In Assessing Children’s Learning, Mary Jane Drummond tells the story of Jason.

Jason is seven and a half. He’s been at school for nearly three years. Now he’s taking a maths test in the school hall with the rest of his class.

Out of thirty-six questions, Jason gets one correct.

Jason hasn’t learnt much maths, Drummond says. But he’s learnt quite a bit about how to be a good pupil:

‘He has learnt how to take a test. His answers are written neatly, with the sharpest of pencils. When he reverses a digit and sees a mistake, he crosses it out tidily. He places his answers on the line or in the box as instructed…’

Jason doesn’t understand a thing on the paper, but he knows he can’t get angry and turn the table over. He can’t shout. He can’t speak to the child next to him.

He knows he’s sitting a maths test, and he knows he has to write numbers.

What Jason has really learnt

Exams, as Jason has shown us, breed compliance.

I used to lead a team of exam invigilators. It was only when I found myself standing through my tenth assembly on exam regulations that it occurred to me what a strange ritual exams are:

Silence.

No communication of any kind.

No phones. No writing on your arm. Clear pencil case. You’re recognised by a candidate number, not your name.

Why go to such extremes?

Because pass or fail, you do so on your own merit. In that exam hall, there can be no excuses. No unfair advantages.

And the stakes are real.

In 2015, England’s Department for Education announced that ‘knuckling down and succeeding in school puts an average of £140,000 in a young person’s back pocket.’

(How much of a difference does ‘knuckling down’ at school really make? I looked at what the data actually shows in my previous post.)

By 2021, inflation had struck: the DfE estimated that gaining one grade higher across a full set of GCSEs was linked to around £200,000 more in lifetime earnings. The conclusion? Develop new policies ‘to help pupils achieve better GCSE grades’.

For the DfE, exams are the focus. They drive policy – and the rules ensure a level playing field.

Sure, there are concessions. Extra time for pupils who need it. A separate room if sitting the exam in a hall would be too much. Different coloured paper, different sized scripts.

All carefully designed to make exams appear scrupulously fair. There can be no claim that the odds were stacked against you. If you fail maths, that must mean you’re a failure in maths.

What other explanation could there be?

I’m bottom set in maths too

I recently taught a lesson to a class of 14-year-olds. In the best pedagogical tradition, I spoke for an hour and they learnt none of it.

One of the students put her hand up:

‘Sir, are we bottom set?’

She’d nailed it.

For those unfamiliar: in many secondary schools in England, kids are sorted into classes by ability – based on previous test results. This class hadn’t done well on theirs. Research shows that having a lower household income or special educational need is a powerful predictor of those who end up in the bottom set, regardless of ability.

I didn’t want to answer in front of the class. I told her to stay back at the end if she wanted to talk about it.

I was hoping she’d forget. She didn’t.

‘I’m bottom set in maths, too,’ was all she said before heading off to lunch.

Not, I’m in the bottom set, but I am bottom set.

A couple of weeks earlier, in my first lesson with the group, another student told me she was stupid. It was one of the first things she said to me, as if preparing me for disappointment.

You’ll just be a McDonald’s cooker, just flip patties

These are not unusual moments. Any teacher in a comprehensive school will recognise them. What’s frightening is how early the process begins.

Eleanore Hargreaves, Laura Quick and Denise Buchanan at University College London followed 23 children labelled ‘low attaining’ from the age of seven.

Saffa loved art – learning about pointillism was her favourite thing at school.

Did that mean she’d rather do art than maths each morning?

No – art would become ‘quite meaningless,’ she said. ‘Because you have to do plus and take away and division and stuff.’

At seven, she’d already learnt which subjects counted and which didn’t. The curriculum hierarchy had overridden her passions.

She also knew the stakes. If you didn’t listen in class, ‘You’ll just be a McDonald’s cooker, just flip patties. You will be unsuccessful.’

And when she had to leave her friends to join a younger class for maths, she called it ‘The walk of shame.’

The children understood that the way to succeed was through what the researchers called ‘compliant hard work’: listening, concentrating, doing what you’re told.

Bob, who was struggling himself, prescribed the same medicine for a classmate who wasn’t doing well. What should the teacher do? ‘Let her stay for her whole lunchtime… Work!’

But compliance wasn’t protecting them. Jake worried that struggling children would be told: ‘Oh you’re bad at mathematics, oh you’re bad at English… Oh you’re not smart.’

Chrystal felt that children like her would end up alone: ‘no-one cares’ because ‘they have no friends to stand up for them’.

Ben dreaded passing the headteacher’s office, terrified they’d call him in and tell him he had to go down a class. The fear existed only in his head – but stayed there across several terms.

Neymar hid in the toilets to avoid a maths test, despite how disgusting he found the smell. When the teacher found him, he complained of a tummy ache.

All except two said school was boring.

Seven years old. Already ranking themselves. Already afraid.

Already convinced that hard work was the answer – inside a system that had already decided they weren’t good enough.

Stop napping!

These children’s experiences don’t happen in a vacuum. They’re produced by a system that has steadily constricted around what can be measured.

In the US, social studies, art, music and physical education have all been squeezed to make room for tested subjects. Even time spent on science – supposedly a core subject – has decreased by a third to make room for English and maths.

The pressure of standardised testing was so great that one school superintendent stopped kindergarteners from napping. Another school cut lunch to less than fifteen minutes.

In England, Alice Bradbury and colleagues found that children as young as five are being grouped by ability based on phonics knowledge. And it intensifies as high-stakes SATs approach at 10–11. They surveyed 288 primary headteachers. 35% agreed that ‘SATs mean we have to group by ability’ in English. In maths, this rose to 47%.

Several heads were uncomfortable with this. One said: ‘Pupils get into a psyche of failure because they’ve always been in the bottom set… You’re just written off.’

Another felt ability grouping was necessary so that the children would learn to cope with the test pressure, but said: ‘I worry about the effect this has on children’s maths mindsets and it goes against everything I believe in.’

But they felt they had no choice.

The measurement becomes the purpose

It’s impossible to put a date on the beginning of mass education in England, but 1862 was a significant year: Viscount Robert Lowe’s Revised Code.

Schools would receive government funding based on how many children passed tests in reading, writing and arithmetic. Inspectors would visit, examine the pupils, and the grant rose or fell according to the results.

When their salary depended on it, what did the teachers do?

They taught to the test.

Matthew Arnold – Victorian England’s most celebrated poet, who also spent 35 years as a schools inspector – watched it happen: ‘it is now found possible, by ingenious preparation, to get children through the examination in reading, writing and ciphering, without their really knowing how to read, write or cipher.’ (It would be cool if kids used to learn codebreaking, but cipher here just means maths.)

Arnold could see it coming.

He warned that tying school grants to a minimum test standard ‘must inevitably concentrate the teacher’s attention on the means of producing this minimum and not simply on the good instruction of his school. The danger to be guarded against is the mistake of treating these two… as if they were identical.’

The original idea of a good schooling would be forgotten. Passing exams would become a good education.

Five years later, the vote was extended to the working classes. Lowe announced: ‘we must educate our masters.’ Now the working classes could vote according to their beliefs, it was imperative they hold the right kind of beliefs.

The Revised Code was eventually abandoned. But the instinct behind it – measure children, fund accordingly, trust the numbers – never went away.

As psychologist Donald T. Campbell put it over a century later: ‘The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.’

In schools, no social indicator is more powerful than exams.

We’ve built a system around measuring children, and the measurement has swallowed everything else. The curriculum narrows to fit what’s tested. Children are sorted by their results. Teachers who value curiosity and creativity find there’s no room for either.

Who’s failing the ‘low attainers’?

It is not the teachers who are failing Saffa, Ben and Neymar. The teachers are keeping seven-year-olds in over break to catch up when they’d probably rather be having a cup of tea in the staffroom.

Headteachers are grouping students by ability to prepare for high-stakes testing at age 11. They believe they’re doing the best for the students, often against their own instincts to protect them.

Exams consistently favour those from wealthier backgrounds – as I explored in my previous post. In every one of the 19 countries where the PISA data allowed a comparison, wealthier students who didn’t believe in the value of hard work outperformed poorer students who saw themselves as gritty – by a wide margin.

From government ministers to classroom teachers, everyone agrees that these inbuilt biases are wrong and that we must do everything we can to correct them.

But who deals with the fallout when the kids realise the system has placed them on the bottom rung of the academic ladder?

Not the government ministers.

What if nothing works because exams are designed to discriminate?

What if the main effect of everything we do to correct the gap – grouping by prior attainment, extra work over break, intervention classes, all the mindset programmes – is to form an identity in low attainers as low attainers?

It’s such a strange system that, at some point, it stops feeling like a design fault and starts to feel like a design feature.

Someone left a comment:

A child’s success in life is overwhelmingly determined by the family they come from.

Wealthy, socially-politically connected, educated, higher IQ parents. Born into a family culture of discipline and thoughtfulness.

Advancing in young adulthood on the family wealth cushion, that grants that child the security, freedom, time, and informational access to fly above the mean survival grind, …..

An individual child’s innate characteristics, or how much they’re able to “bootstrap” themselves by self-aware conscientious effort and psychological conditioning (with or without institutional education) has some impact, in some cases.

But it is NOT the overarching life success determinant for the overwhelming majority of children.

So, is the commenter right?

Getting curious about grit and growth mindset

Recently, schools have been pushing ‘grit’ – a concept popularised by psychologist Angela Duckworth, that is usually taken to mean persistence. How hard are you willing to work at something before you give up?

