COMPLEXITY Dani Bassett & Perry Zurn on The Neuroscience & Philosophy of Curious Minds
Homeschooling and Curiosity
- Dani and Perry Bassett were homeschooled with a self-directed learning focus, fostering interdisciplinary thinking.
- Though raised in a conservative area, their curiosity was sometimes restricted, highlighting the tension between free inquiry and social constraints.
Policing Curiosity
- Curiosity is often policed, limiting exploration to pre-approved areas and methodologies.
- This stifles groundbreaking research, as funding often requires predictable outcomes, hindering exploration of the unknown.
Utility of Useless Knowledge
- Predicting knowledge utility is challenging, especially when exploring new directions or taking large leaps.
- Focusing solely on utility can hinder big discoveries that arise from unexpected explorations.
This is a podcast by and for the curious — and yet, in over three years, we have pointed curiosity at nearly every topic but itself. What is it, anyway? Are there worse and better frames for understanding how desire and wonder, exploration and discovery play out in both the brain and in society? How is scientific research like an amble through the woods? What juicy insights bubble up where neuroscientists, historians, philosophers, and mathematicians meet to answer questions like these? And how long of a path must we traverse to get there?
In this episode, we talk with SFI External Professor Dani Bassett, physicist and neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania, and their birth twin Perry Zurn, philosopher at American University in Washington, DC. You might consider each one of two lenses in a stereoscopic inquiry. Their new MIT Press book Curious Minds: The Power of Connection bridges quantity and quality to recast curiosity as a phenomenon of networks — as a kind of “edgework” (generative, drawing new associations) instead of “acquistion” (of individuals collecting facts). The brain, after all, is made of networked neurons, and society’s a kind of super-brain of networked people, so why not think in terms of links? Their research offers a taxonomy of kinds of curiosity — three different ways that people move through knowledge networks. Traveling across a web of related ideas, rupturing and mending, weaving, percolating, synthesizing, we embody and perform the objects of their academic study. We hope you find this lively and self-referential conversation offers you a helpful map as you draw your distinct connectome through the world of what is and what could be known...
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Thank you for listening…
EDITORIAL CORRECTION: We mention a review of Cormac McCarthy's latest novels in this discussion. The correct link is to James Wood’s piece in The New Yorker, not Michael Gorra’s in NYRB.
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Mentioned & Related Links:
Curious Minds: The Power of Connection
by Perry Zurn and Dani Bassett (MIT Press, 2022)
Curiosity as filling, compressing, and reconfiguring knowledge networks
by Shubhankar P. Patankar, Dale Zhou, Christopher W. Lynn, Jason Z. Kim, Mathieu Ouellet, Harang Ju, Perry Zurn, David M. Lydon-Staley, Dani S. Bassett
Murray Gell-Mann on information overload (from A Crude Look At The Whole) [Video]
The Arrival of the Fittest: How Nature Innovates by SFI External Professor Andreas Wagner
Complexity 99: Alison Gopnik on Child Development, Elderhood, Caregiving, and A.I.
Complexity 80: Mingzhen Lu on The Evolution of Root Systems & Biogeochemical Cycling
Busybody, Hunter, Dancer: Three Historical Models of Curiosity
by Perry Zurn
Hunters, busybodies and the knowledge network building associated with deprivation curiosity
by David M. Lydon-Staley, Dale Zhou, Ann Sizemore Blevins, Perry Zurn & Danielle S. Bassett
Complexity 29: On Coronavirus, Crisis, and Creative Opportunity with David Krakauer
The Dimensions of Experience: A Natural History of Consciousness by Andrew P. Smith
Complexity 68: W. Brian Arthur on Economics in Nouns and Verbs (Part 1)
Complexity 90: Caleb Scharf on The Ascent of Information: Life in The Human Dataome
Complexity 94: David Wolpert & Farita Tasnim on The Thermodynamics of Communication
Complexity 35: Scaling Laws & Social Networks in The Time of COVID-19 with Geoffrey West (Part 1)
Complexity 87: Sara Walker on The Physics of Life and Planet-Scale Intelligence
The extent and drivers of gender imbalance in neuroscience reference lists
by Jordan D. Dworkin, Kristin A. Linn, Erin G. Teich, Perry Zurn, Russell T. Shinohara & Danielle S. Bassett
Underflows: Queer Trans Ecologies and River Justice by Cleo Wölfle Hazard
The Sounds of Life by Karen Bakker
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Dirk Brockmann’s interactive explorables
Nicky Case’s interactive explorables
LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models
by Christoph Schuhmann, Romain Beaumont, Richard Vencu, Cade Gordon, Ross Wightman, Mehdi Cherti, Theo Coombes, Aarush Katta, Clayton Mullis, Mitchell Wortsman, Patrick Schramowski, Srivatsa Kundurthy, Katherine Crowson, Ludwig Schmidt, Robert Kaczmarczyk, Jenia Jitsev
Complexity 86: Dmitri Tymoczko on The Shape of Music: Mathematical Order in Western Tonality
Dani & Perry on SFI External Professor Sean Carroll’s MINDSCAPE Podcast