Active Curiosity vs Open Curiosity
I think the word ‘curiosity’ is used to describe two distinct things that I will now differentiate as active curiosity and open curiosity.
Active curiosity is driven & purposeful. Like thirst, it seeks to be quenched.
When you see a blurry object among distant waves and it looks like it might be a humpback whale, and you want to know.
When you are asked a trivia question like, “How many people have seen the broadway show Hamilton more than once?” or “What’s the life expectancy of people my age in the US, in 2019?” And you find yourself wanting to go to Google.
When you watch a YouTube video of someone doing something crazy, and you’re like, How did they DO that?
When you hear someone mention your name from across the room, and you become anxious to know what they’re saying about you.
Active curiosity activates the part of your brain that anticipates a reward, and it can enhance learning, making it easier to remember surprising results. [1, 2]
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There’s another kind of curiosity that is often referred to by therapy books and practitioners. It is phenomenologically different, and it seems good to be able to distinguish the two types.
This type of curiosity, which I’ll refer to as open curiosity, is best achieved when you feel safe, relaxed, and peaceful. In my experience, it basically requires parasympathetic nervous system activation.
I’m aware of at least one person who can’t recall experiencing this type of curiosity. So I don’t expect this to be a common or universal experience, but I think it’s achievable by all human minds in theory.
This type of curiosity isn’t very driven. It doesn’t need satisfaction or answers. It is open to any possibility and can look without judgment, evaluation, worry, or anxiety.
It is evoked by the Litany of Gendlin and the Litany of Tarski. It is related to original seeing / boggling / seeing with fresh eyes.
When I have open curiosity, I do have things I’m curious about! So it isn’t a totally passive experience. I often use open curiosity to get curious about myself or another person. It’s a very useful state for doing therapy-related work, as all emotions and thoughts feel acceptable and manageable, rather than overwhelming or undesirable.
Perhaps strangely, this type of curiosity is open to knowing, in addition to not knowing. It is open to understanding, in addition to not understanding. It doesn’t need to know or understand things, and as such, you can sit with confusing, upsetting, or vague things. And you can just ask questions about them, with an open mind, ready for whatever response or reaction comes. If no answer comes, it doesn’t feel like a problem. You can just ask another question.
I don’t recommend using open curiosity to study for your exams or read Superintelligence or learn how to make things. It’s not good for downloading lots of new information or developing a skill. Active curiosity is what you want for that.
I do recommend it for the following:
Introspection
Holding space for a friend who’s upset / has a lot of feelings
Trying to resolve a heated conflict that you’re involved in or mediating
Understanding how you relate to things like death, insanity, suffering
Creating an intimate moment with someone
Watching weird, surreal, artsy movies
Being in nature or somewhere very unfamiliar
Circling, meditating, therapy, IDC, etc.
Gaining insight into the universe, yourself, etc.
When I try to use active curiosity to understand how a person’s mind works, they often feel examined under a microscope, like they’re an experiment on my surgical table. When I try to use active curiosity to watch an artsy movie, I feel frustrated that it doesn’t make any sense. When I try to use active curiosity when my friend is upset about something, they feel unheard and like I’m just trying to fix their problem to make it go away; I also tend to ask unhelpful questions (more selfish interest in understanding the situation / update my opinions than trying to help them).
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Now that I’ve described these two types: Do they resonate with you at all? Do you basically know what I’m talking about, and it’s crystal clear? Or does this seem confusing and alien? I find it quite easy to distinguish the two in myself, and I wonder if others feel the same.
( It also seems very plausible this distinction is already covered in research literature or even on LessWrong, and I just didn’t look very hard! References welcome. )
I would like to start using these terms to be less vague when I talk about “curiosity.”
I notice I try to talk to certain people based on which type of curiosity I expect from them. Sometimes, I want active curiosity, like when I’m trying to think through a concrete problem or I want their opinion or advice. Other times, I want open curiosity, like when I’m having emotions, going through a confusing situation, or want to feel heard or accepted.
I have a list of people I can rely on for active curiosity; and a separate list of people I can rely on for open curiosity. (These lists don’t really overlap?)
But I haven’t really tried to just ASK for one type or another from someone.
Now that I’ve named the types, maybe it will be easier to refer to which one I’m wanting, and people can help by saying which one they can potentially offer.
( For the record, if you want open curiosity from me, this is something I can usually switch on, especially on a good day. If you want active curiosity, it depends more on the topic of the conversation and on the object-level details, so you may want to tell me what the subject matter is first. )
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(0: Orientation)
I am not sure whether or not I recognize this. I have a feeling of familiarity, but it’s still very vague and imprecise. Seems super relevant to my work, so I’m gonna try to get more of handle on it over the next couple weeks.