Before that, schools were all about Carol Dweck’s growth mindset: success comes by believing that your academic ability is malleable rather than fixed. You can improve your intelligence by working at it.

In the OECD’s PISA questionnaire, they survey hundreds of thousands of kids from across the globe. As well as testing for achievement in mathematics, reading and science, they ask about the kids’ persistence (which I equated with grit), growth mindset and curiosity.

My question: which has the strongest association with test scores?

Crunching the numbers

Over 140,000 kids across nineteen countries were asked about all three ‘social and emotional skills’ (as the OECD call them).

In that post, I ranked the top 10% in each trait as if they were countries. We’ll come back to this later. Here, I want to show the results a bit differently. If you want the full methodological detail on how I handled the PISA data, it’s in the last post. The same caveats apply here.

Let’s take the top 10% of students in grit (or growth mindset, or curiosity). What are their chances of being in the top 10% in one of the tests – reading, maths or science – versus those in the bottom 10% for grit?

This is called an ‘odds ratio’.

There are about 140,000 kids in our sample. 14,000 of those are in the top 10% in any test result. Let’s make up some numbers to show how odds ratios work.

Imagine that out of the top 14,000 students in maths, 4,000 of these are in the top 10% of grit versus 2,000 in the bottom 10% of grit. This gives us a ratio of 2. Top-10% grit students are twice as likely as those lowest on grit to be top scorers.

The baseline is obviously 1. If grit has no effect on test score, you’ll have the same number from the top 10% in grit as the bottom 10% in grit.

Anything below 1 means that it’s better to have a lower grit score.

Anything above 1 means grit (or growth mindset or curiosity) wins out.

So, how do our gritty, growth mindset and curious students compare across the three subjects?

It’s good to be gritty. You’re between 50% and 80% more likely to top-score in maths, reading or science if you’re in the top 10% for grit than someone in the bottom 10% for grit.

Even better, though, to have a growth mindset: you’re twice as likely to ace the tests than someone with very low growth mindset.

Best of all is to be curious.

Those who are top in curiosity are between 3 and 4 times more likely to be found in the top 10% of the test scores than those who are lowest in curiosity.

Case closed. Why push grit or growth mindset when you could focus on curiosity instead?

But was I ignoring something with a far bigger impact than any of these?

Family circumstances

Wealth, personal connections, better educated parents with a higher IQ – we can’t test all of these, let alone a family culture of discipline or thoughtfulness.

But we can test some of them.

Let’s take household wealth: in PISA, students go through a list of 30-odd household items. Do they have a room of their own? A desk to study at? How many screens? And more categories of books than you’d ever thought about. PISA doesn’t ask about household income, but the HOMEPOS (home possessions) category is the closest thing we’ve got.

Next is students’ parents’ occupation. These are coded against a standard classification which maps each job to a prestige score. It’s a ranking system, where a surgeon would outscore a shop assistant.

We even have a category that gives us parents’ education, which asks how long each parent spent in education and takes the highest scorer (e.g., if mum did a master’s course, she’d get around seventeen years). The categorisation is too rough to get the top 10%, so we can’t include it in a fair comparison, but we will bring it in later.

Then we let the computer programme do the magic.

For household wealth and parental occupation, how many of those in the top 10% do we find at the top of the maths, reading and science charts versus those in the bottom 10%? This gives us our odds ratios.

That changes things.

Curiosity, which looked so towering and impressive on the last graph, has shrunk next to parental occupation and household wealth.

If one or both of your parents are in a high-prestige job, you’ve got between six and seven times more chance of being at the top of the test ranking than someone with a low-prestige job.

And the difference is even starker with household wealth.

Those at the top of the wealth charts are between ten and eighteen times more likely to be found in the top 10% of the maths, reading and science scores.

But parental occupations and wealth are linked. Those surgeons are likely to be making much more than the shop assistants. Our measurements will overlap.

So PISA rolls it all – wealth, education and occupational status – into a single measure: socioeconomic status (SES). It’s PISA’s best single measure of family background.

If the commenter was right, we’d expect the odds from having a high SES to massively outweigh those of grit, growth mindset and curiosity.

Do they?

Family Status – the overwhelming factor driving success?

Yes.

Socioeconomic status wins out. It dwarfs any effect from grit, growth mindset or curiosity, although it’s fairly similar to the effect of household wealth (which has a much larger impact on reading scores, interestingly).

Let’s imagine that those in the top 10% for socioeconomic status were their own country and let’s plot them again the other countries in our sample, as we did last time with grit, growth mindset and curiosity.

Anything that gets you above Singapore is enough to make headlines and change educational policy.

I can almost hear the education ministers clamouring: ‘what is this thing SES and how do we give our kids more of it?’

For reference, the OECD say that a score of 20 points higher on the PISA tests corresponds to about a year’s progress. That means our curious kids are a year ahead of the average kid in the sample.

Those top of the socioeconomic status lottery?

They are three years ahead of the average student (I couldn’t bring myself to plot where those in the bottom 10% would be).

I would love to say I’m the first researcher to stare at a computer and say: ‘wow, so a kid’s family background affects their test score!’ It’s such a well-known effect that unless you control for wealth (i.e. compare two kids with the same wealth), people will blame any effect you find on wealth.

Kids with more books in the home do better on tests? It’s because of their socioeconomic status.

Kids who are more curious do better on tests? It’s because of their socioeconomic status.

Kids who are born in September do better on tests? It’s because of their socioeconomic status.

In fact, it’s so well-known we’ve become almost blind to it.

Well, that’s not quite true. Many countries now spend billions of pounds a year (or whatever your local currency is) trying to reduce the effect.

In the UK, the government spends £3 billion a year on the pupil premium – extra funding for schools to close the gap between disadvantaged children and their peers.

The US has spent around $18 billion a year on Title I – its programme to close the achievement gap for disadvantaged students. A Brookings analysis found it averages around $500 per pupil, with little evidence it works. The programme currently faces proposed cuts of more than a quarter.

Ultimately, that’s why we have grit and growth mindset.

Because if we can get the poorest to try hardest, they can close that gap on their wealthy peers.

Right?

Pulling yourself up by your bootstraps?

The commenter accepted that ‘bootstrapping’ has ‘some impact, in some cases’, but was ‘NOT the overarching life success determinant for the overwhelming majority of children’.

I’m taking this to mean that if a kid works hard, they can ‘pull themselves up by their bootstraps’ and overcome disadvantage.

We can test this, too.

I’m going to use some provocative language to make a point.

I know these are real (albeit anonymous) kids and I have no idea what’s going on in their home lives.

But I want to test the claims we make about whether kids really can ‘pull themselves up by their bootstraps’, in the way the commenter described.

So let’s take two groups. The first, I’m going to call ‘rich and lazy’. These are in the top 25% of family SES and the bottom 25% for grit. (Top/bottom 10% would give us too few students, but 25% gives us about 8,000, which is a fairer comparison with our other groups.)

It’s worth noting that we can’t directly test the effort these kids are willing to put in (except, e.g. by how much of the questionnaire they bothered completing…). I’m using their self-reported perseverance – whether they agree with statements like, ‘I complete tasks even when they become more difficult than I thought.’

Then we’ve got the ‘poor and hardworking’. These are the bottom 25% for SES and the top 25% for grit.

Can the ‘poor and hardworking’ kids really outperform their richer counterparts who are low on grit?

No, in short.

Nowhere near.

Remember, 20 points is about a year of schooling, so the poorer kids can be near the top in grit and yet be several years behind their richer counterparts.

What about those odds ratios we saw earlier?

Rich, lazy students are over-represented in the top of each test score, even compared to the average student. The poor and hardworking students are an endangered breed at these rarefied altitudes.

But a sceptic might wonder if this is fair.

Maybe all the rich and lazy kids are concentrated in a couple of countries like… Spain and Australia.

(And they’d be right, to a degree. More than a third of the ‘rich and lazy’ kids – by this measure – were Spanish or Australian!)

So we can check the gap in each country separately. Does it hold even within one society and one education system?

In all 19 countries in our sample, across each subject, the privileged students who don’t try hard outscore the disadvantaged students who do.

The average gap is 53 points: roughly two and a half years of schooling.

Tipping the table in your favour

This isn’t some quirk of the PISA data. A meta-analysis of 240 studies – including over 100,000 students in total – found intelligence is the strongest single predictor of academic achievement.

In the US, the SAT correlates so well with IQ scores it can be used as a proxy. In the UK, a child’s score on a cognitive abilities test at age 11 predicts their GCSE results at 16 with striking accuracy.

And the link between social class and exam performance runs partly through the schools themselves – schools with wealthier intakes recruit and retain better teachers.

Put on a few inches and you’ll be shooting hoops in no time

The PISA data – and the other studies I’ve shared – bear the commenter out. But there are caveats. Growing up in a wealthy household doesn’t guarantee success, it just makes it (considerably) more likely.

Second, I see the concerns about ‘conscientious effort and psychological conditioning’. This is my worry with mindset interventions – they can only go so far; often, that’s not very far at all.

More importantly, we should ask why we use them as a crutch.

We claim that people just need to try harder to get the top grades when the effect of perseverance on scores is massively outweighed by factors such as IQ and socioeconomic status.

Sure, you can work hard and be successful, but when you’re from a disadvantaged background, the odds are against you.

