Learning & thinking · a life skill
Deliberate Curiosity Lists
chase the questions you half know
Curiosity is strongest about things you half know. You know enough to have a guess, but not enough to be sure. For two to four weeks you keep a running list, rate each question twice, and spend your sittings in that half-known middle. Every look-up starts with a guess, and a week later the wrong guesses get quizzed first.
- Moderate to start
- High impact
- Learn it in 2-4 weeks
- Two ratings per question
The dashed curve is the shape Kang and colleagues fitted to their students' ratings, drawn to show where it peaks. The dots are one person's list.
Two to four weeks
Try it now.
One note on your phone, three sittings a week of about twenty minutes, and a quiz each weekend.
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Keep the list running
Every question that crosses your mind goes on the note the moment it does, with the date. Aim for a few a day, not a perfect one.
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Rate each question twice
How curious are you, 1 to 7? And how sure are you already: nothing, a hunch, about half, nearly, or sure?
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Chase from the middle
At each sitting, take the questions you half know first, most curious first. Three is plenty for twenty minutes.
Know nothing about it? Read one paragraph of background, then rate it again. Already sure? Check it in thirty seconds or drop it. -
Guess before you look, and mark it
Write your guess in the note, then look it up, then write right or wrong beside it. The wrong ones are the most useful.
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A week later, quiz yourself
Read each chased question and answer it before you look, starting with the ones you guessed wrong.
Watch the ratings move. A question you knew nothing about often jumps in curiosity once you've read a little. That jump is the half-known middle forming.
Place your questions
Rate each one twice and see where it lands.
Each question goes on the field by how curious you are and how sure you already are. The panel lists the next three to chase and, once you've marked guesses, the order for next week's quiz.
Your field
Chase next
Next week's quiz
Nothing you type is saved or sent anywhere. It's gone when you leave the page, so copy the list into your own note.
Why the middle
Curiosity peaked at half-sure, and it paid off most after a wrong guess.
Min Jeong Kang and colleagues at Caltech, among them George Loewenstein and Colin Camerer, ran three experiments with trivia questions. Each time, students read a question, guessed the answer, rated their curiosity from 1 to 7, and said how confident they were in the guess. Only then did they see the answer.
Curiosity was low when students had no idea and low when they were sure. It was highest in between. When a second group returned 11 to 16 days later, they recalled the answers they had guessed wrong better the more curious they had been. And when answers cost something, a token from a short supply or a wait of up to 25 seconds, students spent more on the questions they were curious about.
The honest limits: these were small groups of university students, the questions were trivia, and the recall test had twelve people. The studies show where curiosity sits and what it goes with, not that rating your list will change your memory by a set amount.
Where curiosity sits · 19 students, 40 questions
Plotted against confidence, curiosity made a hump. For three quarters of the students, its peak fell between 45% and 55% sure.
What stuck · 12 students, 11 to 16 days later
For answers they had guessed wrong, recall rose with curiosity, from their least curious third of questions to their most.
What people paid · 30 students
With 25 tokens for 50 questions, or a wait for each answer, spending followed curiosity for 28 of the 30.
The idea
Why it works.
Curiosity comes from a gap you can see: you know enough to notice what's missing. Know nothing and there's no gap to feel. Know it all and the gap is closed. The half-known middle is where the pull is strongest, so it's where an evening's chasing goes furthest.
The guess turns the look-up into a test. A wrong guess you cared about is a surprise, and surprises are what you remember. The quiz a week later checks whether it really stayed.
When it goes wrong
Habits that help.
- Rate fast. Both ratings are gut calls. Thinking hard about "how sure am I" is a sitting's worth of time spent on the list instead of the questions.
- Grow a gap on purpose. A question you rated "nothing" is often a 2 for curiosity. One paragraph of background can turn it into a 5.
- Mark wrong as wrong. "Sort of right" hides the surprise. If the answer changed what you thought, it was wrong.
- Let the list shrink. Questions you rated low a week ago and still don't care about can go. A long list of shrugs makes the good ones hard to find.
Practise this in HourLife.
In Someday: Ideas that show their age. A parking lot for ideas you're not ready to act on. Review it monthly and turn the ones that last into goals, tasks, or desires.
