “an inconsistency or a gap in…
knowledge” - (Seligman and Peterson, p. 127)
• “…Individuals with a strong endowment of curiosity proffer a specific
advantage in life because attention is more fluid and novel ideas, objects
and relationships can be found, enjoyed, explored and integrated into an
expanding self. In principle, these aspects of curiosity aid survival – for
example, finding plants with medicinal properties, increasing social
resources, discovering new habitats…”
– (see Seligman and Peterson, 127).
•The cognitive process theory posits that curiosity is a function of
assimilating and accommodating novel stimuli into one’s schematic
framework of the self and the world. (Beswick, 1971)
Source: Jaworski & Peter 4

5. Hierarchy Of Curiosity:
Comments:
•A psychological predisposition
Openness To Experience
•Goal-directed behavior, with Specific Curiosity:
positive emotional core… Curiosity increase one’s
knowledge; evoked by
•Diverse: novelty seeking, emotional blend gap in knowledge
of excitement and novelty
Diverse Curiosity Specific Curiosity
•Drivers:
+ + + + +
Openness to Future Enjoy problem-
Courage Sociability new ideas Orientation solving
Source: Jaworski & Peter 5

6. Curiosity & Creativity:
Creativity strongly linked to “self-actualization” – Maslow’s Definition
•Efficient perception of reality
•Appreciation of the beautiful and sublime
•Autonomy & independence
•Acceptance of self, others and nature
•Identification and sympathy with humanity
•Focus on impersonal issues
•Democratic character, freedom from prejudice
•Mystic experiences . . .
Source: Jaworski & Peter 6

7. Curiosity: Core Components
1. Exploratory
2. Awareness of the new
3. Sensitivity to gaps in understanding and knowledge of the self and the
world
8. Greater allocation of attention and energy to recognizing and pursuing cues
of novelty and challenge
10. Cognitive evaluation and behavioral exploration of challenging activities
12. Flow like states of absorption in these activities
14. Integration of experiences to broaden personal or interpersonal capital
Source: Jaworski & Peter 7

8. 3 Dimensional Perspective On Curiosity:
2. Flow, Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, (Mind-state motivating many individuals
Pursuing a curious challenge)
2. The Spirit of the Beehive, Victor Erice: 1973 (curious explorations of innocence)
7. The Emperor of All Maladies: Siddhartha Mukherjee, (history of a malady;
cancer a curiosity occupying the minds of scores of physicians, surgeons, healers,
chemists, pharmacists … etc.)
Source: Jaworski & Peter 8

9. Question:
So, what is flow? How is it linked to curiosity? Is it?
Source: Jaworski & Peter 9

10. Curiosity – The Psychology Dimension
Flow, Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi,
(Mind-state motivating many individuals pursuing a curious challenge)
Source: Jaworski & Peter 10

11. Flow: Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi
The Psychology Of Optimal Experience:
How does it feel to be in Flow?
4. Goals are clear
2. Feedback is immediate
8. Balance Between Opportunity and Capacity:
“flow occurs when both challenges and
skills are high and equal to each other...”
4. Concentration Deepens
14. The Present Matters
16. Control is no problem
18. Sense of time is altered
8. Loss of ego
Source: Csikzentmihalyi 11

12. Flow States And Curiosity:
“...the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the
experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the
sheer sake of doing it.” – Csikszentmihalyi, p. 4
“Flow will examine the process of achieving happiness through control over one’s inner life...”
– Csikzentmihalyi, p. 6
“..direct control of experience, the ability to derive moment-by-moment enjoyment
from everything we do, can overcome the obstacles to fulfillment...” – Csikszentmihalyi, p. 8
“...the mark of a person who is in control of consciousness is the ability to focus attention at will,
to be oblivious to distractions, to concentrate for as long as it takes to achieve a goal, and not
longer. And the person who can do this usually enjoys the normal course of everyday life.”
– Csikszentmihalyi, p. 31
Source: Jaworski & Peter 12

