When You Wonder, You're Learning

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When You Wonder, You’re Learning

Curiosity

Even by the standards of this particular Neighborhood—where a tiger lives in a clock, polka dots litter the streets, and a trolley travels from another dimension—it’s an admittedly curious scene.

King Friday XIII, the long-suffering sire of Make-Believe, is furious. He’s just been pranked by two purple pandas: creatures who speak in robotic tones and flaunt their simple superpower. (The pandas can appear and disappear with a snap of their fingers.) Identical except for their height, the pandas use their power to trick the tortured ruler, causing Friday to confuse the taller panda for the shorter one, if only for a moment.

Of course, in most puppets, a harmless stunt like this one would fail to inspire outrage.

But King Friday XIII is not most puppets.

“I don’t like being fooled like that,” he declares, projecting as much anger as his puppet master can muster. King Friday isn’t a villain, exactly—he’s a reactionary and sometimes inept, but he tends to give wickedness a wide berth. He’s a musician, a poet, and a former pole-vaulter—a true renaissance king—and he’s even been known to show kindness. Once, upon meeting a starving magician, he established the King Friday Queen Sara Saturday Royal Foundation for the Performing Arts, or KFQSSRFFTPA for short.

But like any autocrat, King Friday has his flaws. He’s vain, he’s insecure, and most of all, he doesn’t like to be fooled.

And this time, he won’t get fooled again. “I shall make a rule,” he declares.

By now, Make-Believe’s subjects know the drill: King Friday forbids whatever foils his moods and whims. Over the years, he’s outlawed harmonicas, bare hands, bad feelings, play, and puppets who don’t look like him, all with varying degrees of success. Friday’s decrees are almost always short-lived—usually, he changes his mind or simply forgets as he tends to other kingly concerns.

In this scene, though, he makes a rule so egregious—so contrary to the nature of Make-Believe—that to follow it would threaten the Neighborhood itself. Not only would it stilt Make-Believe’s progress and dim its denizens’ futures, it would drain the joy out of life and make learning impossible, condemning the Neighborhood to stagnation, decay, and the slow-moving horrors of indifference.

But in a moment of humiliation and shortsightedness, King Friday XIII issues his edict anyway.

“Cancel. All. Curiosity.”

This scene—scripted by and starring Fred Rogers in a late-stage, turn-of-the-millennium episode of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood—is more than just make-believe. Kicking off a five-part series about curiosity, the image of a king trying to suppress his people’s questions has roots in real life: Throughout history, countless rulers have sought to cancel curiosity themselves. As any tyrant knows, the less inquisitive a society is, the less free it becomes.

In 1937, the Nazis staged the infamous Degenerate Art exhibition, where more than seven hundred works of modern art were defaced and ridiculed. Actors posing as critics wandered through the crowds, loudly proclaiming that modern art—a style that invites interpretation by provoking questions—was not art at all, but rather a product of mental illness and Jewish perversion. As a result, many of the exhibition’s attendees left less willing to question how the Nazis treated their neighbors.

It’s a tactic that’s been used for centuries. During China’s Cultural Revolution, militants destroyed libraries to eradicate opposing ideas. In the United States, schools were first burned and bombed, then segregated and budget-starved to prevent Black children from learning. In the antebellum South, enslaved people caught with books were beaten or killed. Campaigns to cancel curiosity stretch all the way back to antiquity: Consider the cautionary tale of ancient Greeks succumbing to the Sirens. Or Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, dooming mankind by tasting the forbidden fruit. Or Lot and his family fleeing the biblical city of Sodom, forbidden by God to look back. (When Lot’s wife gives into her curiosity and sneaks a final glance, she’s transformed into a pillar of salt.)

“To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way [one] achieves his own identity,” said the writer James Baldwin. “But no society is really anxious to have that kind of person around. What societies really, ideally, want is a citizenry which will simply obey the rules of society.”

Perhaps it’s no wonder, then, that some of our oldest stories and sayings suggest ambivalence—or even outright hostility—toward the inquisitive. Curiosity leads to exploration. Exploration leads to questions, and questions threaten the status quo.

Curiosity is power.

