The Hole In Your Brain That Makes You Doomscroll

12:10Hannah Fry:So it was about excessive anxiety, yeah.

12:12Michael Stevens:But yeah, it looks like you can also find the line in Much Ado About Nothing. What courage, man, what thou care killed a cat. Thou hast metal enough in thee to kill care. So... So here's the thing, right?

12:26Hannah Fry:This is this word that we said was a sin for 1 ,500 years. And then in the end, we're naming a Mars rover over it. And that's like, what's going on with those two things? By the way...

12:40Michael Stevens:Now we're putting up big banners that extol curiosity in schools. We want kids to be curious. As though it's a really positive thing. Yeah. Wow. So it wasn't even really a concept that was discussed. It wasn't a virtue. The closest thing was care, by which we meant excessive worry and anxiety over someone or something, which could kill a cat. Which I would say is not a positive thing. even even in 1998 ebenezer brewer included a definition that said care killed the cat it is said that a cat has nine lives yet care would wear them all out i want to show you that i want to show you just how powerful right this like curiosity can be because at some point in the

13:22Hannah Fry:next let's say 20 minutes or so i'm going to open up a little hole in your memory um that you're going to be physically unable to leave alone okay you're going to know the moment you're going to arrives. In terms of what is going on when we feel curious, when we have that drive to push the button, to, you know, turn over the pen, whatever it might be, sail across the ocean, there are all of these different theories about it. And I think the cleanest theory, you know, the first time people really sort of got hands on this is it was George Loewenstein in the 90s, right? This is kind of how late we were like, what is this?

13:59Hannah Fry:Because before then it was all like, oh, it's the pleasure of learning. It's, you know, you're just enjoying learning and that's all there is to it. And he was like, no, no, no, no, no. There is this drive that you have that is more than just sitting down and reading a textbook. It's where you really want to know the answer. And he said that it is an information gap, essentially. It's the distance between what you know and what you've just realized that you don't know. And that just realized bit is really key. But the way to think about it is to think about a missing tooth, right? So you know precisely where it should be.

14:36Hannah Fry:So this isn't just like some vague information all over the place. You know, I don't know very much about 16th century French poetry, but I don't really, I'm not sort of driven to find out more. Right. It's like the missing tooth is a really good analogy because you know exactly where this information slots in and your tongue will not under any circumstances leave it alone, right? You're poking at it because you feel the gap, right? You sort of have the deprivation. And that's the thing about curiosity is that it's not a wish. It's not like, oh, that would be nice. It's more like a deprivation.

15:09Hannah Fry:It's more like your brain is missing something and it needs to know.

15:14Michael Stevens:That's a really good way to put it because, yeah, I also don't want to or desire to learn about 16th century French poetry, but I could be made to, where suddenly if I feel that it's a deprivation, I feel like it's a missing hole in my teeth, then I will look it out because I need it for some new reason.

15:35Hannah Fry:Exactly right. I'm going to show you a couple of examples of that in a second of how this works. But the thing is, if you put people in brain scanners and then you make them curious, you put them in this state of deprivation, essentially, where they really want to know, then the same part of your reward circuit inside your brain lights up that you would see if they were a fruit machine, right? Or if you said, would you like a bacon sandwich? Or if you get a text back from somebody that you're really, you know, flirtatiously pursuing, right? It's like, is your dopamine essentially? And what that does is it means that curiosity is a very specific form of motivation.

16:15Hannah Fry:The prize is dopamine in the end, but you shouldn't mistake the dopamine for pleasure. There's like the difference between wanting and liking, right? And those run on separate systems in your brain. And we know this actually, there's some Parkinson's patients who were put on drugs that would boost their dopamine so that they had like kind of endless motivation, but no sort of satisfaction, as it were. And what they became, they would sometimes slide into, you know, compulsive gambling or shopping or eating or whatever it was, but they weren't enjoying any of it. They were just driven to just do more and more and more and more and more of it.

16:54Hannah Fry:And that's the bit that your curiosity is doing. It's driven to find it.