From this view, the education system feels a bit like everyone is being asked to play in the NBA when they grow up. Every kid has to attend coaching academies; if they’re not getting enough baskets, the coaches tell them to carry on their stretches at home and keep taking their vitamin supplements to make up those inches on the tall guys. One day, if they just try hard enough, they’ll be playing in the big leagues.

But basketball is entertainment. We all accept it’s biased towards the tall. Welcome to the world of sports.

School should be different. Everyone plays, whether they want to or not, and it determines your life chances, as we’re always told.

So we have a moral obligation to ask uncomfortable questions.

Especially the fundamental one: is the system fair?

If we don’t think it is (and we don’t, because we spend billions each year looking for ways to sort out the fact that poorer kids are at a huge disadvantage), are grit and growth mindset interventions enough to fix it?

At some point, the questions have to get bigger.

Nobody chooses their IQ. You can’t decide to be born into a wealthier family. Even how hard you’re willing to try is affected by your genes and environment – neither of which you choose.

So what is the point of school?

Partly, as economist and education scholar Alison Wolf argues, it’s a signalling system – a way of ranking kids to work out who gets the best jobs. But the measure has become the purpose.

Which might explain why the interventions we reach for – grit programmes, growth mindset workshops – are always about helping individual kids run faster in a race that’s already been fixed.

Rather than asking whether the race is worth running, we just tell the slower runners to try harder.

It’s time to get curious about what school could look like if exam results weren’t the whole point of it.

Psychologist Susan Engel and her student Kellie Randall advertised for some teachers to run a science experiment. Each teacher was brought in separately and paired with a child.

The teachers were split into two groups, both with the same task – guiding the children as they mixed baking soda, vinegar and water, then dropped raisins in.

But while half the teachers were asked to help the child learn about objects floating and sinking, the other half were simply asked to help the child complete the task and worksheet.

Teachers were given only eleven minutes to work with the child – only just enough time to complete the worksheet – so that the teachers (like teachers everywhere) were under time pressure.

Those told to help the children learn made encouraging comments, asked their own questions and gave positive feedback. Those who were helping the children complete the worksheet made ‘restrictive’ comments, according to the researchers, criticising and correcting what the children were doing: ‘The procedure says to add 8 raisins. Make sure you are adding exactly 8; count them out first.’ And, ‘No, no, wait, let’s read through this first.’

And that was even before the kid went off script.

On the bench were some things that weren’t on the worksheet – sweets, crackers, marshmallows. Halfway through the experiment, the child picked up a Skittle from this pile and dropped it into the liquid.

If the teacher asked, the kid was to say they just wanted to see what would happen.

The teachers who had been told to help the child learn were mostly encouraging. They asked follow-up questions: ‘Wow, what’s happening with the Skittle?’ and ‘Do you think the water is going to turn orange now?’

The other half, who wanted to get through the worksheet, were frustrated. ‘You were not supposed to do that,’ one said. ‘Show me where it said to put that in there. It didn’t.’

Another said, ‘Well, curiosity is a very good thing, but probably we should stick to the directions.’

The most depressing part?

After the trial, the teachers who had been told to help the child complete the worksheet thought they’d done just as good a job of encouraging the children’s curiosity as the other group.

When curiosity researchers leave their curiosity at home

That’s one experiment. Conducted in a lab rather than classroom.

But what if this sort of thing does go on in classrooms? And what if it happens lesson after lesson, year after year?

What effect would that have on children’s curiosity?

As well as a favourite experiment, I also have a favourite book about curiosity: The Hungry Mind.

It’s also by Susan Engel.

In fact, it inspired me to start a PhD researching children’s curiosity.

But one line in it bothered me:

‘When older children are asked about their enthusiasm for domains like science, many indicate a great interest in the topic itself, but say they have little interest for the way it is presented in school.’

This is a big statement, and she makes similar claims elsewhere.

It’s certainly plausible. As a secondary science teacher, I can confirm a lot of students have little interest in the way it’s presented in school. Or at least, the way I present it (and I try pretty hard some days to make it as interesting as I can).

Other academic researchers have picked up on what Engel says.

‘Despite its association with positive outcomes, one of the most common manifestations of curiosity – children’s questioning – typically decreases once children enter formal schooling.’

Yes, there’s some evidence for this, but one of the main studies cited was conducted with preschoolers at home and at kindergarten. Nearly all such studies (and there aren’t many that look at how questioning changes with age) are small-scale.

Another, more recent paper cites Engel: ‘typical schooling does not reliably increase curiosity, and might even diminish it in some contexts, i.e, when learning information by rote memorization is emphasized.’

Sure, maybe. But Engel gives no evidence to support an effect of rote memorisation on curiosity. And other authors follow suit (e.g., here and here).

What’s missing is curiosity about the original data.

What does the evidence really say?

If only we had a big, global sample of children to ask

Engel’s ideas have caught on because they’re appealing. Also, in a field dominated by questionnaires and quantitative analysis (erm, see below), she actually watches children and teachers to see what they do.

And she does this in the classroom.

She nails the mechanisms by which teachers might halt curiosity. The sort of thing that, repeated day in, day out, might lead kids to think that curiosity has no place in schools.

In one case study, Engel’s watching Mrs Parker, who has given ten-year-olds some equipment to model how the ancient Egyptians might have built the pyramids.

There’s a sheet to fill in. When one group comes up with some particularly creative ideas, Mrs Parker tells them, in front of the rest of the class, ‘OK, kids. Enough of that. I’ll give you time to experiment at recess. This is time for science.’

In another class of fifteen-year-olds, Engel reports the teacher halting a class discussion: ‘I can’t answer questions right now. Now it’s time for learning.’

These are great vignettes. And I’m all in favour of small-scale research involving classroom observations – it’s the basis of my PhD work. I see many of the same things Engel saw, although I also see teachers patiently answering question after question (ones which are often very tenuously related to the lesson).

But to make universal statements about what happens to children’s curiosity at school, you need more.

You’d need to include tens of thousands of children, from across the world – Bogota in Colombia to Helsinki in Finland.

Imagine you asked all those children how curious they were. Then you’d have something solid to work with.

Then you could begin to make bigger statements about what happens to children’s curiosity as they get older.

Luckily, someone has done exactly this.

Thanks OECD – tell us what you’ve got

If you want big educational surveys, you go to the OECD.

Their PISA study of 600,000 15-year-olds every few years makes headlines and forces educational policy changes.

(If you want to know what PISA tells you about curiosity, head here.)

But they run another study which is, in its own way, even more fascinating – their Survey on Social and Emotional Skills, or SSES.

In 2019, they gave their questionnaire to over 60,000 kids in ten cities across the world. This time, they weren’t creating a league table for academic achievement, but finding out which ‘soft skills’ help kids succeed. They asked about creativity, self-control, cooperation and – crucially – curiosity.

And, more importantly, they include 10-year-olds and 15-year-olds in their study. The kids were asked questions and their answers to these questions were weighted and made into a ‘curiosity score’.

All we need to do is compare the curiosity scores of the two age groups.

This should tell us everything we need to know. If the fifteen-year-olds’ curiosity is, on average, lower than that of the ten-year-olds, then Engel’s right.

So, here we go:

(Technical detail: even if you give this the full stats work-over, you find the same thing. I’ve run the model with more levels than a multi-storey carpark and in every city, the 15-year-olds have lower curiosity than the 10-year-olds).

So, job done.

Schools kill curiosity.

We need to stop all those Mrs Parkers in their tracks and tell them: Experimentation is science! Questions are learning!

But not so fast.

What were those questions asking? What exactly was it the children told the OECD about their curiosity?

On a need-to-know basis only

Ok, I need to ask you something before we carry on.

The questions the OECD ask in their survey are confidential. A couple of years ago, anyone could download the questions and data from their website. Now, you need to be a fully paid-up researcher, go through an application process, and take part in a complex initiation ceremony.

So, you need to promise me something.

I’m going to tell you a few of the questions, but you cannot tell a soul what these are, or my licence to research gets revoked.

Agree?

Thanks, glad that’s out the way.

Let’s see them. Or at least the fun ones.

To what extent….

1. Are you curious about many different things

2. Are you eager to learn

3. Do you like to ask questions

4. Do you like to know how things work

5. Do you like learning new things

6. Don’t you like learning

7. Do you love learning new things in school

8. Do you find science interesting

All questions were on a 5-point scale – strongly disagree / disagree / neither agree nor disagree / agree / strongly agree.

The results are in…

If we split the results by question, a more interesting story emerges.

Let’s start with the first one: If kids are curious, surely they’ll agree or strongly agree with question number one.

How do 10-year-olds and 15-year-olds vary in their responses?

Wait.

What was that?

There’s not much in it, but more 15-year-olds are curious about many different things than 10-year-olds. So, curiosity, by that measure, actually increases (slightly) as kids get older.

What about question three – the percentage who like asking questions?

This is where things get interesting. Although students feel at least as curious on average at the age of fifteen, they don’t like asking questions. Not as much as the 10-year-olds, anyway.

(Note that we aren’t looking at what happens to the same children over time – we’re looking at two different groups of children. And this would make a difference if something like the pandemic had happened, and might affect different age groups differently. This is an issue with later SSES data but not this 2019 cohort.)

So, curiosity stays the same (or increases) but enjoyment of asking questions decreases.

But maybe this has nothing to do with school. Maybe this is developmental.

It could be that 15-year-olds don’t need to ask as many questions, because they have other ways of finding out (although even on Google and ChatGPT, you need to ask questions to resolve your curiosity).

There is, however, a way of testing this.

