Choose to be Curious Ep. #279: Kinesthetic Curiosity: Our Styles of Moving Among Information & Ideas, with Dale Zhou
May 15, 2025
Dale Zhou, a postdoctoral scholar at UC Irvine, specializes in understanding how our brains process and connect information. In this discussion, he introduces a unique kinesthetic framework for curiosity, categorizing styles into busybody, hunter, and dancer. Zhou explores the interplay between art and science, and how curiosity shapes decision-making. He also dives into browsing behaviors on Wikipedia, addressing privacy issues and algorithms' influence on knowledge access. The conversation concludes with creative analogies that illustrate the unpredictable nature of curiosity.
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Three Styles of Curiosity
- Curiosity manifests as unique patterns in how individuals move through information spaces.
- These patterns are defined as busybody, hunter, and dancer styles of curiosity.
Curiosity as Search Process
- Curiosity functions as a search process without a known goal, exploring information space optimally for novelty.
- This search is more complex and unpredictable than structured curiosity seen in schools.
Mapping Curiosity via Knowledge Networks
- Knowledge networks map how people connect ideas as threads between visited Wikipedia pages.
- Patterns in these networks reflect different curiosity styles like hunters' tight or busybodies' loose connections.