Have
you ever found yourself reading the same boring sentence over and over again
without remembering what it said?
Brain
scans show how curiosity combines with the brain's memory and reward circuitry,
thereby improving our ability to learn new information.
Have
you ever found yourself reading the same boring sentence over and over again
without remembering what it said? A new study published in neurons may be able to explain why.
The
team found that curiosity promotes activity and interaction in three parts of
the brain: the nucleus acc (NAcc) and the substantia nigra/ventral cover area
(SN/VTA), which is part of the brain's reward circuit, and the hippocampus,
which is responsible for forming new memories.
This is your curiosity brain
To
measure curiosity, the researchers gathered a group of volunteers and asked them
to rate a series of trivia questions based on whether they already knew the
answer and how curious they were about knowing the answer. The researchers then
measured their brain activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging
(fMRI), while the volunteers learned the answers to the questions.
For
each project, participants looked at the question and then showed an unrelated,
neutral face for two seconds before displaying the answer. After that, the next
day, they tested again to see which answers they remembered, and which faces.
As
expected, volunteers were better at remembering the answers they wanted to
know, with about 17 percent more correct answers to these questions being
remembered. However, they also improved by 4 percent in recalling the faces that
appeared after these questions — uninteresting, irrelevant information. The
memory differences persisted until the next day.
So how
can curiosity help you learn something completely unrelated? The answer may lie
in the way the brain anticipates and rewards learning.
Scientists
have known for years that the positive process of learning involves the
hippocampus. "What surprised our study was that when someone was waiting
for interesting information, the activity of the hippocampus increased, as if
curiosity had heated up the hippocampus in advance," said Matthias Gruber,
lead author and postdoctoral researcher of the study. The UC Davis Center for
Neuroscience was interviewed by Healthline. "Curiosity... It may put the
brain in a state where it is more likely to retain new information, even if
that information isn't what makes you curious at first. ”
The
hippocampus isn't the only brain region associated with curiosity — NAcc and
SN/VTA also show greater activity when people are curious. "This means
that curiosity is recruiting key areas of the 'reward circuit,' suggesting that
satisfying curiosity can feel rewarding because it stimulates a very basic
neural circuit that will be more rewarding... Important rewards are for
reacting," Gruber said.
The
hippocampus and sn/vta also increased their communication in anticipation of
answers. The more they communicated, the better the participants' ability to
learn new information.
"Some
people learn better when they're curious, while others are less curious,"
gruber explains. "People who showed more activity in these brain regions
were more capable of learning from the collateral when they were generally
curious. This suggests that the effect of curiosity on learning varies from
person to person, and these differences are intricately linked to brain regions
that process rewards and form memories. ”
Learning is about
Gruber
hoped his findings would be useful to educators. "Teachers often have to
convey material that students are generally not interested in," he said.
"Teaching can be improved by first stimulating students' curiosity to
stimulate questions they are motivated to answer, and then presenting less
interesting material in this situation."
The
study could also reveal conditions that affect rewards and memory, such as
parkinson's disease, traumatic brain injury, depression, and neurological
disorders such as aging. Curiosity can be used to help support damaged reward
circuits, or it can be directly stimulated to enhance memory.
While
the 4 percent increase doesn't seem like much, Gruber thinks the impact of
curiosity could be much greater than he measured in the lab.
"We
may be underestimating the impact of curiosity on the real world," he
said. "Even if we are able to arouse curiosity, the environment in the lab
is still quite artificial, and we may not be able to arouse strong curiosity as
much as the real world." we expect curiosity to have a greater impact in
real life. ”