And when that power is cultivated, it can change lives, topple dictators, and even reshape the planet. Hundreds of thousands of years ago, for example, one of humanity’s predecessors had a question. Homo erectus wouldn’t have called it that; the invention of words was still a long way off. But somewhere on an African savanna, or in a cave on the Sinai Peninsula, a mystery appeared: What might happen, our ancestor wondered, if I picked up those rocks over there and bashed them together?

Thus began one of the most important experiments of all time. According to one theory, the discovery of fire gave way to cooking and better nutrition, which led to the doubling of hominid neurons. Equipped with unprecedented brainpower, humans grew more and more sophisticated, learning to talk to one another, to build societies and cities, and to spread out across the globe. They developed ideas—that the Earth is six thousand years old, or that cavities are caused by tiny worms in our teeth—and replaced those ideas with better ones through science. They invented music, medicine, and Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. They even left the planet, launching a Martian rover that—perhaps out of gratitude—they called Curiosity.

Best of all, our predecessors passed this power to us. Nearly every human being is born curious. Babies as young as nine weeks old tend to focus on what’s new and unfamiliar rather than what’s constant or routine. Before they learn to speak, they learn to point: “A baby’s way of saying ‘tell me’ is to point to an object while looking at her mother,” writes Ian Leslie, author of Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends On It. As toddlers, kids become dogged investigators, asking why at every opportunity. Curiosity is so ubiquitous—so fundamental to who we are as a species—that psychologists put it on par with the drive to eat, sleep, and reproduce. Not only is it “the linchpin of intellectual achievement,” as one scientist puts it, evidence suggests that curiosity will only grow more essential in coming decades.

But there’s a catch. While almost all of us are born curious, far fewer actually stay that way. Curiosity can fade shockingly fast; disparities emerge even among babies, growing wider over time. It doesn’t take a tyrant to cancel curiosity—even the most well-meaning adult can dim a child’s desire to know. If curiosity isn’t nurtured, it tends to be “transitory, to die out, or to wane in intensity,” wrote the philosopher John Dewey in 1910. “In a few people, intellectual curiosity is so insatiable that nothing will discourage it, but in most, its edge is easily dulled and blunted.”

That’s a problem, especially today. It’s been estimated that today’s young people could change jobs as many as fifteen times over the course of their lifetimes and that many of their jobs will require work that hasn’t been invented. The future will require today’s young people to forge careers that cross sectors and industries, requiring constant learning. Those without the ability or desire to keep up could find themselves automated out of a job or otherwise left behind. Meanwhile, the curious will be rewarded.

It’s happening already. Consider the priorities of any number of leaders and intellectuals: Apple CEO Tim Cook seeks employees with “obsessive curiosity.” Addressing a crowd of college graduates, Oprah Winfrey said this: “I wish you curiosity.” Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, when asked about their success, both credited their desire to learn more about the world. And Ta-Nehisi Coates, the National Book Award–winning writer, has described himself as “irrepressible in terms of my curiosities.”

The list goes on, but curiosity’s value extends far beyond wealth or professional success. Curious people can question their circumstances and fight for something better. They can appreciate the world’s marvels and the importance of conservation. Above all, curious people are learners: people who can look closely at an orange blossom or a mural or a fellow human being and wonder.

What Curiosity Can Do

“Did you know?” Fred Rogers used to sing. “Did you know when you wonder, you’re learning?”

Throughout the Neighborhood’s thirty-one-season run, Rogers served as curiosity’s most famous televangelist, nurturing children’s inquisitiveness in ways that—when viewed from today’s world of pinging phones and breaking news—can seem almost quaint. Pick any episode at random and you might find Rogers exploring a pinwheel, or carefully drawing a rainbow, or narrating a documentary about citrus farms. He makes a point, again and again, of telling viewers how many questions he has and how much he wants to know about the world. He’s so genuinely interested in everything that viewers can’t help but be interested, too. And when he looks at the camera and asks if you’ve ever wondered how people make crayons or if you’ve yearned to visit an eraser factory, you surprise yourself by how quickly you think, Yes!

Thinkers, teachers, and scientists have long been interested in the power of wonder. From Jean Piaget to B. F. Skinner, psychologists have probed curiosity’s origins; today, behavioral scientists and neuroscientists are shedding new light on its functions. But even before the advent of modern learning science, Rogers seemed to sense that curiosity drives learning—a thesis that brain scans and studies are now confirming in droves. Consider these lines from “Did You Know?” a song Rogers debuted in 1979:

Like so much of Rogers’ work, “Did You Know?” was inspired by his childhood. “Fred McFeely, his maternal grandfather, was wonderfully supportive of Fred’s sense of curiosity, his sense of learning, and his sense of exploration,” says Maxwell King, author of The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers. “Fred McFeely understood that the most natural thing in the world for a child is to be exploring and learning and wondering about how the world works and how one fits in.”