13. Enjoyment – Ancillary Factor Powering Curiosity:
Csikszentmihalyi On Factors That Qualify As Descriptive Of Enjoyment (Essential For
“Flow”)
3. the task must be one we have a chance of completing
5. concentrate on what we are doing
7. task has goals
9. task gives us feedback
11. absorption that removes awareness of the worries and frustrations of everyday life
13. exercise a sense of control
15.concern of self disappears, and the sense of self emerges stronger after flow
experience is over
8. duration of time is altered
Source: Jaworski & Peter 13

14. Active Pursuit of Flow-States: Is It The Challenge?
“…What drove me?...It’s about trying to express something in the only way that most of us know how –
because we don’t write Bob Dylan songs or Tom Stoppard plays. We try to use the talents we do have
to express our deep feelings, to show our appreciation of all the contributions that came before us,
and to add something to that flow. That’s what has driven me.” – Steve Jobs, p. 570
“…personal growth facilitation model of curiosity posits that recognizing and pursuing novelty, uncertainty
and challenge is the foundation for enhancing personal and interpersonal capital…”
-(Kashdan, Rose & Fincham: 2002)
Flow States Could Be About Work That Maybe Perceived As BORING NOT NOVEL!
Csikszentmihalyi’s story of person who made “Lox Sandwiches” at a Manhattan Deli:
“... one might have expected him to have found his task boring, but he discussed it with the
enthusiasm of a poet or a surgeon. He described how every fish he picked up was different
from its predecessor. He would hold the fish by its tail and slap it against the marble counter;
looking at it and feeling it ripple until he developed a 3 dimensional mental X ray of its
anatomy. Then he would pick up one of his five knives – which he sharpened to perfection
several times a day – and go about the business of slicing the fish as finely as possible with
the fewest moves, discarding the least amount of good meat. “ – p. 102
Source: Jaworski & Peter 14

15. Question:
How does curiosity relate to the Spirit of the Beehive?
In particular is Ana “curious?” Can curiosity lead to positive and
negative outcomes?
Source: Jaworski & Peter 15

16. Curiosity – The Film Dimension
The Spirit of the Beehive, Victor Erice: (curious explorations of innocence)
Source: Jaworski & Peter 16

17. The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), Dir. Victor Erice
Synopsis: “Six-year-old Ana is a shy girl who lives in the manor house in an isolated Spanish village on the Castille
Plateau with her parents Fernando and Teresa and her older sister, Isabel. The year is 1940, and the civil war has just
ended with the Franco’s victory over the Republic. Her aging father spends most of his time absorbed in tending to and
writing about his beehives; her much younger mother is caught up in daydreams about a distant lover, to whom she
writes letters. The entire family is never seen together in a single shot. Ana's closest companion is Isabel, who loves
her but cannot resist playing on her little sister's gullibility…”
Curiosity Sequence; Experiencing the eerie “Frankenstein” Film:
At the beginning of the film, a mobile cinema brings Frankenstein to the village and the two sisters go to see it. Ana finds the film more
interesting than frightening, particularly the scene where the monster plays benignly with a little girl, then accidentally kills her. She asks her
sister, "Why did he kill the girl, and why did they kill him after that?" Isabel tells her that the monster didn't kill the girl and isn't really dead; she
says that everything in films is fake. Isabel says the monster is like a spirit, and Ana can talk to him if she closes her eyes and calls him: "It's me,
Ana".
Ana's fascination with the story increases when Isabel takes her to a desolate abandoned sheepfold, which she claims is the monster's house.
Ana returns alone many times to look for him but finds only a large footprint. One day, Isabel screams from a distant part of the house, and when
Ana comes to investigate, she lies perfectly still on the floor, pretending to be dead. That night, Ana sneaks out and while looking at the night
sky, closes her eyes. In the next scene, a fugitive republican soldier leaps from a passing train and limps to the sheepfold to hide.
Ana finds the soldier hiding in the sheepfold. Instead of running away in terror, she feeds him and even brings him her father's coat and watch.
This odd, wordless friendship ends abruptly when Franco’s police come in the night, find the republican soldier and shoot him. The police soon
connect Ana's father with the fugitive and assume he stole the items from him. The father discovers which of the daughters had helped the
fugitive by noticing Ana's reaction when he produces the pocket watch she had given to him. When Ana next goes to visit him, she finds him
gone and fresh blood on the ground. Her father confronts her as she gazes at the blood, and she runs away.
Source: Jaworski & Peter 17