Stuff I wanna answer:
How can you tell when you’re experiencing open curiosity vs. something sort of similar that isn’t curiosity at all?
Is “open curiosity” relatively joint-carving? If I go looking for it, is it the sort of thing that will reveal itself to be a misunderstanding, something that will dissolve into a loosely related family of phenomena, or something that will prove to be fairly distinct and unitary?
What exactly does open curiosity feel like?
What sorts of things am I likely to be doing when I find myself in open curiosity?
What sorts of things am I likely to be doing just before I end up in open curiosity?
What mental postures am I likely to be holding at times when I’d be well served by open curiosity, and which motions can take me from those postures into open curiosity?
What else tends to be going on in my mind during open curiosity?
Thanks for doing this investigation! I love your thoroughness and precision.
Based on my personal ontology of this, “something sort of similar that isn’t curiosity at all” doesn’t register as a relevant class of object to me. It sounds like it’s relevant to you, however. Perhaps there’s something you want to preserve with the term “curiosity.” That’s interesting, and I find myself curious about it (more open than active, atm).
As an aside, I get the vague sense that you’re doing something somewhat confusing (to me) with regards to building maps of phenomenology. Especially when I read the set of questions about joint-carving. This seems like a longer conversation to be had, if you wanted to have it one day.
Some of the confusions I have can be summed up in these inquiries:
“If ‘open curiosity’ ends up being fairly distinct and unitary, does that make it more joint-carving? …Why?”
“Does ‘more joint-carving’ basically stand in for ‘more real’ to you? Or something?”
Anyway this is a longer conversation, I think, and best to carry out not-via-text. But hope reading this was useful or insightful for you.
(1: Chocolate Tasting)
It’s been a bit over a week. I’ve been wearing my counter ring, and turning it every time I notice something that might be open curiosity.
The first time I ran into “maybe this is open curiosity” was during a chocolate tasting.
Account
I ordered six different brands of single-origin Ecuadorian chocolate, laid them all out, then slowly tasted them one by one while taking notes on my experience of each. I’d break off a piece, paying attention to the sound and feel of the snap. Then I’d bring the piece to my nose and smell it. Then I’d set a one minute timer, let the chocolate melt on my tongue for the whole minute, and finally chew it up. I took notes off and on the whole time.
Here’s a bit from my notes on To’ak’s Rain Harvest 2018 74% dark chocolate. “A little boy climbed into the canopy to harvest flowers from the tallest vines during a rain storm, then brought them down to the dew-covered irises, sprinkled all the petals with clover honey, and brought them to his grandmother who is taking a mid-day nap in a darkened room.”
Whatever it was I did with my mind to generate notes about the flavor had a quality I’m strongly inclined to describe as “open”. There was a feeling like stepping out of the way, letting go of something, or welcoming. If I had to name the something I was letting go of, it might be “making literal sense of things”.
I definitely wasn’t letting go of trying, though. I was being very precise, discarding a lot of description pieces that weren’t quite right. The thing was, I discarded them after considering them, rather than pre-determining what kinds of descriptions were allowed to present themselves. I think it was probably the space of pre-determined answers that was “opening”.
By contrast, I completely failed to do this “open” thing when describing my experiences of snapping the chocolate pieces. I wrote notes like, “snappy little pop” and “crunchy crunchy snap”. By the end I was feeling some combination of dismissive and frustrated about the chocolate textures. Of the last chocolate, I wrote, “I don’t fuckin know, it goes ‘pop’ when i break it. Maybe a little quieter and lower pitched than the others.” I was sort of trying to convince myself that the textures didn’t matter.
Reflections
Although I definitely identified a quality of “openness” in chocolate tasting, it’s much harder for me to recognize “curiosity” in this experience. I’m left feeling very unsure whether there is anything to “open curiosity” beyond “openness”.
If I assume that there is a difference, and that this experience contained “open curiosity” rather than mere “openness”, then I’d guess it has something to do with the frame. I orchestrated the experience with an intention to discover something. I wanted to know what the chocolates tasted like, whether I like Ecuadorian chocolate in general (this was a follow-up to an earlier tasting where I tried chocolates from several different parts of the world and found that my favorite was from Ecuador), what differs among different chocolate manufacturers who start with basically the same beans, and whether the much more expensive brand is of noticeably higher quality than the others (it is).