Look at questions 5 and 7. They ask whether students…

(Question 5) like learning new things.

(Question 7) love learning new things in school.

There are two differences between these questions.

If students’ answers differ, it might simply be because they like learning, although they don’t love it.

But there’s another difference, one that jumps straight out: question 7 asks specifically whether students love learning new things in school.

Most students – aged 10 and 15 - agree or strongly agree with both questions. But looking at the number who don’t agree or strongly agree makes the changes a bit clearer:

The number who don’t agree that they love learning new things in school is much larger than the number who don’t agree they like learning new things.

Even at ten years old, it’s fifty percent larger. But by fifteen, that gap has doubled. Now, twice as many 15-year-olds don’t agree that they love learning new things in school compared to the number who don’t like learning new things.

Houston, we have a problem

We can even look at this ‘curiosity drop’ city by city.

I averaged the scores for every student in each city at age 10 and age 15.

On the y (vertical) axis, I’ve plotted their agreement that they love learning new things in school.

The x (horizontal) axis tells us whether they like asking questions.

We can then see the changes between 10- and 15-year-olds in each city.

Of course, we have to be cautious. We only have twenty data points. But an interesting pattern begins to emerge.

Those arrows are shooting back towards zero (although note that the axes only start at about 3.5).

In our diverse sample of cities from across the world, something changes for the average student between age ten and age fifteen. They don’t like asking questions as much, as their love of learning new things in school is falling.

Why, though? What’s causing this?

So who’s responsible? Lining up the suspects…

This is where we have to be cautious. It’s easy to fall into the trap I gave at the start of this post by pointing the finger at the most obvious candidate.

Researchers have been quick to blame the Mrs Parkers of this world, squashing questions and pulling Skittles out of chemical concoctions.

But let’s look at this from Mrs Parker’s perspective.

Her mind could have been on an upcoming inspection, or the headteacher was going to check through her class’s books later that day: ‘oh look, this kid (who’s in the disadvantaged group) didn’t manage to complete his worksheet.’

The teachers in Engel and Randall’s study were randomly assigned to a group. They hadn’t decided to focus on completing the worksheet – they’d been told to do that.

We know from survey evidence that teachers value children’s curiosity – something I’ve heard again and again in interviews for my doctoral research. But teachers work within constraints: a scheme of work to get through, exams to prepare for, and – crucially – the need to ‘prove’ that learning has taken place.

If you’re a teacher with limited time to cover a lot of material, a simple action like a student dropping a Skittle into liquid, or asking an off-topic question, could become a subversive act. You can embrace it, but that sends out a message to all the kids that this kind of behaviour is ok. At best, it puts you further behind in the endless race against the scheme of work. At worst, your classroom authority is challenged and it’s even more difficult to get through everything you planned to.

Or you can put a stop to the behaviour and plod through the lesson’s content. And at the end, you’ll have the worksheets to show for it.

The curious teacher has nothing.

Where is that curiosity going?

So is it school that kills curiosity? Is it developmental – something that happens when kids hit their teens? Or is there something the OECD’s questions are failing to capture?

I don’t think the data can tell us.

But it can tell us something important.

Look again at the difference between those two questions. Only sixteen percent of 10-year-olds don’t agree they like learning new things. The same proportion of 15-year-olds.

Curiosity, in the broadest sense, survives adolescence intact.

But ask whether they love learning new things in school, and the picture changes.

At age ten, there’s a gap between students’ answers to these questions.

By fifteen, that gap has doubled.

The curiosity is still there. It just doesn’t feel as welcome in school.

A final question: what would schools look like if students felt their curiosity was welcome?

Enjoyed this? Subscribe to Get Curious for more content to pique your curiosity.

Subscribe now

· Joyous Exploration – delight in learning for its own sake. This is curiosity as wonder: finding something fascinating and wanting to understand it better, not because it’s useful, but because ideas are genuinely exciting.

· Deprivation Sensitivity – a restless need to know. People high on this dimension work relentlessly at problems, often losing sleep over them, not because they enjoy the struggle, but because they simply can’t rest without a resolution.

· Stress Tolerance – comfort with uncertainty and the ability to manage the anxiety that comes with it. High scorers don’t necessarily seek out the unknown – they just don’t let the discomfort of not-knowing stop them.

· Social Curiosity – interest in other people. And here’s where it gets interesting: the researchers found two distinct flavours. Overt social curiosity is the art of asking questions – turning towards people, probing, engaging. Covert social curiosity is quieter: watching, listening, picking up on things others miss.

· Thrill Seeking – the appetite for adventure. This is curiosity with an adrenaline edge: a preference for the novel, the risky, the spontaneous. People high here don’t just want to know – they want to feel.

Wondering which you might be higher or lower on? Well, I’ve got a way you can find out, but more on that in a minute.

Empathizer or avoider?

The researchers discovered something else, too. They found patterns in the results. People taking the quiz could be grouped into four distinct curiosity ‘types’:

The Fascinated score high across the board. They’re lit up by the world – ideas, people, places. Learning energises them; uncertainty feels like an invitation. They’re assembling a richer picture of how everything connects.

The Problem-solver is intensely, narrowly curious. When something grabs them, they won’t let go. They’re less interested in everything than in this thing, right now, fully understood. Persistence is their superpower.

The Empathizer is high on social curiosity, often lower on thrill-seeking. People are their laboratory. They explore life through connection, and the question they ask most often – consciously or not – is why do people do what they do?

The Avoider is the most interesting type, and probably the most common. They score lower across the board, particularly on stress tolerance. But this isn’t someone without curiosity. Their curiosity is quieter, more cautious – often unexpressed, because uncertainty feels uncomfortable. The pull towards the unfamiliar is there. It’s just competing with something stronger.

Go on – it might change your life*

Want to know which category you fall into? Glad you asked! Because I’ve put together a quiz to help discern the problems solvers from the avoiders, those high on joyous exploration or lacking in stress tolerance.

At this point, I should give a disclaimer and say something like ‘the test is just for fun’ or ‘don’t take this as a diagnosis, quit your job and become a yoga teacher in Kuala Lumpur or Scunthorpe or wherever.’

But it has just changed my life.

Ok, maybe that’s a slight exaggeration. It made my Saturday ever so slightly easier.

I was finishing off the code for the quiz and Daughter Number 1 (who identifies as Blossom for the purposes of this post) asked what I was doing.

We were supposed to be doing errands, then going to the bookshop and getting lunch, but she couldn’t be bothered and wanted to play at home.

Also, she thought the takeaway curry might have onions in it.

As a distraction, I said she could take the test.

Each time I read an academic paper and come across a new curiosity measure, I test it out on her (it’s easier than recruiting actual research guinea pigs; the KCL ethical process is a nightmare). She loves being asked questions. I even ran a trial for my doctoral research where I asked her to examine a range of houseplants and come up with questions about them.

She scored high across most dimensions on the quiz, coming out top on stress tolerance (not always evident at bedtime) and getting the ‘fascinated’ profile. She was delighted about getting the curiosity rubber stamp.

‘Imagine what we might discover in the bookshop,’ I told her. ‘You can try some new food at the curry place.’ She was all for it – her fear of onions forgotten.

Science in action: no guarantees you’ll get the profile you’re hoping for…

So, go on and try the quiz. It’s just for a bit of fun.

But there’s a tiny chance it might just change your life – or at least make your day a bit easier.

Terms and Conditions:

*No refunds available if taking the quiz does not turn out to be a life-changing experience.

In Victorian England, women did not become adventurers. They certainly didn’t become solo travellers, not if they were from respectable families.

Marianne North didn’t care for convention. She didn’t care for her own safety. She didn’t care what other people thought.

What she did care about was exotic plants.

A vice takes hold

Originally, Marianne North wanted to be a singer. She had a problem: ‘a most provoking habit of nervousness; when told to stand up and show off, the room seemed to go round, and I could not keep myself from shaking all over’.

So she developed another passion. Two, in fact: plants and oil painting. To North, painting was a vice like whisky, ‘almost impossible to leave off once it gets possession’, as Milbry Polk quotes in Robin Hanbury-Tenison’s The Great Explorers.

Marianne North was born into privilege. She didn’t have much formal education but was surrounded by inspiring figures during her childhood. These included Sir William Hooker, pioneering botanist and director of Kew Gardens, who sparked North’s love of plants.

After her mother died, North promised to look after her father. Which she did her way – on a series of road trips they took together to Europe and the Holy Land. North’s sketchbook was never far from her hand.

On one trip, her father fell ill. At home in Hastings, days after North turned thirty-nine, her father died.

North was devastated.

It was unthinkable, at that time, for a woman to travel without a chaperone. But North disdained convention. She called marriage ‘a terrible experiment.’ She hated the idea of simply being someone’s wife.

She wanted freedom.

The pleasure of recognition

It has become easy, in the twenty-first century, to travel to faraway places in comfort.

A new city, a different continent, another culture. Experiences that should give us a new perspective on life simply become another box, ticked.

As journalist and literary critic António Guerreiro puts it, we travel for ‘the pleasure of recognition and not the curiosity of discovery’.

This is a polite way of saying we travel to take photos.

Or, at least, to inhabit those photos that haunt our dreams. The photos we used to gaze at in the glossy travel agency magazines and that now comprise Instagram.

There is no unknown, no ambiguity. The only risk is that the hotel might not match up to the Tripadvisor description.

What kind of curious are you?