When Rogers was young, for example, he was curious about where kittens came from. While questions about reproduction sometimes strike fear in the hearts of parents, Fred McFeely had an idea: He’d let little Freddy watch a cat give birth. The experience satisfied Rogers’ curiosity in a developmentally appropriate way, with a trusted adult—his grandfather—serving as a guide. “I’ll always remember that as a wonderful time,” Rogers later said. “[My grandfather] helped me to understand it so well, and he told me, ‘You know, Freddy, it’s all right to wonder about things and ask about things.’”

Watching a cat give birth might seem like a strange thing to remember several decades after the fact. It might seem odder, still, that Rogers would show his viewers another cat doing exactly the same thing. But the reality is that this is stuff kids wonder about, and according to learning scientists, Rogers was right: When kids wonder, they are learning—or at least they’re far more likely to.

“Inciting children’s curiosity is the best way to ensure that they will absorb and retain information,” writes psychologist Susan Engel, one of the world’s leading experts on curiosity’s development. In 2009, a team of Caltech researchers demonstrated this by posing a series of trivia questions to a group of volunteers. They asked participants to guess the answers to the questions and rate their level of curiosity about each—that is, to tell the researchers how much they wanted to know the answers. Later, the volunteers were shown each question again, followed by the correct response. The research team watched their brains light up via functional magnetic resonance imaging—in effect, watching the volunteers’ brains process information in real time.

They found that when volunteers were curious, their brains indicated “the type of feeling you have before the curtain goes up on a play you have wanted to see for a long time,” writes author Mario Livio. “The researchers also found that when the correct answer was revealed to the subjects, the regions of the brain that were significantly energized were those typically associated with learning, memory, and language comprehension and production.”

In other words, the more curiosity that participants reported feeling—the more they wondered—the more powerfully their brains were primed for learning.

On one hand, this might not surprise you. Anyone who has ever struggled to stay awake during a boring presentation knows how difficult it can be to learn information that doesn’t pique your interest. On the other hand, the Caltech study allowed scientists to measure just how much difference curiosity can make: Ten days later, when asked to recall what they’d learned, participants more easily answered the questions they’d been curious about. This helps explain why Rogers never forgot watching the birth of those kittens.

A later study from the University of California at Davis found an even more surprising benefit. When participants were highly curious about the information in front of them, they also more easily learned other information, even when it was unrelated. As one researcher put it, “Curiosity may put the brain in a state that allows it to learn and return any kind of information, like a vortex that sucks in what you are motivated to learn, and also everything around it.”

When you wonder, you’re learning, indeed.

Such findings should be great news for parents, teachers, and anyone else concerned with children’s learning. Since kids are naturally curious, harnessing their desire to ask and answer questions should be a no-brainer. Now that we know just how powerful curiosity can be, we’d expect learning environments to be like little laboratories—places where it’s all right to wonder; where kids explore the whats and hows and whys of the problems that intrigue them; and where their brains light up day in and day out, making schools and libraries and museums the most joyful places on the planet.

And in a few lucky places, that’s exactly what’s happening. At the Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburgh, Jason Brown stands beneath a towering, room-size replica of the human brain, full of twinkling lights that map the constellations of neurons that carry our thoughts and feelings. All around him, the center’s three-foot visitors dart from exhibit to exhibit, their parents struggling to keep up. One presses a button that says, “Why Do I Fart?” letting out a long recording of human flatulence. Shrieks of discovery and delight ring throughout the building.

“Sometimes we forget that learning is supposed to be fun,” says Brown. It’s something the center’s director knows from experience: As a kid, he had no particular love for science. “I remember doing formulas for reactions of acids and bases in school, and never once did I think, ‘Wow, this is amazing,’” he says. It wasn’t until he mixed ammonia and Drano at home—a mixture that exploded in his driveway—that he developed an interest. “I think I just needed to see some destruction,” he says, laughing. “After that, I was hooked.”