18. The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), Dir. Victor Erice
Sequence:
Ana is mesmerized watching Frankenstein with Maria (innocently arranging daisies)…she
asks Isabel to explain the meaning of the film, how “real” is Frankenstein and how may she
speak with him or approach him…
Ana’s father in the meantime views the honeycomb and the frenetic activity of the worker
bees and their queen, as metaphoric or allegory… to deepen his philosophical
contemplation on “futility”, “work”, “death” and the beauty of the trap; the “honeycomb”…
Note: Play sequence 16:00 to 24:15 (in film version) or 1:42 to 9:57 in youtube (Spirit of
the Beehive, 2/7)
Source: Jaworski & Peter 18

19. Question:
How did curiosity play a role in the Accidental Empires?
Source: Jaworski & Peter 19

20. Question:
Was Farber curious? What other character traits would you use to
describe him?
Were the scientists imaginative, curious, hard-working, tenacious in
the face of criticism – all of the above?
Source: Jaworski & Peter 20

21. Curiosity – The History Dimension
6. The Emperor of All Maladies: Siddhartha Mukherjee, (history of a malady;
cancer a curiosity occupying the minds of scores of physicians, surgeons,
healers, chemists, pharmacists … etc. for the lifetime of humanity…)
Source: Jaworski & Peter 21

22. Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies
Geographic and Historic Antecedents of Humanity’s Encounter with Cancer”
(Egyptian) Imhotep: 17th C. BC Herodotus, Greece, 440 BC:
“….it is under these clarifying headlamps of an Histories written around 440 BC, the Greek historian
ancient surgeon that cancer first emerges as a Herodotus records the story of Atossa, the queen of
distinct disease. Describing case forty-five Imhotep Persia, who was suddenly struck by an unusual
advises…”This is a case of bulging masses I have to illness….In the middle of her reign, Atossa noticed a
contend with… large, spreading and hard; touching bleeding lump in her breast… she descended into a fierce
them is like touching a ball of wrappings, or they may and impenetrable loneliness. She wrapped herself in
be compared to the unripe hemat fruit, which is hard sheets, in a self-imposed quarantine. …Darius doctors
and cool to the touch.” – p. 40 may have tried to treat her, but to no avail. Ultimately a
Greek slave named Democedes persuaded her to allow
him to excise the tumor.
Louis Leakey:
Louis Leakey discovered a jawbone dating from 2
million years ago from a nearby site that carried the
Paleo-Pathologist, Aufderheide:
signs of a peculiar form of lymphoma found
endemically in southeastern Africa … If that finding 1000 year old gravesite in a remote, sand swept plain in the southern tip
does represent an ancient mark of malignancy, then of Peru: At the Chiribiya site, Aufderheide a paleopathologist from the
cancer, “…far from being a modern disease, is one of Univ. of Minnesota in Duluth…
the oldest diseases ever seen in a human specimen – “the mummy was of a young woman in her midthirties, found sitting, with
quite possibly the oldest…” – p. 43 her feet curled up, in a shallow clay grave. When Aufderheide examined
her, his fingers found a hard “bulbous mass” in her left upper arm. The
papery folds of skin, remarkable preserved, gave way to that mass, which
was intact and studded with spicules of bone. This, without question, was
a malignant bone tumor, an osteosarcoma.” – p. 43
Source: Jaworski & Peter 22

