Arthur Brooks: belief

Transcript context

…Is just wanting to do things a sufficient reason to turn away from these goals of happiness and meaning of life? If it is, can’t we multiply that example many times and get people pretty far away from happiness and meaning of life? Maybe that’s why the young people don’t listen so much. I think that the reason that curiosity is important, because curiosity is ultimately a basic—I should say interest is a basic positive emotion that leads to happiness. It also leads to longer, better lives. There’s two streams of research that support this. The first is the work on the science of emotion, including the neuroscience of emotion. Now, this is not the area that I was trained in. I was trained as a traditional behavioral economist, social scientist. When I came back to academia seven years ago, I really substantially had to retrain in neuroscience because this is the direction that the fields are going. The interesting work on curiosity and interest is it’s one of the seven basic emotions, and it’s a positive emotion at that. Human beings in the late Pleistocene, 250,000 years ago, when the modern brain was more or less what it is today, the members of the species Homo sapiens living in bands of 30 to 50 kin-based hierarchical individuals, the ones that had the most kids were the ones who learned the most. The result of it is that there was a lot of positivity, there was a lot of cognitive and emotional reward that came from learning new things. How does that reach us today? You want to know the score. You want to learn a new thing. You want to learn a new skill. You love that. That’s part of an important life. Now, the second part of the research that reinforces this is the research from the Harvard Study of Adult Development that my colleagues have been conducting for 85 years up at Harvard that has been following the same cohort of people since the late 1930s. The original cohort had JFK in it and Ben Bradlee, and the Boston Strangler, and a bunch of people that didn’t make it through to the end of the study. The people who are still alive, one of the things that they all have in common is that they’re lifelong learners and they love to learn. This is a strategy. Curiosity is not an idle thing. It might kill the cat under the wrong circumstances. We even in the Catholic faith, we have a word for idle curiosity or for the curiosity that hurts your soul, it’s called concupiscence. Have you ever heard that word, Tyler? Sure.…

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