Let’s embark on a reward-seeking journey.
What do lifelong learners and the dedicatedly curious know? They know that learning feels good. If you can remember an “aha!” moment that you’ve had, didn’t it literally feel good? A flash of pleasure. “The pleasure of finding things out,” a la Richard Feynman. If you can’t remember a sweet “aha!” moment, we really need to work on that. Seriously. It’s too good to miss out on.
Neuroscience has a lot to say about the role of dopamine in both learning and motivation. An essential neurotransmitter, dopamine gives our nervous system a running account of how likely it is that a given situation will be rewarding. Research also points to dopamine’s role in whether or not we retain information that we’ve learned.
Here’s my question: What actually happens? We say that “learning feels good,” but why? What is it about that moment, “aha!” or otherwise, that gives us that feeling?
In his interesting book “Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends On It,” author Ian Leslie explores the mechanism of human curiosity. Why are we curious? What drives us to find things out?
According to Leslie, the work of psychologist George Lowenstein points to the answer: our curiosity is activated when we perceive a gap “between what we know and what we want to know”:
It’s not only the incongruity that evokes our desire to know; it’s the absence of information. Information gaps often come in the form of questions: What’s in the box? Why is that man crying? What’s a four-letter word meaning “suffering”? You have some incomplete information — there is a box, there is a man crying, there is a crossword puzzle clue — and you want to find the missing part.
Leslie, p. 34
When we notice this gap, it’s not because we don’t know anything about the subject, though. Lowenstein’s information-gap theory proposes that information “fuels curiosity by creating awareness of ignorance, which gives rise to a desire to know more.” To feel curiosity requires that we know enough to know that we don’t know. We tend not to be curious about things we know absolutely nothing about.
So, we’ve noticed a gap; and here’s where the dopamine reward system comes in. Remember that dopamine tells us how likely a given situation is to be rewarding? When we perceive that information gap, dopamine signals us that a good feeling could be right around the corner. “An information gap isn’t simply recognized rationally; its onset is like an itch that we have to scratch … The emotional force of curiosity is what impels us forward on our intellectual explorations even when there’s no pressing need to do so and keeps us inquiring even when we’re weary or confused. A curious person knows that she won’t feel emotionally fulfilled until she finds the information or the understanding she seeks. So she keeps reading or questioning until the gap is closed (Leslie, p. 41).”
Go deep into human evolution and this makes sense. We’ve been wired for who knows how many hundreds of thousands of years to pay attention to puzzles and mysteries. Our minds are formidable pattern-recognition instruments, taking in observations and inputs and looking for the connections that will help us make sense of the world. This is a constant mental process that’s always running, even if we’re not consciously aware of it. We simply have to figure things out. It’s one of the hallmarks of our species.
And when we figure something out — when we make a connection, when we fill a gap — it feels good.
Brene Brown makes the same point in her book “Dare to Lead.” She writes about the dopamine reward system in a different context, but the basic mechanism is the same: “In the absence of data, we will always make up stories,” she writes (Brown, p. 258).
It’s how we’re wired. Meaning making is in our biology, and when we’re in struggle, our default is often to come up with a story that makes sense of what’s happening … our brains reward us with dopamine (that “aha!” moment) when we recognize and complete patterns. Stories are patterns. The brain recognizes the familiar beginning-middle-end structure of a story and rewards us for clearing up the ambiguity.
Brown, p. 258
It’s all learning, though, isn’t it? Our finely-tuned social-emotional apparatus is learning every time we engage with other people. We are hyper-conscious of gaps because social functioning is so very critical to us humans.
Be curious about your curiosity. The learning and dopamine system operates subconsciously (I mean, who has time to consciously pay attention to all that?), but step into your curiosity every once in awhile and watch as you scratch that knowledge-gap itch. Didn’t that feel good?
Stay curious, my friends.