16:58Michael Stevens:Right. And then you can sate your curiosity. But these people taking these drugs couldn't sate it. They just kept it. I think that explains a lot of the behavior we're seeing in old folks' homes. nowadays where they're just throwing caution to the wind gambling a lot of stds are spreading like

17:16Hannah Fry:never before have you heard about all of this no they might be on medications that are helping

17:21Michael Stevens:their parkinson's and yet are making them wild uninhibited teenagers who need to pursue these things these these delicious lifestyle treats but they can't they can't be satisfied i mean they

17:35Hannah Fry:can't be satisfied bit is not so good but aside from that knock yourselves out guys I think that's great keep it up that's great maybe use protection but nonetheless you know I think it's great I think it's great right so here's the other thing about this when you have created this gap in somebody's mind when you've created that that sort of deprivation you put them in this curious state actually what ends up happening is that you remember the thing that you learn better so your hippocampus is essentially primed. It's like, okay, I really want to know this and I'm really gonna, I'm gonna hang on to the answer that comes in.

18:09Hannah Fry:Curiosity is like this real attention spotlight that you're like, I'm really focused. I care a lot about what the answer is gonna be. But there is this shape, you know, kind of as we said with 16th century poetry, that if you know nothing about a subject at all, you're not gonna have an itch. If you know everything about a subject, you're not gonna have an itch at all. This is the Lowenstein work. You get this peak right in the middle where you know just enough to know exactly where the information is missing, which is not coincidentally where the whole like, oh, you're never going to believe what happened next.

18:40Hannah Fry:Ten weird things that psychologists want you to know, right? Yeah. It's like there's just enough in that that you're like, okay, fill the holes for me.

18:52Michael Stevens:I got to fill it. Right. That's why it's such great clickbait. Yeah, you open up that hole and then it's curiosity. that causes us to need to fill it. I need to figure this out. Oh, they say number one is really mind-blowing. What is number one? You can't just leave me hanging with this unfinished promise.

19:12Hannah Fry:Right, and that phrasing just there is different to there's something interesting in this film because it's not specific enough. You'll enjoy this. It's nowhere near specific enough. Whereas number one is mind-blowing, is quite literally a sort of what's in the box, right? What's in the envelope. It's like, it's one of those. It's like, I want to know what is inside that particular thing. Okay, so here, if you want to make somebody maximally curious, right? Here's your three steps and retain the information afterwards. Okay, so the first is that you need to open up a gap where they nearly know the answer, but they don't know.

19:49Hannah Fry:So for you, I would like you to name all seven dwarfs, right? I'll start you off. You've got Doc, Grumpy, Happy, Sleepy, and Sneezy. What are the other two? Save those first five again. Doc, Grumpy, Happy, Sleepy, Sneezy. Bashful and Cutie Patootie.

20:15Michael Stevens:No, what's... I know Bashful's one of them. You're not allowed to look it up. I'm not looking it up. Give me some wrong guesses.

20:25Hannah Fry:Cutie patootie. Okay, say the five again. Doc. Grumpy. Happy. Sleepy. Sneezy.

20:33Michael Stevens:Oh, I was going to say sneezy, but you've already listed that one. So it's bashful and... Tell you what, we'll come back to this later. Sticky.

20:42Hannah Fry:No. No.

20:45Michael Stevens:Not sticky, not cutie patootie. Isn't it like a... It's like not even an adjective. It's like, well, doc is one.

20:52Hannah Fry:You know what? I think we should come back to this later. Because I've got the answers written in the envelope.

20:56Michael Stevens:Ah, I see. Yeah, you've made this difficult. You've made me want. You've made me driven to get the answer.

21:04Hannah Fry:I have tried to. I have tried to.

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22:47Hannah Fry:so here are the three steps right you've got to open the gap where they nearly know but not quite you've got to refuse to close it so that it's not just instant gratification i'm not going to instantly tell you what the answer is and then the third thing wrong guesses actually end up making people remember the information when you finally get it way more than if you just if you just don't worry. And I think this is it. You know, we sort of gave these examples earlier of like how this is used in clickbait, but actually you can use this to this incredible effect in teaching too. Let me give you an example.

