How curiosity helps you learn: what happens in your brain

It’s 1am. You picked up your phone to check the weather and now you’re five tabs deep into why octopuses have three hearts. Nobody will ever test you on it. You’ll probably remember it for years anyway.

Meanwhile, the training module you sat through at work last month has completely evaporated. Same brain, very different results. The difference is curiosity, and researchers have spent years working out what it actually does inside your head. The short version: curiosity doesn’t just make learning more pleasant. It shifts your brain into a state where you remember more, including things you weren’t trying to learn at all.

What is curiosity, according to science?

One of the most influential accounts comes from George Loewenstein, an economist and psychologist at Carnegie Mellon. In a 1994 review, he described curiosity as a feeling of deprivation that kicks in when you notice a gap between what you know and what you want to know. It’s an itch, and the answer is the scratch.

That idea helps explain what Min Jeong Kang, Colin Camerer and colleagues at Caltech found in 2009. They showed people trivia questions in a brain scanner and asked how curious they were and how confident they felt about the answer. Curiosity was highest when people were moderately confident: when they half-knew. Questions they had no clue about, or were already sure of, left them fairly cold.

So curiosity lives at the edge of what you already know. Total mystery doesn’t grab you. Neither does the obvious. The almost-known does.

Kang’s team also found that curiosity tracked activity in the caudate, part of the brain’s reward system. People would spend scarce tokens or wait longer to find out answers they were more curious about. And when they were tested again one to two weeks later, higher curiosity went with better memory for answers that had surprised them.

What happens in your brain when you’re curious?

In 2014, Matthias Gruber, Bernard Gelman and Charan Ranganath at the University of California, Davis published a study in Neuron that made headlines. Nineteen people first rated more than 100 trivia questions for how curious they were about the answer. The researchers then picked questions each person didn’t know: some they were itching to answer, some they couldn’t care less about.

Inside an MRI scanner, each person saw a question, then waited 14 seconds for the answer. During that wait, a photo of an unfamiliar face with a neutral expression appeared on screen. It had nothing to do with the trivia, and nobody was told they’d be asked about it.

Then came surprise memory tests. People remembered more answers to the questions they’d been curious about, which you might expect. The twist was the faces. People were better at recognising faces that had appeared during high-curiosity questions than ones that appeared during low-curiosity ones. The curiosity boost showed up both in tests straight afterwards and in tests a day later.

The scans suggest why. During high-curiosity moments, activity rose in the midbrain and the nucleus accumbens, parts of the brain’s dopamine-linked reward circuit. And the people who got the biggest memory boost for those unrelated faces showed more activity in the midbrain and the hippocampus, a region essential for forming new memories, while they waited, plus stronger communication between the two. The authors’ reading: curiosity puts the brain in a reward-ready state that helps the hippocampus hold on to whatever comes along.

Does curiosity really help you remember other things too?

Yes, with some fine print. Nineteen people is a small sample, and brain scans show associations rather than proving exactly how the wiring works. But the basic memory effect has held up in later work from the same research network.

A 2018 study by Stare and colleagues, including Gruber and Ranganath, found that the curiosity boost for both answers and incidental faces was still there after a 12-hour delay. And a 2021 follow-up by Charlotte Murphy, Gruber and colleagues added a useful twist: the benefit for unrelated faces appeared only when they were shown shortly after the question. The moment curiosity is sparked seems to matter more than the long wait for the answer.

That gives you a practical rule of thumb. The best window for learning something else is right after a question has hooked you.

How to use curiosity to learn better

1. Start with a question, not the material. Before you open the textbook, the course or the explainer video, write down one thing you genuinely want to know.
2. Guess first. Make a prediction before you look anything up. A 2019 study by Garvin Brod and Jasmin Breitwieser found that generating a prediction made people more curious about the answer.
3. Aim for the half-known. If a topic feels totally alien, learn the basics first so you can spot the gaps. If it feels obvious, find the bit you can’t actually explain.
4. Put the dull bit right after the hook. Got something boring to learn? Pair it with a question you’re dying to answer and tackle the boring part straight after the question lands.
5. Don’t kill the itch instantly. Before you reach for a search engine, give yourself a moment to wonder. Notice what you think the answer might be and why.
6. Ask people better questions. Curiosity isn’t only for facts. “What has life been teaching you lately?” opens a gap no search engine can fill.

Why people are the best curiosity triggers

Here’s the thing about trivia: the answer exists somewhere, and you can look it up. A question about someone’s life is different. Ask a person you’ve just met, “If you could relive one ordinary day of your life, which day would it be?”, and the answer isn’t written down anywhere. You can’t google it. You can only wait and listen.

That’s Loewenstein’s information gap, pointed at a human being. And unlike a trivia app, the other person can ask you something back.

Where Everconnected fits

If you’d like to try this with someone new, Everconnected matches you with people who share your values and interests, for one-to-one conversations by voice. It’s free to join: create an account at app.everconnected.com, or get the app from the App Store or Google Play.

Questions people ask

Sources

1. Gruber, M. J., Gelman, B. D., & Ranganath, C. (2014). States of curiosity modulate hippocampus-dependent learning via the dopaminergic circuit. Neuron, 84(2), 486-496. doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2014.08.060
2. Kang, M. J., Hsu, M., Krajbich, I. M., Loewenstein, G., McClure, S. M., Wang, J. T., & Camerer, C. F. (2009). The wick in the candle of learning: Epistemic curiosity activates reward circuitry and enhances memory. Psychological Science, 20(8), 963-973. doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02402.x
3. Loewenstein, G. (1994). The psychology of curiosity: A review and reinterpretation. Psychological Bulletin, 116(1), 75-98. doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.116.1.75
4. Stare, C. J., Gruber, M. J., Nadel, L., Ranganath, C., & Gómez, R. L. (2018). Curiosity-driven memory enhancement persists over time but does not benefit from post-learning sleep. Cognitive Neuroscience, 9, 100-115. experts.arizona.edu/en/publications/curiosity-driven-memory-
5. Murphy, C., Dehmelt, V., Yonelinas, A. P., Ranganath, C., & Gruber, M. J. (2021). Temporal proximity to the elicitation of curiosity is key for enhancing memory for incidental information. Learning & Memory, 28(2), 34-39. doi.org/10.1101/lm.052241.120
6. Brod, G., & Breitwieser, J. (2019). Lighting the wick in the candle of learning: Generating a prediction stimulates curiosity. npj Science of Learning, 4. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6803639