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.
(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.