23:21Hannah Fry:Okay, so this is an example I really love, right? I can tell you your stomach lining regenerates in three days. Like how boring is that? Who cares? But I can tell you, hey, you know your stomach acid is strong enough to literally melt metal. how does it not destroy your insides? How come you're not melting from the inside out? And then get people to give me guesses and then get all the wrong answers. And then when you finally do the reveal, when you fill in that missing gap and you say, ah, it's because your stomach lining regenerates every three days quicker than it can be melted. It's basically building itself again faster than the acid can work.

24:01Hannah Fry:All of a sudden, actually, it's like it's got in there. And it's because what you've done is you have literally ripped open a hole in your brain, primed your hippocampus, motivated you to care about the answer, and then the information will end up being retained.

24:16Michael Stevens:And the wrong answer is help. Mm-hmm. Can you tell me more about why they help?

24:22Hannah Fry:I think that... So this is Lowenstein again, by the way. He did this in 1992, and he asked people which US state reaches further east

24:35Michael Stevens:or furthest east sorry do you want to make a guess yeah it's maine incorrect oh really maine is the closest to africa but the furthest reaching the furthest east uh it's curious i mean i really want to look at a map i really need to get this information because if it's if If it's not Maine, what could it be? Because I've always heard and seen, if you look at a globe, Maine is definitely closer to Africa because of the way we're actually a bit, you know, tilted.

25:12Hannah Fry:Agree.

25:13Michael Stevens:Agree, that is true. Is there some weird thing where it's actually Alaska because it crosses the dateline? Yeah. Okay.

25:21Hannah Fry:Yes, exactly. It stretches so far west that it kind of essentially wraps around. I mean, Sarah Palin, who said, I can see Russia from my window.

25:30Michael Stevens:Yeah, yeah.

25:31Hannah Fry:It's because it goes so far west that it ends up crossing the day line and ending up.

25:35Michael Stevens:Right, right. So there's part of Alaska that's actually just extremely east, according to our system of longitude. Exactly.

25:45Hannah Fry:So Lowenstein, he asked people this question, and he found that people who were told that their guess was wrong ended up both being far more curious, but also remembered the answer for longer than people who just guessed and then left it.

26:02Michael Stevens:Well, you know what? I mean, that's a case in point right there. Like, if I had just thought to myself, oh, the answer is main, I know this, then I wouldn't have thought about it again. But because you told me I was wrong, I became much more aware of a hole in my knowledge. And it's there, and I even have a good sense of the shape of that hole now. And I go, wait a second. And I didn't let us move on until I got it right.

26:26Hannah Fry:Right, right, totally. So, but this is the thing, I think, that when you are learning, it feels like wrong answers are just, you know, delaying your progress. But actually, wrong answers are making you feel the shape of the gap and driving you to want to find the right answer. As long as it is done in a way that is not too hard, not too easy. the right, if you get it exactly the right level, it's like where you get the best possible learning. Like you need to struggle a little bit because that is where your brain is kind of forcing open these gaps.

27:03Michael Stevens:This reminds me of, I think Derek Muller's doctoral thesis was on this method of teaching. And he incorporated it into his YouTube videos where he was like, people have more fun when things are pretty like easy. They say they enjoy a video, but they learn more if you present wrong answers as wrong answers. And that's why he did so many of these interviews on the street where he was like, hey, if the earth was a basketball and the moon was a tennis ball, how far apart would they be? And he showed people getting it wrong. And it made you go, oh my gosh, just tell me the answer. And people would say they were frustrated by the video.

27:45Michael Stevens:But when you tested them later, they remembered the correct answer better if you had shown them all the wrong guesses.

27:52Hannah Fry:I bet they watched longer as well.

27:54Michael Stevens:And they probably watched longer because they need to wait around for this answer. They can't just think, oh, I'm sure I know this. It's probably, I don't know, about that far. Next.

28:03Hannah Fry:Here's the thing, right? So, I mean, despite the fact that this was very unfashionable for a very long time, you know, the idea of curiosity, it is in all of us. It arrives incredibly early, this like insatiable need to fill in the gaps of information. this really gorgeous study using babies who are 11 months old. And what they do is they get a ball and they basically show the baby's a magic trick. So they have like a kind of a hidden lever, which makes it look like this ball passes through a wall. Okay. And then they give the baby an opportunity to play with this ball and other balls. The baby always chooses the magic ball.