All of that sort of melted away, though, during the tasting. I intuitively knew that it had to, that if I kept all of those intentions at the font of my mind as I tasted, I’d basically experience what I expected to, in little more detail than my priors already contained. …Which does sound an awful lot like a reasonable distinction between “active curiosity” and “open curiosity”.
If I suppose, though, that there is a difference between “open curiosity” and mere “openness”, and that this was an experience of mere openness without the curiosity, then I’d guess it was missing some kind of question-holding that is “open” rather than “active”. While I was tasting, I was not aware of any interest to learn anything. My whole attention was on close observation of the chocolate and its effect on me as I interacted with it, and on the task of describing those observations in words. And I wonder whether curiosity of any sort requires some kind of question-shaped box that is held in front of you to catch some bits of information, and not others.
So I think that in chocolate tasting, I have at least explored my first question (“How can you tell when you’re experiencing open curiosity vs. something sort of similar that isn’t curiosity at all?”), but I don’t think I have an answer yet.
(2: Dioecious Junipers)
I’ve also run into several instances of “maybe open curiosity” while studying botany.
My experiences with junipers have lead me to wonder about the relationship between active curiosity and open curiosity, and especially about the nature of “general active curiosity”.
Account
I was listening to a lecture on the taxonomy of non-flowering plants, which touched on the cypress family and mentioned junipers. I didn’t listen to it all at once, and there was a point where I’d paused just after the professor had talked about ferns, but before she’d gotten to conifers.
I already knew a little bit about junipers. I knew, for example, that gin is flavored by passing the vapors of wheat or barley alcohol over juniper berries, then collecting the condensation. (It’s also sometimes made by just plopping the berries right in the liquid, though this makes for a harsher-tasting gin.) So I’d already recognized some of the plants in my area as “probably junipers”, from their gray-blue berries.
But, having just learned a little about fern reproduction, I realized that many of the other plants in my area, ones without blue berries, were also junipers. They were just male junipers. I was on a drive with Duncan, watching out the window, and I remarked, “Huh, you can really tell that junipers are dioecious!”
[footnote: A dioecious species is one with distinct male and female organisms. Humans are dioecious, while roses produce both male and female reproductive organs on a single flower.]
I want to zoom in on the moments just before I made that remark.
We had not been talking about botany at all. We were not on a drive to look at the scenery; we were just headed out to the mailbox. There were many, many kinds of plants, as well as rocks and animals and man-made structures, for me to look at.
Yet I noticed the berry-covered junipers in particular. And I noticed the other plants that looked just like those junipers, but without berries. I felt a tiny confusion about it, one I’d never felt before even though I’d passed these same plants many times. Ever since scheming to fill my backyard with holly bushes for Christmas time, I knew that some plants require both male and female individuals to reproduce. So all the pieces were there. Why did they suddenly come together, with no apparent effort, in that moment?
Reflections
I figure there must have been some sense in which I was “curious” about junipers, on that day. This was not paradigmatic “active curiosity”. That would have been more like, deliberately and consciously setting out to investigate the local junipers to discover whether they are dioecious or monoecious, looking specifically at their reproductive organs.
But it wasn’t paradigmatic non-curiosity either. That would be more like my orientation toward the road signs, which I definitely saw but did not register on this particular trip to the mailbox.
Still, I have a hypothesis that some pre-conscious part of my mind was quite actively trying to understand local junipers, in general, in a way that it was not trying to understand chocolate during the chocolate tasting. During the chocolate tasting, I was very attentive to my experience of flavor. During the drive, I think I must have been attentive to “information about how junipers work” or “information about what’s up with junipers”.
This “how it works” or “what’s up with it” orientation seems pretty essential to my current concept of curiosity. In Catching the Spark, I described “head tilting” as “What is this? What’s going on here? Is this right? Is it really so simple? Could I be confused somehow?”
When I said that my chocolate tasting involved “openness” but perhaps not “curiosity”, it was the absence of this head tilting posture that left me doubtful.
I’m a little bit inclined to locate instances of curiosity on a grid with one axis for “active to passive”, and another axis for “specific to general”. But I’m also inclined to suspect that I am confused enough that my concept of curiosity ought to fall apart and be re-built from scratch.
Endnote
If you’re trying to decide whether to correct me about juniper reproduction, be patient. This was not the end of my conifer studies. We’ll get there eventually.