23. Multiple Pathways Necessary to Defeat or Restrain
Such an Insidious “Enemy”:
• Robert Weinberg’s epiphany in the midst of a
Lasker: fairy godmother of Openness To Experience blizzard: isolating the “oncogene” (p. 372)
medical research… • Weinberg and Hanahan – “hallmarks of
“…The Laskers were professional socialities, in cancer” – p. 391
the same way that one can be a professional 4. Self-sufficiency – cancer cells acquire an
scientist or a professional athlete; they were autonomous drive to proliferate…pathological
mitosis… activation of oncogenes – ras or myc
extraordinary networkers, lobbyists, minglers, 5. Insensitivity to growth-inhibitory signals:
conversers, persuaders, letter writers, cocktail
party-throwers, negotiators, name-droppers, Curiosity 6.
7.
Evasion of programmed cell death (apoptosis)
Limitless replicative potential
deal makers. Fund-raising – and, more 8. Sustained angiogenesis- drawing out their own
important, friend-raising – was instilled in their supply of blood and blood vessels
9. Tissue invasion and metastasis – colonizing
blood, and the depth and breadth of their social other organs…
connections allowed them to reach deeply into
the minds – and pockets – of private donors • Thad Dryja(ophthalmologist-turned-
and of the government.” – p. 111 geneticist) finding a piece of DNA missing in
tumor cells: (p. 379)
Diverse Curiosity Specific Curiosity
+ + + + +
Openness to Future Enjoy problem-
Sociability new ideas Orientation solving
Courage
Source: Jaworski & Peter 23

24. Softer Roads Of Understanding & Orientation…for The
Oncologist
Openness To Experience
Siddharth Mukherjee on coming back from “the strange land”:
“…To me, these were miracles enough. It is an old complaint about the practice of medicine that it inures you to the idea of
death. But when medicine inures you to the idea of life, to survival, then it has failed utterly. The novelist Thomas Wolfe,
recalling a lifelong struggle with illness, wrote in his last letter, “I’ve made a long voyage and been to a strange country, and
I’ve seen the dark man very close.”…But surely, it was the most sublime moment of my clinical life to have watched that
voyage in reverse, to encounter men and women returning from the strange country – to see them so very close,
clambering back…” – p. 400
Doctor’s Skill in assisting the patient to “reconcile with death” and hope for miraculous
“remission”: Susan Sontag’s experience with the “unfeeling” doctor versus the “good” doctor…
“…There was no hope, he told her flatly. And not just that; there was nothing to do but wait for cancer to explode out of the
bone marrow. All options were closed, His word – the Word – was final, immutable, static. “Like so many doctors,” Rief
recalls, “ he spoke to us as if we were children but without the care that a sensible adult takes in choosing what words to
use with a child.” – p. 306
“…for a woman who wanted to live twice as energetically, to breathe the world in twice as fast as anyone else – for whom
stillness was mortality. It took months before Sontag found another doctor whose attitude was vastly more measured and
who was willing to negotiate with her psyche. Dr. A. was right, of course, in the formal, statistical sense. A moody, saturnine
leukemia eventually volcanoed out of Sontag’s marrow, and, yes, there were few medical options But Susan Sontag’s new
physician also told her precisely the same information, without ever choking off the possibility of a miraculous remission. He
moved her in succession from standard drugs to experimental drugs to palliative drugs. It was all masterfully done, a graded
movement toward reconciliation with death, but a movement nonetheless – statistics without stasis.” – p. 307
Source: Jaworski & Peter 24

25. Question:
What causes curiosity or interest?
Source: Jaworski & Peter 25

26. Question:
How is curiosity different than interest or openness to experience?
Source: Jaworski & Peter 26

27. Question:
What are the positive (negative) consequences?
Source: Jaworski & Peter 27

28. Question:
Is curiosity “field specific” (e.g. humanities scholar vs. high tech exec)?
Source: Jaworski & Peter 28

29. Question:
Is it possible to be both curious and “execution focused”?
Source: Jaworski & Peter 29

30. Question:
Does society have “thinkers” and “doers” – can they co-exist?
Source: Jaworski & Peter 30

31. Journal Questions
What does curiosity mean for you?
….
1. Is curiosity a necessary “core value” to be successful in
organizations or ministry?
•How will you nurture your curiosity?
•What is an example of curiosity in the Bible or the History of
Christianity? Explain how this was used by God.
•How might God use your curiosity?
Source: Jaworski & Peter 31