28:39Hannah Fry:You know what? I said always as though nothing is ever 100%. The baby is way from first.

28:45Michael Stevens:We gotta make room for the babies that are like, nah, magic ball, big deal. Give me the block.

28:51Hannah Fry:Okay. So, but what they do with the ball is they take the magic ball and they start hitting it against tables, against walls, against chairs, whatever it might be. And if you change, if you change the magic trick that you show the babies and you show them where a ball floats in the air, okay, then the babies go to, gravitate towards the ball, gravitate, and then they pick it up and they drop it. So it's like they're testing their models of physics, essentially. I mean, certainly, you know, you wouldn't read like that inside of a baby brain. But that's what they're doing. They're like, here is this gap in what I thought I knew about how balls worked.

29:32Hannah Fry:And my drive is to try and fill in that gap by running experiments, essentially. They're sort of motivated to learn. And I think this is it, right? It's again, this Goldilocks effect, because if the scene is too chaotic, if the magic trick is too elaborate, they don't care. If it's too simple, if it's too easy, they don't care. But this sweet spot in the middle of where they can feel what the gap is and they believe that they can fill it. It's like they know the exact shape of this gap. Then off they go. They're just like extremely excited by it.

30:06Michael Stevens:Wow. I'm sorry. I was literally trying to think of dwarves names.

30:16Michael Stevens:Because I can't stop. It's annoying, isn't it? I feel like I should know.

30:21Hannah Fry:Isn't it annoying?

30:22Michael Stevens:And that's what you wrote in the envelope.

30:24Hannah Fry:That's what I wrote in the envelope. That has my name on it.

30:26Michael Stevens:Because I knew, I knew you would want to know. But let me tell you, I no longer want you to open the envelope. I really want to find it myself. I feel like it's in there or that I can work my way towards the answer and I need to finish this. And it's not so much that I'm uncomfortable not knowing, it's that I'm anticipating the pleasure of getting it. I got a taste by saying bashful. That made me feel like, ooh, yeah, more of that. All right, so what's the seventh one? Yeah. Let me, sorry, I just want to know, I'll be thinking about this in the background. Are there different degrees to which people are bothered by these information gaps?

31:09Michael Stevens:Like, is it a personality trait to be more upset by them and more fixated on failing them?

31:15Hannah Fry:Yes. And also, actually, your curiosity does decay as you get older. So it's the dopamine reward system that motivates you to find out more, that actually in some people, it sort of ends up dying away as time goes on. The other thing is actually, I mean, if you've got this innate drive, and as humans, we have this innate drive, it also means that it could be exploited. And essentially, this curiosity drive is the whole reason why doom scrolling works and works so incredibly well. Of course. You can see this, by the way, there's other experiments. So in 2018, OpenAI did this experiment where they, because there was a big idea for quite a long time about maybe the way to build intelligence.

32:02Hannah Fry:Maybe the fundamental aspect of our intelligence is curiosity. Actually, if you are motivated by wanting to learn information, right, rather than being motivated, but just by food or, you know, whatever other biological responses there are. If you're motivated by curiosity, maybe that's the way that you get to artificial intelligence. So OpenAI, they built these agents that was rewarded by only curiosity. And they did amazing. Like they could play Mario from scratch. They, you know, could do all kinds of things. And then somebody added in a TV in the next level, like a TV screen that just showed random static.

32:42Hannah Fry:And the agents basically sat down and never moved again. They were just like, oh, transfixed by the sort of maximally unpredictable, it's like maximally curious sort of forever state. Now, OK, you don't get that in humans because as we know in humans, we need the gap needs to have a correct size and shape for us to want to fill it. Right. But here is the thing with doom scrolling, that is what it manages to do, because there is always the promise that the next thing that you see, it's like, what is this next thing going to be? What is the next video going to show me? And then when you add to that, the fact that everybody has worked out that the algorithm just works better, people stay on your videos longer.

33:24Hannah Fry:if you also use these tricks, if you also use clickbait, if you also say you're not going to believe, number one, it's going to be mind-blowing. It's something built to exploit your curiosity drive embedded within a bigger system to exploit your curiosity drive that can just end up leaving you just there, like getting the dopamine, dopamine, dopamine, dopamine, dopamine, the sort of satiating the feeling of having filled the curiosity hole without ever having the kind of joy of actually struggling with that deprivation.