Risk taking excites me

I prefer spontaneous adventure to planning

When I have free time, I like to do things that are a little scary

Agree? You might score highly on the thrill-seeking dimension of curiosity.

For Todd Kashdan and his colleagues, curiosity isn’t a single trait. It can be split along five dimensions:

• Joyous Exploration — delight in learning for its own sake.

• Deprivation Sensitivity — a restless need to close knowledge gaps.

• Stress Tolerance — comfort with uncertainty.

• Social Curiosity — interest in other people (overt asking vs covert observing).

• Thrill Seeking — a desire to explore through novelty or risk-taking.

People who score higher in stress tolerance, for example, are more extraverted. Joyous explorers are more open to new experiences. The socially curious – unsurprisingly – are more likely to gossip. (Want to know where you rate? Try this quiz I put together – just for fun – and get more info about the five dimensions).

It’s easy to feel that adventure should be for the thrill seekers, or those who are fully stress tolerant. But that’s an excuse we use – it’s too big. I don’t know where to start. I haven’t got the time, or the experience, or the money to do that.

We can turn those excuses on their head. Rather than thinking of adventure as something that exists ‘out there’, we can build adventure into our daily lives.

Embrace the inconvenience

We don’t have to start with the epic travel, writes explorer Belinda Kirk in Adventure Mind. A change to routine, a new environment, the chance to rely on our wits over modern technology – small changes can be our starting point.

And adventure brings a whole host of benefits, Kirk argues. As well as improving our mental health, it builds new skills and helps us use our brain in a way that the modern office doesn’t allow us to.

Adventure might involve following a map rather than a SatNav, cooking our own food on a burner stove in the great outdoors (and probably under a drizzle) rather than mustering the courage to risk the street food stall.

This is adventure as journey rather than destination.

Insta-travel is about where you end up. It’s about what it looks like from the outside.

In adventure travel, the inconvenience becomes the story: getting lost, being cold, wet, tired. The kind of things we spend our lives avoiding become part of the story.

Challenging yourself by getting outdoors can be transformational, Kirk writes in Adventure Mind.

You’re in a new environment, which focuses your mind on your immediate surroundings, not on the email you still haven’t answered.

Paradoxically, it is novelty of the situation, and the cognitive demands it places on you, that frees your mind:

Before you leave on the adventure, you have a million and one things to do, but as soon as you set foot on the plane, sit on the seat of your bike or turn away from your car with a full backpack, life immediately becomes much simpler. And nagging feelings dissipate and are replaced by something much more exciting: the challenge, the unknown.

One fingerhold from death

The stages of Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey are so well known that they have become a cliché – and it’s easy to apply them to our lives. We wait for the call to adventure – for someone to tell us it’s time. Someone to tap us on the shoulder and hand us the itinerary and map with the route already marked out.

It’s easy, too, to think of adventure as for someone else. A different kind of person.

We look at people who do extraordinary things and assume they must all be like Alex Honnold.

Honnold climbed one of the tallest rock faces in the world without ropes or harness. The friction between his chalked fingertips and the tiniest protrusion of rock was all that separated him from death.

A few years later, he climbed one of the world’s tallest skyscrapers, again without safety equipment.

There is a scene in the 2018 film Free Solo in which Honnold is put into an MRI machine. He is shown images that would terrify a normal person. His amygdala barely lights up. He needs these terrifying experiences to feel alive, in the same way someone might feel a thrill while giving a PowerPoint presentation at work which they’ve only practised a couple of times.

To most people, adventure is both more mundane and more extraordinary than it is for Honnold. Mundane, because few people are going to make an Oscar-winning film about it. Extraordinary because it requires us to overcome what our amygdala is telling us. (Run!)

It’s more like Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit, who lived a quiet life in The Shire, and was respected by his neighbours because he never had any adventures or did anything unexpected. Until one day he ran off after a group of dwarfs in such a hurry he forgot his hat and walking stick.

And it’s more like Marianne North, who lived a proper life in polite society until, at the age of forty, she began a series of solo adventures that would last for the rest of her life.

Snakes, fever and enormous boulders

Marianne North had a very particular idea about what she wanted to escape to.

She was driven by ‘the dream of going to some tropical country to paint its peculiar vegetation on the spot in natural abundant luxuriance.’

Nowadays, heading off to the tropics and posting snaps of some of the weird flowers on a group chat doesn’t sound that revolutionary. What Marianne North did, though, challenged the way people saw plants.

Traditional Victorian botanical art was often a lifeless affair. A sprig was laid out and painted with watercolours.

North had her own ideas about how to paint flowers.

Marianne North, ‘Foliage, Flowers and Seed Vessel of the Opium Poppy’ (1870s). Marianne North Gallery, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Her oils brought life and colour back into the plants. She used a limited palette, and avoided black, giving a vibrancy to her paintings. Plants appeared in their habitats, creating a naturalism that had been dispensed with.

She began her travels in Egypt, but was encouraged by Lucie Duff Gordon, another female explorer, to travel more widely.

Like Bilbo, facing his trolls and goblins, North’s travels were not without their dangers.

In the Seychelles, she was perched so high on a boulder that ‘the slightest slip or cramp would have put an end to both the sketch and to me.’

In Sri Lanka, she thought someone had left a plant specimen on her stool. She reached out her hand to pick it up – realising just in time that it was a poisonous snake.

Her sister later wrote that North led a ‘charmed life. She could apparently sit all day painting in a mangrove swamp, and not catch fever.’ She could survive without food and sleep and return home ready to enjoy a ‘flattering reception’ in London.

By challenging what people thought proper for a respectable woman, she left her mark on botanical history.

Don’t forget your hat and walking stick

In retrospect, it seems as if success came easily to Marianne North.

She was friends with Charles Darwin, who encouraged her to visit Australia. He thanked her afterwards for the specimens she sent back to him.

In Borneo, North painted an enormous pitcher plant. This carnivorous plant was unknown to science and later named in her honour. Several other species first depicted by North have also been named after her.

Along with James Fergusson, North designed the gallery that bears her name at Kew Gardens. Over 800 of her paintings still cover the walls.

As North’s biographer Milbry Polk puts it:

She was one of the truly fortunate people who discover what they love to do, have the means and courage to follow their passion, and the gift to share their discoveries.

North had the money to travel – and to refuse the marriage that may have tied her down. Her father had encouraged her hobbies, and she had grown up around the greatest scientists of the day. Had she been born into different circumstances, this path may have been unthinkable.

Today, many of us tell ourselves similar stories.

I don’t have enough money

I don’t have the right connections

I need people behind me

But often what we mean is, I’m scared.

We can’t all be Alex Honnold, dulled to the fear that grips everyone else when contemplating something out of the ordinary.

But maybe we can be a bit more like Bilbo Baggins – worried about what people might think, but taking that first step on the road to adventure anyway. Even if we do forget our hat and walking stick as we rush through the door.

Debunking the myths

Google ‘education myths debunked’ and you’ll soon come across something about learning styles.

Each child had a preferred way of learning – visual, auditory or kinaesthetic – the idea went, and teachers had to accommodate this.

This was based on evidence.

Until it wasn’t.

This is how teaching works. Strategies are supposedly evidence based. But it’s funny how often the evidence is called into doubt just as the next fashionable theory arrives.

Whose test paper will you take a peek at?

A few years ago, ‘growth mindset’ was in fashion.

The original concept came from Stanford University professor Carol Dweck and colleagues.^[1] If you have a growth mindset, you believe your intelligence and abilities are malleable. It isn’t just what you’re born with, it’s what you do to improve them that really matters.

The classic test of growth mindset went a little like this – a kid takes a test. After, they’re given the opportunity to someone else’s test. Do they choose the test of the student who did better, to learn from them, or the one who did worse, as an ego boost? First choice = growth mindset, second choice = fixed mindset.

Each school had posters up about how to foster it. In 2015, the education secretary Nicky Morgan wanted to ‘nurture a generation’ through promoting growth mindset.

The academic work on growth mindset was complex, but schools often stripped this nuance away. Inevitably, when the classroom interventions didn’t match the effects seen in the original studies, it was this translation that was blamed.

In 2019, a randomised controlled trial involving over 100 schools and over 5000 students found that students exposed to training in how to build a growth mindset made …. no extra progress compared to those without the training.

As with all fashions, growth mindset eventually faded from view. The posters became tattered and the school assemblies moved onto new topics.

Growth mindset never completely disappeared. It’s still mentioned from time to time. The fossilised remains are still there, on outdated teaching and learning pages on forgotten corners of school websites.

But there’s a new kid on the block.

The secret to West Point success – and everything else

By 2019, the year growth mindset’s lustre faded in England, the UK government was already talking about the importance of developing ‘character traits’ like conscientiousness and perseverance.

By 2025, this had become a central focus for the Department for Education. Developing ‘much-needed grit’, as the Education and Health Secretaries Bridget Phillipson and Wes Streeting put it, would help young people in all areas of life.

Grit, according to Phillipson, is ‘the resilience, the ability to cope with life’s ups and downs, about the challenges that are thrown at you’. In fact, it’s ‘essential for academic success’.

The concept – grit – was popularised by psychologist Angela Duckworth in her book of the same name.^[2] She led much of the pioneering research in the area. And grit seemed to explain things no other concept could.

Take the elite West Point military training academy in the US. Out of 14,000 high school applicants – who are nearly all star athletes as well as top academic performers – only 1,200 are admitted. Of those, twenty percent drop out before graduation, including a substantial number in the first weeks.