Ian McGilchrist came out a book on brain hemispheres and their specialized roles called The Master and His Emissary. This summary was useful: https://www.reddit.com/r/streamentry/comments/b39n4x/the_divided_brain_and_awakening_theorycommunity/
The Left Hemisphere handles narrow focus (like a bird trying to pick out a seed among a bunch of pebbles and dirt), while the Right Hemisphere handles broad, open focus (the same bird keeping some attention on the background for predators). The LH is associated with tool use and manipulation of objects. The RH is associated with exploration and experiential data gathering.
I don’t immediately know how the hemispheres may be involved in the types of Curiosity. But a plausible hypothesis might be that Active Curiosity would be more left-brained and Open Curiosity would be more right-brained.
fwiw, I’d kind of like to see this book epistemically-spot-checked before building too much off it (I was chatting about it recently and some of the claims seemed iffy to me. It seemed like it should probably be able to identify easier-to-check claims and check to make sure he’s at least getting obvious things right)
My understanding is that the last time people got really into Left Brain / Right Brain as a dichotomy it ended getting kinda pop-sci-simplified (which eventually resulted in it falling out of favor), and I’d like to “do it right this time” if it’s going to be a thing people are building theories and models around.
I’ve been watching a bunch of videos on this, and I’m finding them quite interesting so far.
http://iainmcgilchrist.com/videos/
Also I agree lots of precision and discernment are useful to maintain here. It could get “floppy” real fast if people aren’t careful with their concepts / models.
Open curiosity very much sounds to me like a familiar aspect of the state that IFS calls “being in Self”: you’re curious about the nature of your parts and those of others, but you don’t have any particular agenda that you would want to achieve, and are open both to the possibility of learning more about your parts as well as to the possibility that they won’t tell you anything more on this particular session.
When facilitating someone else’s IFS session while in Self, you are also not driven by any particular goal (including wanting to “fix” them), but are also just open to exploring things together and seeing what you will find. It’s a familiar and pleasant state to me.
In my IFS training, I explicitly heard Self being described both as a curious state and as a state where you don’t have an agenda, so I don’t think that this is just my interpretation either. Also watching other people who got into a strong state of Self, definitely seemed like they were very much in a state of open curiosity.
Meditation has also once brought me into an even stronger state of Self / open curiosity than IFS work has managed to: one where I’ve been totally open to all mental and physical experience, without even the slightest need to experience particular thoughts and emotions, and have just been deeply at peace with whatever I might experience.
yes, this is basically what I’m referring to
Yes! For me one area where it’s super clear is relationships. On first dates I’m 100% active curiosity. I’ll ask lots of questions, trying to get to the heart of who the person across the dinner table is. But after a while, once I’ve “accepted” them, I switch more to open curiosity. It feels more playful. I’m less interested in their version and more interested in exploring together. There’s trust.
I’d call it concentrated vs. diffuse curiosity instead. Strong desire to know one particular thing vs. many weaker desires to know many things.
You receive a big wrapped gift but can’t unwrap it until tomorrow. This is concentrated curiosity. (Less pleasant variant: the results of your health test are due tomorrow.)
You unwrap the gift and it’s a strange device with a big green button. You wonder what will happen if you press it? This is still concentrated curiosity.
You press the button and a panel opens up, showing fifty more buttons. Now your curiosity has become more diffuse and exploratory, spread out across all the buttons.
Do you mean to say that open curiosity is diffuse curiosity? If so, then that feels a little off, since you can have open curiosity about e.g. one particular emotion that happens to be in your mind.
It seems to me that perhaps the major difference between active/concentrated curiosity and open/diffuse curiosity is how much of an expectation you have that there’s one specific piece of information you could get that would satisfy the curiosity. (And for this reason the “concentrated” and “diffuse” labels do seem somewhat apt to me.)
Active/concentrated curiosity is focused on finding the answer to a specific question, while open/diffuse curiosity seeks to explore and gain understanding. (And that exploration may or may not start out with its attention on a single object/emotion/question.)
Open curiosity does not actively seek to understand. Which is why I call the other one ‘active’.
I suspect concentrated and diffuse curiosity are both referring to types of active curiosity. Open curiosity is talking about something different.
I’m reminded of Malcolm Ocean’s article “questions are not just for asking.” Open curiosity feels more like holding a question while active curiosity is asking it. He also links to my favorite web-comic ever which seems to advocate a sort of open curiosity.
Active Curiosity (AC), Open Curiosity (OC)
I would consider the example with a panel of many buttons still AC or concentrated since it is simply a continuation of the desire to understand the [particular] object.
I do, however, accept your description of OC as diffuse and exploratory: a series of AC questions in rapid succession.
I suppose on some level, all curiosity could be boiled down to a simple question, which by this post’s definition is AC.