33:59Michael Stevens:Well, that's why I want to know so much about my algorithm. What equations are filling my feed? Because I feel like I would learn so much about myself. Because I think we all get different things in our feed. There isn't just one way to skin a cat, as we were saying. Different people are motivated to keep scrolling because they're getting a particular kind of content. Yeah. I wonder what it is that works on me the best because it works really, really well. And I try to be mindful of what is making me want more of these things that come up. However, yeah, it lacks the, the effort. Um, I'm just getting it for free.

34:41Michael Stevens:Um, and in fact, whenever I'm scrolling reels and one of them is a puzzle and it's something like, can you name the seven dwarves? I might give it a second of thought, and then I just say, ah, whatever, I'll revisit this. I might even screenshot it, see if I can do it later, but I'll just keep scrolling.

34:59Hannah Fry:But I think this is the thing, you know, the three stages of like really getting somebody's curiosity drive up is that you can't resolve it immediately. You have to sort of leave it. And the problem is when you're watching videos that are one minute, two minutes, whatever, it's just resolved, resolved, resolved, resolved. It kind of never, it never stays open long enough for your hippocampus to sort of actually retain any of the information of the reels that you're watching.

35:23Michael Stevens:Right, right.

35:25Hannah Fry:There's a kicker on this, which isn't very nice either. So, so Lowenstein again, this is in 2020. The thing is, is that like any appetite, right? There's, you know, your dopamine reward system, which is what's going on in your brain. Your curiosity needs to feel hungry, essentially. Like you need to kind of have that deprivation. And the problem is, is that if you are, I mean, I'm using an analogy here, but if you're effectively snacking all the time over and over and over and over again, you never get properly hungry. You never get hungry for real information. And so the real concern here is that actually, I mean, the evidence is mounting in this regard, that actually the kind of attention economy isn't just exploiting your curiosity, it's actually dampening it over time.

36:12Hannah Fry:You are less driven, less motivated to find out the sort of deep, more meaningful things that otherwise would have caught your attention because it's just so easy. It's like, you know, it's junk food, right?

36:24Michael Stevens:Right. You're not hungry long enough. Or if at all, you're just given the snacks. And it does fulfill a little bit of a drive because you don't know what's going to come next. It might be something important. It might be something funny. It might be something you can share with your friend. But it's nowhere near the kind of hunger you would get without the internet, without such accessible information where you're like, how can I solve this problem in my life? Some of them are better just logistical problems. Like how can I do this but also pick up my kids and also make sure that I go to the grocery store?

37:01Michael Stevens:Like those are all things. And once you've got assistants and AI assistants that can do it all, you're not hungry anymore. But what you're saying is that the hunger is important. Yeah, it really is.

37:14Hannah Fry:It's like you getting stuff wrong is the thing that helps you remember. The hunger is the thing that will like drive you on to be more curious. You sort of need it, unfortunately. I mean, look, food tastes better when you're hungry, right? And like curiosity feels better when you fight for it. I want to go back to that question though, that idea of like, Are you still working on dwarves, by the way?

37:40Michael Stevens:Actually, I think I figured it out.

37:42Hannah Fry:Okay.

37:43Michael Stevens:Yeah. I think, and here's what's funny. It just sort of came to me when I wasn't thinking about the dwarves, which is how this often works, because I was pretty sure it was in my brain. Now, I could be wrong, but I think the seventh one is dopey. You are correct. It's bashful and dopey. Bashful and dopey. Now, I'm pretty surprised I got that right, Because I don't think about the Seven Dwarves very often at all. No. I feel like I had a sense that it was a bit of a silly name. You know, it wasn't a normal, like, sleepy, happy. It was something that was a little, like, negative. And I was right.

38:19Michael Stevens:Dopey.

38:20Hannah Fry:Dopey. It wasn't Julie, which I think was one of your earlier guesses.

38:24Michael Stevens:Cutie Patootie.

38:26Hannah Fry:It's the ripoff of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. The pirate copy.