Fitness didn’t predict who would leave; nor did academic achievement. Then Duckworth stumbled on the idea of grit. Suddenly, just by giving cadets a few questions, she could predict who would make it to graduation and who would leave a few weeks in.

And grit didn’t just explain who would graduate from West Point. It seemed to explain success in areas of life as diverse as who’d be crowned spelling bee champion to who would top a company’s sales figures.

But what exactly is grit?

Grit, for Duckworth, has two aspects – perseverance and consistency of interests. Perseverance obviously encapsulates how hard you are willing to work. Consistency of interests looks at whether you flit between hobbies and activities or stay focused year after year.

But interest is often forgotten, especially in schools. It doesn’t matter whether you’re interested in English or maths, you still need to work hard towards your exams.

Duckworth’s own work doesn’t help with this simplification. She sums up grit in two equations:

talent x effort = skill

skill x effort = achievement

Effort, then, is the most important aspect of achievement. Many schools can be forgiven for reducing grit to the idea that you need to work hard (even when you don’t feel like it) to succeed.

The question is, are they right?

Does persevering really make a difference?

So, which is best?

In an ideal world, we’d take a hundred thousand kids from across the world and give them a questionnaire. We’d ask them about grit and growth mindset.

We could then, for example, take the top 10% in each group – grit and growth mindset – and compare their scores in maths, reading and science.

Who did best, those top in growth mindset or grit?

Luckily, we don’t need to – someone’s already done it for us. The OECD’s PISA test is taken by hundreds of thousands of fifteen-year-olds around the world every few years. As well as assessing which country’s students do best in mathematics, reading and science, they look at ‘soft skills’ including growth mindset and perseverance.

Perseverance? What happened to grit?

First, as the Education Secretary suggests, while grit is a complex concept, most schools are only interested in the perseverance part. It’s about trying hard when things get tough.

Also, PISA’s perseverance construct isn’t that far away from Duckworth’s original grit scale.

Take these two:

Although I should probably just say ‘perseverance’, ‘grit’ is a bit catchier. I’ll use the two interchangeably from now on, but bear in mind that Duckworth’s scale includes consistency of interests too, e.g. ‘My interests change from year to year’ (reverse scored, so ticking ‘agree’ gets you a low score).

The growth mindset scale is a cut-down version of Dweck’s original questions. The key question is this one: ‘Agree/disagree: Your intelligence is something about you that you cannot change very much.’

So, what happens when we put growth mindset and grit (perseverance) head-to-head? Which has the strongest effect on test scores?

But how WEIRD is our sample?

The analysis below is quick and simple. It’s an approximation. A thorough analysis would take many more stages and deal with a few issues a bit more rigorously than I have.

One of the main problems is that kids taking the PISA tests don’t answer all the questions, only a selection of them. If we look at just the countries where at least 90% of kids answered questions about growth mindset and perseverance, we’re left with only 19 countries out of the 80 that took part.

It doesn’t sound that much, but the sample still includes 145,000 students.

The main worry is whether these countries are really that representative, globally speaking:

In a 2010 paper, psychologist Joseph Henrich and colleagues warned that a lot of published research findings were skewed towards Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) nations.

Did these findings hold in non-WEIRD nations? There wasn’t enough evidence to say. And the sample of 19 countries above isn’t immune from this criticism: most obviously, there are no African or South American nations included at all.

But the sample is more diverse than it might look at first glance: alongside Western European nations, the sample includes Türkiye, Mexico and several high-performing East Asian systems whose educational cultures differ substantially from Western norms.

Then there’s a second simplification (and complication).

PISA doesn’t give each student a single score for mathematics, reading and science; instead, it estimates a range of possible scores. A thorough analysis would take all of them into account.

I’m just going to use what’s called the first ‘plausible value’. So, bear in mind it’s an estimate, but it will get us close enough. Even published, peer-reviewed papers like this Nature article do this sometimes.^[3]

Before we release the results, a word about what the scores actually mean.

Can you really make airplanes out of dogs?

Six birds flew over the trees

The window sang loudly

Airplanes are made of dogs

Do these sentences make sense?

If you can answer correctly, you’re on the way to a decent score on the reading fluency section.

There are trickier and more interesting comprehension questions – on a made-up blog about Rapa Nui, for example, and discovering whether you can give aspirin to chickens via a chat forum.

The OECD keeps a tight hold of most of the questions, though, which allows them to compare scores. If the UK scores 500 points in science this year, is this really an improvement over the 490 last time or is this grade inflation?

If everyone answers the same questions every four years, it’s easy to compare.

What’s a ‘good’ PISA score? In some ways, it depends how your country did last time. Beat the previous score and your nation’s Education Secretary will be on the phone to the papers to organise a press conference.

It also depends on how your rivals do. And, of course, the pace setters, like Singapore, Korea, Japan and their neighbours like Taipei (Taiwan), Macao (China) and Hong Kong. These top countries might be pushing 550.

The ‘average’ used to be 500. It’s slipped a bit since then to around the 470s. And this is obviously where you’ll find the mid-ranking countries like Israel, or Malta or the Slovak Republic. Countries nearer the bottom, like Kosovo or Cambodia, fall below 380.

To give an idea of the spread of results, here are the reading scores for our 19 countries:

Enough preamble.

How do the gritty students compare to those with growth mindset?

And the winner is…

Let’s take the students who score in the top 10% for perseverance and compare them with those who score in the top 10% for growth mindset (obviously the same students might appear in both samples).

Then we see who gets the highest scores on mathematics, reading and science.

Time to cut to the results:

So, we have a clear winner.

It’s good to be gritty: students in the top 10% for perseverance outperform the average student in our sample by over 10 points across all three subjects.

That’s not bad going. According to PISA, 20 points equates to about a year’s worth of schooling.

Growth mindset does even better, though, adding between 14 and 17 points on top of the baseline across all subjects.

A thought experiment: Let’s imagine that those in the top 10% of each trait –grit and growth mindset – were countries. Where would they fall in our list of 19?

They’re both doing well, but growth mindset edges it.

So, we’ve solved the conundrum. Who has the Education Secretary’s number? Someone WhatsApp her the graph and let’s dust down the growth mindset posters.

Not so fast!

There’s another concept we haven’t talked about yet (in this post, at least): curiosity.

The PISA test asks students how curious they are, too.

What if we took kids in the top 10% for curiosity? How would they compare?

Getting curious about which trait matters most

First, a word about curiosity.

Neuroscientists define it as the intrinsic motivation to learn.^[4] It’s about wanting to do well rather than simply acing a test or doing it to get rewards (or avoid punishments).

Who’s curious, according to PISA? People who strongly agree with the following:

· I am curious about many different things.

· I like to ask questions.

· I like learning new things.

And disagree with these:

· I get frustrated when I have to learn the details of a topic.

· I find learning new things to be boring.

As a gritty, persevering, growth-minded curiosity scholar, I have tried to trace the origins of these questions (the dark winter evenings just fly by in our household). Their genealogy, as Nietzsche might have put it, isn’t always that clear.

Still, people who agree ‘I am curious about many different things’ are probably more curious than people who don’t agree with it.^[5]

So, enough preamble. How do those in the top 10% of the curiosity ratings compare to the gritty and growth mindset students?

The big reveal

As before, we take the top 10% of students in grit, growth mindset and curiosity. We look at the average scores across the three tests. Then we put them in a table and…

Voilà.

And the same thing in the form of a helpful graph (note the dotted black representing the average for our 19 countries across all three tests and the fact we’ve started the y-axis at 490 points):

Again, we have a clear winner.

Not only that; the differences are sizeable. A few points in PISA can make a big difference. The seven points that separate curiosity from growth mindset – its nearest rival – in mathematics are meaningful.

Say you started off with Latvia on 483 points in 21^st place. An extra 7 points would allow you to leapfrog Finland, Slovenia, Czech Republic, Australia, Austria, Poland, the UK, Denmark, and Belgium into 12^th position.

In science, the difference is starker: if you could switch from being in the top 10% of grit to the top 10% of curiosity, you’d make almost a year of progress in an instant (ignoring all the caveats mentioned above about missing data and using only one of the ‘plausible value’ scores etc).

Insert curiosity into our ‘what if traits were countries’ table and the gap is clear:

Time for another thought experiment.

Let’s imagine that some schools went all-in on the educational interventions and promoted grit and growth mindset at the same time.

If we had a group of students who excelled in both areas, surely they would beat our curious students.

Right?

Flipping the table

Wrong.

Curiosity is no ordinary trait: it’s a learning superpower.

If we add the perseverance and growth mindset scores together and take the top 10% of students in both traits… these students still don’t reach the scores of the most curious students.

In fact, in reading, these gritty, growth mindset students are still the equivalent of three months behind their curious peers.

Let’s do a crazy thought experiment.

Let’s add together the perseverance, growth mindset and curiosity scores for all students. Take the top 10% again and compare them to the ones who are in the top 10% simply ranking by curiosity.

The difference?

This time, the triple-combo takes the crown, but there isn’t much in it. The difference is smaller than the gap between curiosity and either of its competitors.

Don’t worry about grit and growth mindset; you’d be as well simply concentrating on getting into the curiosity elite.

Time to put 145,000 students into a line. And then another line…

The top-10% comparison is the most intuitive way to look at the data, but there are two more rigorous tests worth mentioning — and they tell the same story.

The first is a correlation test.^[6]

Let’s take 10 students and line them up by curiosity scores, then test scores.

If they’re in the same order both times, their correlation scores would be 1 – a perfect correlation.

