Aha moments - the link between curiosity and serendipity

This week, I’ve been curious about curiosity. 

Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and American University have measured different types of curiosity and found two distinct archetypes: hunters and busybodies. 

Whereas the busybody type jumps from topic to topic and forms loosely connected knowledge networks, the hunter type connects closely related issues to form tightly clustered networks that fill knowledge gaps. Curiosity occurs on a spectrum, and most people practice both styles of curiosity, although they may have tendencies towards one way or another. 

By monitoring Wikipedia browsing habits, the research itself has taken a novel approach to the way that curiosity is measured (you can read all about that here). It’s findings have also identified a potential tool for improving education and overall wellbeing. 

Curiosity´s connection to wellbeing

Curiosity is a two-way street: consumption and curation. Consumption, or how we gather information, is the focus of the Penn/American research, but that’s only half the story. Once the information is collected, curiosity guides us into shaping it for our satisfaction. In other words, it’s not just about how you look for things but how you hold onto things for different purposes. 

If you think about when you read a book and all the wonderful insights you glean. The feeling associated with finding a piece of information that resonates with you profoundly impacts wellbeing – I like to call these aha moments – the emotional response when your understanding crystalizes. You discover a little bit more about yourself and the world around you.

Read here about how the world around us shapes our perspectives.

However, how do you hold onto the insights from that book that really interest you? Your curiosity extends beyond the initial consumption of the ideas to curation. This could be for all kinds of reasons—to come back later, share with the world, or reference something you are creating. You extend the emotional satisfaction from the aha moment by shaping that information into something you can put your mark on, be it a memory, a note, or a well-crafted tweet. 

While there’s no doubt of the positive impact of consuming and curating information, what happens when you can’t retrieve that information? Your memory fails, you lose your notes, your tweet disappears so far down your timeline that it’s never seen again, and your original curiosity was all for nothing. There may be a different emotional response, one of frustration or fatigue, that negatively affects wellbeing.

The good news is that by understanding how we find information and shape it for different purposes, we can design for it—create tools that actively stretch and strengthen the curiosity muscle. We can encourage people to find and manage their findings in a way that enables curiosity and allows it to continue to flow, benefiting all kinds of applications.

And when we do this, we’ll see the true impact on wellbeing and emotional satisfaction.

Hunome speeds up our sense of aha moments and lets the multidimensional perspectives inspire us. At times, you stumble across astonishing thought connections. We call this assisted serendipity.