38:34Michael Stevens:Stinky and late.

38:36Hannah Fry:And late. Yeah. Okay. I want to go back to that idea of like, how on earth could this drive have survived when clearly it is something that would have killed many of our ancestors? And the thing is, is that while I agree with you about how humans are stand out in our curiosity, I also think that actually you do see this same reward mechanism, this drive in other creatures too. And what I'm specifically talking about here is about separating out information and reward. Right. OK, so let me let me give you an example. there's this experiment where you have a choice between two options okay um like imagine you've got two levers in front of you and both of them give the same chance of a food after five seconds okay it's like 50 50 whether you get the food you press a button 50 50 whether you get food there's no difference essentially between the two buttons except that one of them will immediately tell you whether food's coming or not right so immediately tells you whether you've won or not uh don't know you but i'd be pressing that one every time i don't want to wait i don't want to wait to find out if i won just tell me just tell me just tell me yeah right and there's a difference there because it's like it makes no difference to the reward but the information is a separate signal and humans you will not be surprised here press the information button uh yeah you know all the time so do macaques they um they they care very deeply they reliably want the information tell me when the food's coming.

40:10Hannah Fry:Birds also, they want the information. Goldfish, they don't care. Goldfish. Really? Doesn't make any difference. They're not interested in the extra information. Thank you very much. This doesn't make any difference to them. This is sort of an indication that you are seeing information as its own reward in some animals and others, right? It has evolved in some animals.

40:31Michael Stevens:Right, so somewhere between goldfish and macaques, information as a reward emerges.

40:37Hannah Fry:Yeah, information is a reward. So we know there is this evolutionary selection for it or an evolutionary drive, let's say, that has like presented it as an advantage. And just going back to the idea of like, you know, people surely died when they were crossing the oceans. I mean, I think there are different ways to look at this. There's back to Augustine around 400 AD. this is when he was saying that curiosity was awful uh he talks about how there was a mangled corpse by the roadside and people came out to look at it right it's sort of rubbernecking you know

41:15Michael Stevens:but um yeah whatever like a morbid curiosity morbid curiosity exactly and he writes it was they they

41:23Hannah Fry:wanted to see to be made sad and to turn pale and this was one of the reasons why he thought it was a sin because it was like, you know, why would you, why would you be drawn to this? But also this is like hauling you towards danger, you know, trying to like go towards a creature of the same species as you who has died in a bad way. Surely not a very good thing. And yet maybe it actually is, maybe it actually is. So there's a fish called the guppy who has a behaviour that's really similar to this what it does when a predator turns up to go and eat the guppy certain certain guppies will leave the safety of their shoal and swim over to inspect the predator crazy what are they doing

42:12Michael Stevens:like this seems wild well it seems like a bad idea for them but is it a good idea for the larger

42:20Hannah Fry:school of guppies wow the thing is is that i mean they do the sort of the the um the kind of tail end rather than the business end. They're not sort of like, they're not kind of crazy. They're not suicidal.

42:32Michael Stevens:Okay. Okay.

42:33Hannah Fry:But the thing is, is that actually the guppies that went and inspected were actually not just sort of helping the wider school. They were less likely to be eaten than the ones that hung back because the thing is, is that they know where the predator is, right? The predator's lost the element of surprise. Right. And actually what ends up happening is the predator itself ends up just leaving the hunt. Just being like, okay, well, I've been spotted. Not going to bother with those ones then. So actually reduce the chance of being eaten for them and everyone else.

43:08Michael Stevens:Right. So there's many advantages here. Because I would say those morbid curiosities we feel, you can kind of justify it as saying, well, we want to learn about how that accident happened and what happened to that missing person. Because it in some way is like a vaccinated danger for us. We can explore it, but it's safe. It's just a podcast, and yet it allows us to experience things and almost feel more prepared for them. Right.

43:40Hannah Fry:And you know, there's actually evidence for exactly that. So during the early weeks of 2020, the pandemic, it turned out that people who scored highly in morbid curiosity, so we're talking about horror fans, We're talking about people who love watching true crime, people who sort of, you know, all kinds of like morbid curiosity, looking at pictures of dead people, all of that kind of thing. They ended up scoring higher on psychological resilience. They were less distressed than everybody else. And like, it's almost as though maybe there is something about we're kind of rehearsing. It's exactly as you described, right?

