Hi everyone, I’m Inés and right now I’m in Berlin Germany working on a really exciting
project for Curious Minds - and I’ve got a question for you - what does curiosity mean
to you?
[Intro - Raw Curiosity #15] Anyway, as you may be able to guess just from
the title of my channel, curiosity is something that’s very important to me.
I want people to feel things when they watch my videos, and generally what I want them
to feel is the joy of learning something new, maybe that Eureka moment when you put two
and two together of something you didn’t know before, or a sense of curiosity where
you just want to go and discover lots of new things.
Now Merck recently conducted a study with scientists and innovators where they asked
them whether they thought curiosity was essential or not in making new discoveries, and 80% thought
that it was, but only 20% of them self-identified as curious, and obviously that’s a worrying
discrepancy.
However, I personally don’t think that curious is something that you are or aren’t, it’s
like a muscle that you can train and make yourself more curious, so that is what we’re
exploring today.
There are four dimensions to curiosity: creativity in problem solving, distress tolerance, openness
to other ideas and inquisitiveness, which I explored across four videos with several
talented scientists and innovators.
I explored the first one with Simon Clark, whom you may know already!
SIMON: “The worse case scenario happened and it wasn’t that bad”
INÉS: *laughs* Exactly!
We talked about creativity which is one of my favourite topics personally and one of
the things we did was to attempt to come up with a solution to a lateral thinking riddle.
INÉS: “Picture the scene, Romeo and Juliet, they’re both dead, there is water, there
is broken glass and the window is open but not broken, what’s happened?”
as well as talk about how he incorporates creativity into his PhD work and his YouTube
channel.
The second dimension is distress tolerance which I explored with Samuel Cunha.
Interestingly, the production of this video also involved overcoming distress tolerance:
Samuel’s first language isn’t English and he personally preferred to give his answers
in Brazilian Portuguese, Samuel: It motivates me, I try to make them
happier, more fun, more spontaneous! so in order to get a natural answer, I spoke
with him in Spanish in between takes, and there was also an interpreter on set to make
sure that he was able to communicate easily with everyone who couldn’t understand Portuguese!
The third dimension of curiosity is openness to new ideas, in essence, being able to view
things from different perspectives.
I explored this with Eva Amsen and Shigang He.
There’s actually a technique known as the Six Thinking Hats which can help you to view
situations from at least 6 different perspectives.
For myself, I’m usually an optimistic person, so I do try to force myself to see things
as well.
And last but not least, the fourth dimension is inquisitiveness whose importance I explored
with Jakob Futurjanski - we’re not always looking for answers but also for questions.
We talked about Jakob’s approach to questioning… and we asked a lot of questions!
[Merck insert] Can clouds be moody?
Can bugs be philosophical?
Can cars be invisible?
Can hair be farmed?
Can trees be mindful?
Can bees be inventors?
Can technology be caring?
Can brains be connected?
Can food be downloaded?
Can bushes be heard?
Can apples be catalysts?
Can bricks be brainy?
Can wasps be artists?
Can water be clothes?
Can plants be entertainers?
Whoa!
That was a lot of questions!
Anyway, I really hope you enjoyed this quick introduction - if you’re *curious* about
this project, you can follow the links in the description to see Merck’s interactive
program - there’s a Curiosity test which you can take, a report and study you can read,
the four videos we made you can watch and some activities for you to play around and
train your curiosity today.
Thank you so much to Merck for letting me be a part of such a fun campaign, and as always,
thank you so much for watching me and I’ll see you in the next one!
Bye!