Perry Zurn & Dani S. Bassett | Curious Minds: The Power of Connection | Talks at Google
132Perry Zurn and Dani S. Bassett discuss their book "Curious Minds: The Power of Connection". Curious about something? Google it. But is curiosity simply information seeking? According to "Curious Minds", what gets left out in the conventional understanding of curiosity are the relations between ideas and between people. Curiosity, say Perry Zurn and Dani Bassett, is a practice of connection. It connects ideas into networks of knowledge and it connects the knowers themselves, both to the knowledge they seek and to each other.
Perry and Dani—identical twins who write that their book “represents the thought of one mind and two bodies”—harness their respective expertise in the humanities and the sciences (specifically, philosophy and neuroscience) to identify three distinct styles of curiosity: the butterfly, who collects stories, creating loose knowledge networks; the hunter, who hunts down secrets or discoveries, creating tight networks; and the dancer, who takes leaps of creative imagination, creating loopy networks.
They go on to explain that many of us are all three types but to differing degrees, and that those degrees can change over the course of our lives and even daily, depending on the task at hand. What’s more, they suggest that a true understanding of what happens in the curious brain can pave the way for a curiosity-centric education—an inclusive one that embraces everyone’s innate style of learning. Just think of the possibilities such a paradigm shift would engender.
Get the book here: https://goo.gle/3KiMnHS.
Perry Zurn is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at American University and the author of Curiosity and Power: The Politics of Inquiry. Dani S. Bassett is the J. Peter Skirkanich Professor of Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania and received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2014.
Moderated by Sanders Kleinfeld.
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