44:21Hannah Fry:Like, okay, well, let's see what's going on there. So we make sure that the same thing doesn't happen to us.

44:25Michael Stevens:So the benefits outweighed the costs.

44:28Hannah Fry:Exactly. Exactly right. Exactly right. And I think this is it, actually. Just going back to the point that you made right at the top about how humans have this drive, this curiosity to explore elsewhere. We are still doing it. You know, in 2009, NASA ran this competition for people to name. It's Mars Rover. and it ended up being this sixth grader from Kansas, in fact, called Clara Ma. Lenexa in Kansas. Do you know where that is?

45:02Michael Stevens:Yeah, Lenexa. Yeah, of course. I didn't live very far from there.

45:06Hannah Fry:If I've pronounced that incorrectly, imagine all of the other words that you went there.

45:09Michael Stevens:I'm a Stilwell slash Overland Park kid. So Lenexa, they were the big city folk to me.

45:16Hannah Fry:Okay. Okay. the sophisticated ones.

45:20Michael Stevens:But still, we're brothers and sisters. Of course. Of course.

45:24Hannah Fry:I think this is such a lovely story, right? They allowed the public to name it. I think Boaty McBoatface has ruined that forevermore for everyone.

45:31Michael Stevens:Yeah, it's hard to beat that one.

45:33Hannah Fry:It is hard to beat that one. Anyway, she suggested the word curiosity and she wrote this really gorgeous essay, 250 words. And she said that curiosity is an everlasting flame that burns in everybody's mind. the thing that drives us through ordinary days. How gorgeous is that?

45:51Michael Stevens:That's what it is.

45:52Hannah Fry:She got to sign her name on the rover as well.

45:54Michael Stevens:I didn't know that Curiosity was named by a Kansan who said such beautiful things about Curiosity. That's great.

46:01Hannah Fry:Isn't that lovely? I mean, maybe she saw one of the signs at school, right? Right?

46:07Michael Stevens:It's all been worth it.

46:08Hannah Fry:It's all been worth it. And I think that's it. This thing has the most incredible arc, something that has been called disease. The thing that like was the, you know, the myths were written about as like the moral of the story was to avoid being curious. You know, it's the thing that will make you electrocute yourself, drive you to electrocute yourself, even if it hurts. And I think actually it's just really lovely that this is the thing that's now on Mars, kind of wandering around. It sort of strapped it to nuclear battery and let a 12-year-old name in and off we go. How fitting.

46:43Michael Stevens:It's a wonderful story, by the way. I love hearing a story about any Kansan child who did something amazing. But I've been doing a lot of research on the history of what it means to be cool, specifically the word coolness and why people 100, 1 ,000 years ago certainly had status and all of that. But the word cool never existed. And I'm starting to think, and I'll tease this for a future episode because we should do one on coolness. I wonder if the concept of being cool might have also emerged for the same social and cultural reasons that curiosity became so important, that even children are being taught it and are sharing its importance.

47:28Hannah Fry:Are you suggesting that I go down to the school tomorrow with a sign that just says coolness on it?

47:34Michael Stevens:Because I will. Actually, I am suggesting that. I think that at schools, you know, we have the signs that say respect, compassion, curiosity. There should be one that says cool because we live in a society where it's not just where do you fall in the aristocracy hierarchy, but it's like, what do you have as an innovative thought or idea? Like we contribute in different ways than we used to. And so being curious and being cool, being autonomous in ways that bring new things, new information, not just existing status, but new information. We live in this like time now where information is the currency.

48:16Michael Stevens:Like, of course, we're going to find that curious people and cool people take up a lot of our time.

48:25Hannah Fry:Well, you watching this podcast, listening to this podcast, you are both cool and curious. That's right. You are forever part of our club. So thank you so much for listening. Tell you what, we're going to have to come up with one head of a clickbait title for this one, aren't we? Imagine that, talking about the theory of clickbait and then not doing a clickbait title. It's going to be punchy. But anyway, you can email us as ever, the rest is science at gohanger.com. And we will see you next time. Bye.

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