Let’s imagine they’re in completely the opposite order. The student top first would be bottom in the second case, and so on. This time, the correlation would be -1 – a perfect negative correlation.

No relation between the two? Correlation is 0 – no relationship.

For context, the correlation between height and weight in adults is around 0.5: most people in a sample who are heavier are also taller.

Here’s how our three traits score:

First thing to note – all correlations are positive. Higher traits = higher test scores.

Second thing – all the scores are pretty low.

As a rough guide, correlations below 0.2 are often considered small in social science research, but in the case of the PISA test data, this is to be expected. Test scores are complicated, affected by hundreds of factors – teaching quality, home environment, sleep, what someone posted about you on social media the morning of the test.

A single psychological trait isn’t going to explain everything.

But within that context, across all subjects curiosity’s correlations are consistently larger than the alternatives – up to double, in some cases.

This finding holds across our sample.

Curiosity has a stronger correlation with all three test scores than growth mindset in all 19 countries and beats perseverance in 17 of 19.

Wherever you look, the pattern holds: curiosity correlates most strongly with test scores.

Note that this doesn’t mean curiosity causes higher test results, merely that the two go together. A rigorous analysis would look at curiosity’s effects over the longer term. We can’t rule out the effect that test success causes higher curiosity (or, of course, that both are caused by another factor).

But what if curiosity is piggybacking on the other two?

Correlation testing tells us that when one thing goes up, so does the other.

But we can do a bit better than this.

A regression model lets us ask a more specific question: given what we know about a student’s curiosity, how well can we predict their test score?

Even more importantly, it tackles another concern: what if curiosity only looks stronger because curious students also happen to be grittier or have growth mindset?

Well, we can look at how curiosity affects test scores while ‘controlling’ for perseverance and growth mindset. Effectively, we take all the students, imagine they have identical scores for perseverance and growth mindset and plot their curiosity against their score in each subject.

Then we do the same for growth mindset (keeping curiosity and perseverance scores constant) and for perseverance.

The steeper the slope, the more dramatic the effect, say, being more curious has on your mathematics score.^[7]

In every case, we can see that curiosity – the red line – is the steepest.

The gradients (or ‘betas’) of the lines tell us how many extra points you get in each subject when your trait score – curiosity, perseverance or growth mindset – increases.

A student who moves from average to one standard deviation above (i.e., from the 50^th percentile to the 84^th), perseverance and growth mindset staying the same, would score 14 points higher in reading. This is equivalent to about 9 months of schooling, by PISA’s measure.

Conclusion? Get curious.

In comparison, going from average to one standard deviation above in growth mindset adds just over six points.

The same shift in perseverance adds only half that.

The three traits aren’t just measuring the same thing in different ways, curiosity is doing something distinct.

And when it comes to PISA test scores, it makes a real difference.

The upshot

None of this means perseverance and growth mindset are useless.

They’re not.

And none of these traits operate in isolation — you can be curious and give up easily, or incredibly gritty about the wrong things. The strongest performers were those in the top 10% on all three measures together, which shouldn’t surprise anyone.

But if you had to bet on one trait — if you were designing a school culture, or thinking about how to raise a child, or deciding where to put your energy — the data makes a fairly unambiguous suggestion.

But wait a minute. Are we really measuring curiosity or grit or growth mindset here?^[8] For curiosity, it’s hard to say for sure without doing a battery of other reliable tests (which don’t really exist).

But we probably can say that the students who score highest on curiosity have the most positive attitude towards curiosity.

And, therefore, the students who most strongly think curiosity is a good thing are likely to do better on the PISA tests than those who strongly think perseverance or growth mindset are good things.

Curiosity isn’t just an add-on. It isn’t something to tag onto your education policy or school’s mission statement. It shouldn’t be an afterthought to grit or growth mindset.

Having curiosity might be the thing that matters most.

Which raises an awkward question for anyone who spent the last decade putting up growth mindset posters, or the last year giving assemblies about grit: why aren’t we talking about curiosity?

Acknowledgements

My extremely patient PhD supervisor Dr Richard Brock looked over the code and post beforehand, and made lots of very sensible suggestions about how to improve the method to make it more robust. My excuses for taking coding shortcuts at every stage appear in the footnotes below. Run the full thing - with weightings, all the PVs and an MLM and you’ll get almost the same values, honest.

Sorry Richard! All errors are, obviously, mine.

Endnotes and references:

^[1] Carol Dweck (2006) Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

^[2] Angela Duckworth (2016) Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

^[3] Also, using all the PVs is complicated, takes a long time and my computer gets very hot while it’s doing it. The analysis is unweighted, too. PISA’s complex sampling design ideally requires student sampling weights to correct for unequal probability of selection, which would slightly widen our confidence intervals but is unlikely to change the substantive findings.

^[4] E.g. Baranes, A., Oudeyer, P.-Y., & Gottlieb, J. (2015). Eye movements reveal epistemic curiosity in human observers. Vision Research, 117, 81–90; Gruber, M. J., Gelman, B. D., & Ranganath, C. (2014). States of Curiosity Modulate Hippocampus-Dependent Learning via the Dopaminergic Circuit. Neuron, 84(2), 486–496; Van Lieshout, L. L., De Lange, F. P., & Cools, R. (2020). Why so curious? Quantifying mechanisms of information seeking. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, 35, 112–117.

^[5] See Note 7.

^[6] Growth mindset scores were non-normally distributed, so we should use a different correlation test with these, but Spearman rank correlations tell a similar story.

^[7] These are very simple linear models. One thing a fuller analysis would do is also control for socioeconomic background — wealthier students tend to score higher on tests and may also report higher curiosity, simply because they have more opportunities to pursue their interests. We haven’t done that here. It’s possible that some of curiosity’s apparent advantage reflects this overlap. That said, the consistency of the finding across 19 very different countries — from Mexico to Singapore, from Greece to South Korea — makes a pure wealth explanation harder to sustain. A more rigorous analysis would also use multilevel modelling (MLM), which accounts for the fact that students aren’t independent observations — they’re clustered in schools, which are clustered in countries, each with their own characteristics. Our simple regression treats all 145,000 students as if they were independent, which slightly overstates our confidence in the results. In practice, the direction and rough magnitude of the findings are unlikely to change, but the standard errors would be larger and the significance thresholds harder to reach. Think of it this way: knowing that two students from the same school both score highly tells you less than knowing the same about two students from different schools on opposite sides of the world — the MLM approach adjusts for this.

^[8] The PISA questionnaire uses what’s called ‘self-report’ to measure traits. You can’t cheat on the test – or so the idea goes. You can tick strongly agree on all the curiosity or growth mindset questions, though. Are those who score highest on curiosity really the most curious students? We’ve got no way of knowing. Many people have tried other ways to measure curiosity; few have succeeded convincingly. It’s easier to make the case that we’re genuinely measuring grit or growth mindset on PISA than curiosity. Grit and growth mindset are both psychological constructs. They’re defined by getting a high score on a questionnaire. It’s a bit more debatable with curiosity. There are several competing ‘instruments’ for measuring curiosity (and PISA have created their own). There are even people (like me) who disagree that we should think of curiosity purely as a psychological construct – it’s a bit more complicated than that.

‘Curiosity has much in common with the sex drive, which is also a powerful motivator, highly stimulus bound, and associated with impulsive behaviour and disappointment.’

George Loewenstein, The Psychology of Curiosity: A Review and Reinterpretation

Some inventions have saved humanity countless centuries’ worth of work. The washing machine, dishwasher. Cranes, trucks, diggers. Maybe, someday, we’ll be able to put AI into that category.

Social media is another story, with its endless news feeds and clickbait.

How much time have these inventions cost humanity?

They thrive by making us think we might be missing out. By making us think we have to pay attention, by making us curious.

Yet understanding how our curiosity works – particularly the difference between deep and shallow curiosity – can help us regain control over our attention.

Swipe right

Often, curiosity starts with a question.

How can we get people to use Tinder when they’re on the move and only have one hand to spare?

Tinder co-founder Jonathan Badeen was thinking about this problem and getting nowhere.¹ Then one morning he woke up with the idea.

Imagine you have a stack of cards. Each one has a face on it and your job is to sort them into a ‘yes’ and a ‘no’ pile.

A simple idea that drove Tinder’s growth, giving swiping a whole new meaning. It became an activity.

It wasn’t even the swiping as much as the excitement – what next? Who else might be lurking around the corner: A lonely supermodel? A sexy billionaire? Or even The One?

And the thought that while you’re swiping through photos of other people, millions of others are doing the same. Someone else is probably looking at your picture. Do they swipe left or right? When are you going to get a match? It’s the gamification of dating: when are you going to hit the jackpot?

The psychology of gambling (in 100 words)

Tinder’s creators took inspiration from psychology. In particular, the work of B.F. Skinner.

Skinner put pigeons in boxes. When a pigeon hit a button with its beak, food fell out. It carried on clicking.

It carried on clicking, in fact, even when no food came out.

Skinner had created a habit.

Want to make the habit even stronger? Don’t give the pigeon food each time it clicks the button. Instead, give it food every other time. Or every fifth time. Or, even better, after a random number of hits.

This variable reward schedule is the principle behind gambling machines like the one-armed bandit. You know the reward might come; you just don’t know when.

Bored yet?

Curiosity is a form of mental engagement. You can think about something – filling the washing machine, emptying the dishwasher – without being curious. But you can’t be curious without thinking about something. What we think about, and the way we think about it, determines the kind of curiosity we experience.

