How a Curious Mind can Improve Your Learning

Alyssa Sinclair, Ph.D. ’23, a postdoctoral researcher working in the lab of Alison Adcock, Ph.D., M.D., director of the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences, recruited 420 individuals to pretend to be art thieves for a day. After then, the individuals were randomly allocated to one of two groups and given distinct backstories (1^✔ ✔Trusted Source
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“For the urgent group, we told them, ‘You’re a master thief, you’re doing the heist right now. Steal as much as you can!’,” Sinclair said. “Whereas for the curious group, we told them they were a thief who’s scouting the museum to plan a future heist.”

Despite having distinct backstories, participants in both groups played the same computer game and scored the same manner. They walked through an art gallery with four colored doors symbolizing different rooms, and clicked on one of the doors to display an artwork from that area and its worth. Some chambers housed more valuable art collections. Everyone received actual additional money by discovering more valuable paintings, regardless of whatever scenario they pretended to be in.

The impact of this shift in mentality was most noticeable the next day. When participants returned to the site, they were greeted with a pop quiz asking if they could identify 175 distinct artworks (100 from the day before and 75 new ones). If a participant recognized an artwork, they had to remember how much it was worth.

Sinclair and her co-author, fellow Duke psychology & neuroscience graduate student Candice Yuxi Wang, were pleased to learn that their predictions had come true after grading the exams.

“The curious group participants who imagined planning a heist had better memories the next day,” Sinclair said. “They correctly recognized more paintings. They remembered how much each painting was worth. And reward boosted memory, so valuable paintings were more likely to be remembered. But we didn’t see that in the urgent group of participants who imagined executing the heist.”

Participants in the urgent group, on the other hand, had a distinct edge. They were better at determining which doors concealed more valuable items, and as a result, they snatched more high-value paintings. Their haul was valued at around $230 more than the inquisitive participants’.

However, the difference in techniques (curious versus urgent) and their effects (greater memory versus higher-valued paintings) does not imply that one is superior to the other.

“It’s valuable to learn which mode is adaptive in a given moment and use it strategically,” Dr. Adcock said.

Short-Terms Problems Require Urgent High-Pressure Mindsets

For example, for a short-term situation, being in an urgent, high-pressure mode may be the best option.

“If you’re on a hike and there’s a bear, you don’t want to be thinking about long-term planning,” Sinclair said. “You need to focus on getting out of there right now.”

Opting for an urgent mindset might also be useful in less grisly scenarios that require short-term focus, Sinclair explained, like prompting people to get a COVID vaccine.

Curiosity Mindset Might be the Way to Go for Long-Terms Plans of Action

Stressing individuals out is less effective at boosting long-term memory or behavior.

“Sometimes you want to motivate people to seek information and remember it in the future, which might have longer term consequences for lifestyle changes,” Sinclair said. “Maybe for that, you need to put them in a curious mode so that they can actually retain that information.”

Sinclair and Wang are currently investigating how urgency and curiosity stimulate various areas of the brain. Early data shows that “urgent mode” aids in the formation of concentrated, efficient memories by stimulating the amygdala. The amygdala is an almond-shaped brain area, well recognized for its role in fear memory. Curious investigation, on the other hand, appears to transport the learning-enhancing neurochemical dopamine to the hippocampus. It is the brain area critical for establishing detailed long-term memories.

With these brain findings in mind, Dr. Adcock is investigating how her lab’s study may assist patients she encounters as a psychiatrist.

“Most of adult psychotherapy is about how we encourage flexibility, like with curious mode,” Dr. Adcock said. “But it’s much harder for people to do since we spend a lot of our adult lives in the urgency mode.”

These thought exercises may give people the ability to manipulate their own neurochemical spigots and develop “psychological maneuvers,” or cues that act similar to pharmaceuticals, Dr. Adcock explained.

“For me, the ultimate goal would be to teach people to do this for themselves,” Dr. Adcock said. “That’s empowering.”

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