Consider the mental move you’re performing if you’re doing a word search and you switch which word you’re currently actively hunting for. Or searching for a word on the tip of your tongue. Gendlin called this a sharp blank or a blank that knows what it is looking for. This seems related to active curiosity vs the more exploration based open curiosity.
Also related: forward vs backchaining, open vs closed mode, exploration vs exploitation
Babble vs. prune.
When someone says that an important business meeting should start with small talk they usually mean that it should start with open curiosity before proceeding to active curiosity.
When I was in my late teens and early 20s I spent almost no time in open curiosity (basically because I was very bad at it, and like many young men I was driven to achieve mastery in something quickly, which entails getting better at the things I was already good at). Now that I am in my 50s I find myself avoiding active curiosity most of the time when the stakes are high (!) because I have noticed that I make more serious mistakes if I don’t force myself to avoid active curiosity most of the time that I spend thinking about the things that matter to me the most (with the result that most of my hours of active curiosity are devoted to tangential concerns, e.g., improvements to my personal software environment, e.g., learning a little linear algebra, both of which a tangential concerns in my particular life). There are reasons to believe that my mind would work much better and that I would be able to stay actively curious a much larger fraction of the time I spend on my core concerns (without my finding in retrospect that I was making worse decisions) if I had established the habit in my teens and 20s to interleave my intervals of active curiosity with long intervals of open curiosity.
Years ago IIRC I came across a web page that claimed that the people running MIT were publicly seeking an explanation for why the careers of successful MIT grads tend to peter out later in life relative to the careers of successful grads of Harvard. It is possible that the explanation includes the fact that hard science and engineering require the practitioner to spend more of their time in active curiosity or “focused attention” than other high-powered careers do. (The things I spend my teens and 20s being actively curious about were mostly computing and math.)
Note that the flow state is usually highly pleasurable (which is why people spend so much time talking about it on the public internet) and that if you are in the flow state, switching from active curiosity to open curiosity will cause an abrupt cessation of the pleasure.
Hmm, I think I haven’t yet found a good personal memory for what you are referring to as “open curiosity” based on the things you wrote. Do you maybe have a video or a blog-post or an audio-clip that shows someone being in an archetypical form of that state?
I find this description on point. I often go down what I call “weekend rabbit holes” where like Alice I may start out with a spark of active curiosity but then coast through a sea of topics, allowing one idea to lead me to the next, in autopilot. I also find the terms active and open appropriate, particularly open. Like allowing one mind to stand back and be ready to receive any and all.
I wonder how I could tap into this concept for leadership… To cultivate an environment where both types are nourished and directed fruitfully.
I get it. As extreme cases, consider reading Proust vs. looking for an answer on an open book test. One is meditative; you’re reading a whole book about the memories triggered by eating a cookie, following the associations wherever they go. In the other case you’re actively, quickly searching for (say) an equation relating dielectric constants to refractive indices.
It doesn’t work that way for me.
For example, when I repeat litany of Tarski, I think “I really really really want to know the truth about this whatever it is, and, I hope, biases will not stop me”. When I try get to know a person, I 1. create a question (feeling active curiosity about person in general); 2. ask it (feeling active curiosity about this question); 3. Go back to the 1-st point;
Even if I haven’t a concrete question, I often have a lot of desire to improve my map. It’s so for me, because one time I read “truth let us achieve our objective and make more powerful”, and I thought “I love achieve my objective and became more powerful! So… I really love truth now!”.
So when I try to understand my psychology or something else that is really important, something on periphery of mind say me: “You are on the good way! You’re getting closer to Omega! Continue whatever it takes!”
Tentatively:
Getting stuck solving a problem should ideally trigger open curiosity. I was thinking about this in the context of solving a Project Euler problem (math problems that usually require some programming). There seem to often be alternating phases in solving where you find some low-hanging fruit, and then get stuck. Stuckness can be for example conceptual (you need to speed up your algorithm; you haven’t found an algorithm that works at all; you don’t understand the problem) or related to code (you have a natural-language framework for your problem but not code; the only code you can think to write is really ugly; there is a bug).
The thing I call “stuckness” perhaps often indicates there is no clear path to go on—if there is, I would be going on it. Sometimes this should trigger taking a break to rest. Other times it should trigger open curiosity about the problem. Even if I am remaining openly curious about the problem, it seems more likely that I will do something like get up from where I am sitting at the trigger point.
A common failure mode is to continue being actively curious when stuck; this is associated with treating the situation like something it’s not.