This inquisitiveness seems as intrinsic to us as hunger or thirst. A child asks a series of seemingly innocent questions: Why is the sky blue? How high up does the blue go? Where does the blue go at night? Instead of answers (most adults can’t explain why the sky is blue, including me), the child might receive a dismissive, slightly patronizing reply like, “Why, aren’t you the curious little girl . . .” 7 Grazer has spent most of his life exploring curiosity through what he terms “curiosity conversations” with some of the most interesting people in the world, including spies, royals, scientists, politicians, moguls, Nobel laureates, artists…anyone whose story might broaden his worldview. These discussions sparked the creative inspiration behind many of his movies and TV shows, including Splash, 24, A Beautiful Mind, Apollo 13, Arrested Development, 8 Mile, J. Edgar, Empire, and many others. There is another point that I am not fully aboard with. The author argues that schools can't teach thinking skills without teaching knowledge. I think the issue here is how that knowledge is imparted. Is it rote memorization, or hands-on learning? Monstrous births, for example. If there were births of deformed horses or cattle, or of course people, they were seen as portents that happened because God was trying to tell us something, or warn us in the same way that strange weather or comets were seen as warnings. It’s interesting how that concept evolved into seeing them as natural phenomena as well – that they didn’t represent God’s hand but did nevertheless represent a deviation from natural laws.

My Polish grandmother was a Rosicrucian, but I never quite understood what they believed in. What do we learn about them from this book? Digital technologies are severing the link between effort and mental exploration. The web erodes our penchant for epistemic curiosity focused on understanding. “Google can answer anything you want, but it can’t tell you what you ought to be asking." I particularly enjoyed the analysis of the correlation between knowledge and curiosity, and that learning more about a topic creates more interest in it. As a grown-up, I am responsible for giving my children a basis of knowledge that opens up wider horizons for them to be curious about. It is not enough to hand them a laptop and tell them to explore whatever they are interested in. The randomness of the information they will find online will rather kill their wish to know more than make them develop further interest in it.When I was working just down the hall from him, Calley was forty-four or forty-five years old, at the height of his power, and already a legend—intelligent, eccentric, Machiavellian. Warner Bros. in those days was making a movie a month, 13 and Calley was always thinking a hundred moves ahead. A handful of people loved him, a slightly larger group admired him, and a lot of people feared him. The truth is that when I was meeting someone like Salk or Teller or Slim, what I hoped for was an insight, a revelation. I wanted to grasp who they were. Of course, you don’t usually get that with strangers in an hour. The Adam and Eve story, she says, is a warning. “?‘You are a serf because God said you should be a serf. I’m a king because God said I should be a king. Don’t ask any questions about that.’ Stories like Adam and Eve,” Benedict says, “reflect the need of cultures and civilizations to maintain the status quo. ‘Things are the way they are because that’s the right way.’ That attitude is popular among rulers and those who control information.” And it has been from the Garden of Eden to the Obama administration. It finally dawned on me while writing another curiosity article how flawed this thought is. It’s impossible to “run out” of creativity if you’re curious. As long as you’re curious, you’ll never draw a blank on what to write for very long. If you pursue your curiosity, you’ll always stumble on new things to write about. Here’s how to be more curious and use it to boost your creativity for writing, based on research in psychology. Notice what surprises you and follow it

I didn’t quite realize it at that time, but two incredible things happened that day in the summer of 1974. For a trait with so much potential power, curiosity itself seems uncomplicated. Psychologists define curiosity as “wanting to know.” That’s it. And that definition squares with our own commonsense feeling. “Wanting to know,” of course, means seeking out the information. Curiosity starts out as an impulse, an urge, but it pops out into the world as something more active, more searching: a question. Browsing the shelves in a bookstore, it caught my eye and I spontaneously bought it, probably as a subconscious reaction to the fact that I have heard that I tend to be too curious about everything ever since I was very little. It is a topic that has followed me from early childhood over my academic studies and into motherhood and teaching. I called the number and asked for Peter Knecht. An assistant in his office answered, and I said to her, “I’m going to USC law school in the fall, and I’d like to meet with Mr. Knecht about the law clerk job that’s open.” Something else happened during that year of being a legal clerk that was just as important. It was the year I started to actively appreciate the real power of curiosity.

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Curiosity has never let me down. I’m never sorry I asked that next question. On the contrary, curiosity has swung wide many doors of opportunity for me. I’ve met amazing people, made great movies, made great friends, had some completely unexpected adventures, even fallen in love—because I’m not the least bit embarrassed to ask questions. I would recommend this book to parents or educators who would like to refresh some common sense reflections on why we work daily to create an environment of inquiry, and how we can keep it alive as adults as well. Curiosity can be trained, and nurtured, or stifled, depending on how much we work on it and feed it. To get started, Stoufer recommends the I Survived and Ranger in Time series, which will help your child connect to historical events through relatable characters and spark even more curiosity for what happened in the past.