Translator: Tanya Cushman Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
So when I was young, my family moved around a lot
and I went to five schools in seven years,
and one of them was this school in Atlantic City,
a Catholic school in Atlantic City, New Jersey,
in a neighborhood called Duck Town,
where decades before, the guys would slick their hair back in DAs,
like the Fonz.
And this is about half my class - we're missing all the boys -
but that's me,
and that's my sixth-grade teacher,
Sister Raquel.
Now, Sister Raquel was not like the other nuns
who would make us "sit with the Devil in the coat room"
if we acted up in class.
She wasn't the Flying Nun,
and she wasn't Maria from the Sound of Music;
we were not joining hands and singing "raindrops on roses."
But something remarkable happened to me in her classroom.
Sister Raquel would have people come visit us,
and these were regular people from the community.
We had a baker and a cop and a doctor.
We would be "encouraged" to ask them questions
about their lives and about their jobs.
One time, a girl came, and she wasn't much older than us,
and it was a real shock to us
because months before,
her father had shot up the whole family and killed himself.
She had been blinded by a bullet to the head,
but she'd survived.
I felt in our classroom, she was wary of a room full of strangers,
and we were wary of someone who had suffered so much.
What could we possibly ask her?
But someone got started, up in the front,
and asked, "Are you back in school yet?"
And she said, "No."
Then somebody else asked, "Did you have to move out of your home?"
And she said, "Yes."
So my turn came, and I was really nervous,
but I was a voracious reader,
and I decided to ask her about a book that she held clutched to her chest.
So I said something like, "Do you like to read?"
And she nodded.
And I thought, okay, that's going to be that.
But then she spoke up, and she said,
"It's hard to read now because I'm just learning Braille."
And I had never felt Braille,
so I asked her, "Can I feel it?"
On the page were little bumps,
and as soon as I had felt it,
all 38 other kids rushed up to the front of the room -
Sister Raquel couldn't stop them -
and surrounding her,
we felt the pages of her book and asked more questions.
I remember that moment:
in our curiosity, we had made her one of us.
So curiosity is a funny thing.
In the Classical era,
someone who was curious was considered a hazard to society.
You can think of Pandora.
Pandora was given a box of special gifts by the gods
and told, "Never open the box."
But women and gods telling them what to do do not have a great history,
and so Pandora, like any of the rest of us,
opened the box.
And when she did, out flew all the evils of the world.
Only hope was left inside.
The Christians had, I would say, an even crazier view of curiosity.
To them it was a sin, a moral vice
that started with Eve ripping off the Tree of Knowledge
and went straight through
to the early scientists, who were condemned as heretics.
But a culture or a company or a classroom
that represses curiosity suppresses inquiry.
And we know that when no one asks questions, no progress can be made:
the status quo remains.
So it wasn't until a little bit later
when attitudes started to shift about curiosity,
that these attitudes actually changed.
Poster boy for curiosity, Leonardo da Vinci.
I think of him as a proto-hippie
because da Vinci felt free to not just feel curious
but to act on that curiosity.
And how did he do it?
He didn't rely on the ancient texts,
so he observed the world for himself with an open mind,
and he turned his attention, with care, to a staggering range of topics.
I couldn't even tell you all of them,
but it starts with aerodynamics and straight on through to zoology.
(Laughter)
I'm a word nerd,
so I did have to look up the etymology of "curiosity."
"Curiosity" comes from Latin, "cura."
Cura means care,
and it's the same root as curator,
one who looks after obligation or objects with care.
It was this caring accumulation of knowledge,
with people collecting objects in elaborate curio cabinets
and recording their findings,
that made such a difference in curiosity.
And really,
they were admired as having what was known as "a habit of curiosity."
So what is curiosity?
We've heard a lot about it today.
Researchers curious about curiosity
have found that it's located deep in the center of the brain
that's connected to our self-preservation
as well as our neural reward system.
So this is great news:
we are wired for our curiosity to protect us and give us pleasure.
And one pair of neuroscientists have even coined a new term for us humans,
so now we're not just carnivores or omnivores or herbivores,
but we are "infovores."
Luckily, my husband is an infovore too.
So about three years ago or so,
he came home with an idea -
after a very rigorous yoga class -
for a book.
He said, "Why don't we go
straight to people who've achieved great things and ask them,
How do you do what you do,
and how do you do it so well?"
So my caudate region must have lit up like a disco ball.
We were so excited, and we got started right away,
and we made up a long list of all the people we were curious about.
We wanted to represent all of human endeavor.
We did a high five after each person said yes.
We had the dog whisperer.
We have the head of a billion-dollar business.
We have a civil rights activist.
We have a hostage negotiator.
We had a tennis champion and an opera diva
and an astronomer
who started the world's largest search for extraterrestrial life.
And our mission at first was to find out,
What was unique about these people?
But after thousands, literally thousands, of hours of research and conversation,
we saw their similarities,
and that included their curiosity
and their habit of curiosity,
which was tenacious and focused on their area of interest,
and this, we discovered,
was one of the most decisive factors
of their success and their happiness.
They had made an art form out of their curiosity.
So engaging with these people, for us,
was like being part of some giant curiosity feedback loop.
We were so curious about these people
whose curiosity had led them to follow,
to go through, take big risks
and get great achievement,
and in turn, we hoped,
by writing about their stories,
we could encourage other people to follow their curiosity,
to take big risks and do great things.
We know that we live in a complex world,
and that we've got a lot of potential and a lot of problems to solve.
The good news is that we don't have to make ourselves be curious;
we just have to let ourselves be curious.
So it doesn't matter if you're a scientist
or a sculptor or a CEO
or a sixth-grader, like I was when I met that girl.
You want to ask yourself,
Am I following my curiosity?
Because it's those people who follow their curiosity
and cultivate a habit of curiosity
who make a difference.
So ask more, read more, think more,
try more,
debate your ideas and share them
with an open heart and with hope -
the last thing left in Pandora's box.
Thank you.
(Applause)