There are two types of curiosity, pioneering curiosity researcher Daniel Berlyne claimed – specific and diversive curiosity.² If you’re trying to figure out a crossword puzzle, how an engine works or the location of El Dorado, that’s specific curiosity. It has a single target.

Diversive curiosity is a vaguer state. It’s the relief of boredom. You’re scrolling on your phone or flicking through TV channels waiting for something to grab your attention.

But it’s possible to move from one to the other.

Think of the toddler wandering around, searching for something exciting. They spot your jewellery box and think they’ve hit the jackpot.

This, in some ways, is what much of the internet aspires to – taking us out of that aimless state and giving us something we can get our teeth into. Something that really hooks us.

Social media thrives on engagement. It’s one of the key metrics of success and growth. The more people use your app, the more advertising revenue you can take.

If you want to keep eyeballs on an ad, curiosity is a surefire way of ensuring engagement. But this often leads to a race to the bottom. The focus is on grabbing attention rather than sustaining it, which leads to hyperbolic headlines and flashing banners.

There are so many apps and websites competing for our attention that it’s easy to become passive. We begin depending on their stimulation for our entertainment. We forget what it’s like to grapple with a problem, how to formulate questions and find reliable answers.

Without our computers or phones, we become bored. And, as psychology has shown, it isn’t all that difficult to hook the attention of people who are bored.

Shocking experiments

People would rather give themselves electric shocks than be left alone with their own thoughts.

In one experiment, psychologists left participants alone in a room. Everyone had previously said they would pay to avoid an electric shock, but within fifteen minutes, two thirds of men and a quarter of women had pushed the button to give themselves a shock. ³

Why?

Diversive curiosity. It turns out anything is better than boredom, even an electric shock.

Sit by yourself with only a button in front of you and you start to wonder what the shock might feel like. How strong it might be.

In another series of experiments, Christopher K. Hsee and Bowen Ruan investigated exactly this idea.⁴

Again, participants were left waiting in a room, ostensibly between other tasks. This time, they had a box of pens in front of them. All the pens had a sticker on them. For some participants, the colour of the sticker told them whether or not they’d get a painful 60V shock. Other participants didn’t know which pens would shock them.

On average, the participants who didn’t know which pens would shock them clicked twice as many pens. Even more strangely, in the other group, participants clicked more of the pens they knew would shock them than the pens that wouldn’t.

In another test, participants had all three types of pens – ones that were certain to shock them, ones that definitely wouldn’t and ones they didn’t know about. Again, participants clicked more than twice as many of the uncertain pens than either the ones that would definitely shock them or definitely not shock them.

Participants also chose to listen to an uncertain sound, which could be nails down a chalkboard, over the guarantee of a pleasant tune. Their feelings suffered as a result. The more they chose the uncertain sound, the worse they claimed to feel as time went on.

Even when we know the outcome could be harmful or painful, our curiosity often drives us to choose the uncertain option.

Curiosity’s dark side

We are told that curiosity is a good thing. In the last week alone, I’ve seen curiosity used to sell newspaper subscriptions, university courses and the Church of England.

Celebrities and scientists have praised curiosity. Steve Jobs put his ability to innovate down to his ceaseless curiosity. Psychologist Brené Brown has described curiosity as a ‘superpower’.

Sometimes, though, your own curiosity can get the better of you.

In 2017, a group of researchers asked 600 US psychology undergrads to complete an online personality assessment.⁵

The real test, though, was yet to come.

Two weeks later, some of the students got an email from a suspicious source. Those who clicked were more likely to be risk takers who were prone to boredom and lacked focus.

The decisive factor, though, was how curious they were. Those high in curiosity needed to know their results, regardless of how dubious the source of the email was.

Studies have found that curious people are more likely to party than to study, to engage in risky behaviour and to experiment with drugs – or, at least, to use curiosity as an excuse for trying drugs.⁶

Never stray from the path

When we’re browsing, we’re like the character in a fairytale, staring up at the trees as we wander while the wolf stalks us.

Our curiosity makes us oblivious to the dangers lurking around us.

We’ve been told to stay on the path – the safe websites, the ones with that little padlock at the top. But our curiosity makes us stray.

We drop breadcrumbs to show us the way back but advertisers and ‘information merchants’ like the social media giants are following behind, pecking them up as they go.

The more we click, the more we allow online lurkers to learn about us. The tech giants are just as curious as we are. They want to know about our gender identity, our age, our income, and our deepest wishes.

It’s not so much that they want to blackmail us – that would be too much effort. They exploit our desires. Why try and sell a top-of-the-line robotic lawnmower to a tech worker who lives in an apartment building when you could sell her the latest phone contract or coffee machine?

And they’re usually our most benign stalkers.

Because there are potential blackmailers are lurking out there. People who seem like desperate students or lovelorn widows. But who knows what they are really after.

Young people (and not so young people) are also lured towards extremist positions by peddlers of conspiracy theories. Information and mis-information – curiosity doesn’t always distinguish.

At least, one form of curiosity doesn’t.

Read this section to discover one life-changing hack!

Use this crazy old recipe to lose half your bodyweight in a day!

A man asked an old lady to give up her seat on the Tube. You won’t believe what happened next!

Answer 8 questions to find out if you have a higher IQ than Einstein

Clickbait headlines promise to change your life and instead end up delivering a lifetime’s supply of cookies and pop-up ads.

Sometimes it can feel like the entire internet is screaming for us to look, like a class of eager toddlers who’ve just finished their finger paintings.

In 1994, the psychologist George Loewenstein wrote an academic paper summarising the research on curiosity to date.⁷

Curiosity, he claimed, has four defining features:

1. It is short lived

2. It makes us impulsive

3. It creates an intensity within us

4. We’re left disappointed after our curiosity has been sated

We will call these the Loewenstein Criteria.

These four features certainly apply to some examples of curiosity – the curiosity that makes us click on a dodgy link in a phishing email or follow a headline promising unbelievable rates of return on our investments.

Lots of the research Loewenstein drew on was designed to be carried out in the laboratory – easily controlled and measured, with repetitive questions and a short timescale.

Often, this is not a good way of modelling real-life curiosity.

Think about Sir Isaac Newton’s work in mathematics and physics, Frida Kahlo’s expressions of her experiences or, indeed, Loewenstein’s own, decades-long research into curiosity.

This work is long-lived, requires careful, deliberate thought and the intensity peaks and dissipates across the days and years. The answers, when they come, can be extremely satisfying, and lead to yet more questions.

These are all examples of deep curiosity. Curiosity that gets under your skin. That helps you to grow. That, occasionally, changes the world.

Loewenstein’s Criteria can help us to distinguish good from bad. If it ticks the four boxes above, it’s shallow curiosity.

Deep Curiosity

Shallow curiosity tends to be associated with a stimulus.

It’s triggered by a tantalising headline or a few whispered words.

Or through the senses – the smell of a street food stall, the intro to a song or a face across the room.

Deep curiosity – the sort that enriches our lives and helps us to grow – remains even when the stimulus fades away.

It’s the feeling we get when we’re falling in love. When we think about the object of our affection, even when they’re miles from us, and wonder what they’re doing. What they’re thinking about.

It’s the curiosity that wakes us up at midnight with an insight that might become a breakthrough on a project.

It’s the curiosity that has driven progress in the sciences and the arts and transformed the world through technological innovation.

Deep curiosity is always there, waiting. We just need to take a moment away from all those screaming headlines, which promise so much and deliver so little, to find it.

Sources

1. BBC Three. (2025). Dating Apps: The Inside Story. BBC iPlayer: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/m002n1t3/dating-apps-the-inside-story

   

   ︎

2. Berlyne, D. E. (1966). Curiosity and exploration. Science, 153(3731), 25–33

   

   ︎

3. Wilson, T. D., Reinhard, D. A., Westgate, E. C., Gilbert, D. T., Ellerbeck, N., Hahn, C., Brown, C. L., & Shaked, A. (2014). Just think: The challenges of the disengaged mind. Science, 345(6192), 75–77

   

   ︎

4. Hsee, C. K., & Ruan, B. (2016). The Pandora effect: The power and peril of curiosity. Psychological Science, 27(5), 659–666

   

   ︎

5. Moody, G. D., Galletta, D. F., & Dunn, B. K. (2017). Which phish get caught? An exploratory study of individuals’ susceptibility to phishing. European Journal of Information Systems, 26(6), 564–584

   

   ︎

6. Arneklev, B. J. (2023). Self-control and curiosity: Has curiosity been an overlooked concept in the crime/deviance decision-making process? Deviant Behavior, 44(8), 1194–1218
   Rácz, J. (2008). The role of the curiosity in interviews with drug users. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 9(2), Art. 16

   

   ︎

7. Loewenstein, G. (1994). The psychology of curiosity: A review and reinterpretation. Psychological Bulletin, 116(1), 75–98

   

   ︎

The post Likes, Swipes and Clickbait appeared first on Get Curious.

‘I’ve just got an insatiable curiosity. I want to learn. I want to see. I want to do things I don’t know if I can do.’

PJ Harvey – in an interview with ABC news

Losing her religion

By 2016, PJ Harvey had been nominated for every songwriting award going. She’d won a fair few, too. The only artist to have won the Mercury Music Prize twice, she’d also been given an MBE for services to music.

For twenty years, she’d written, recorded and performed music. It was what she did. But now, after a year on the road, something changed.

‘As an artist, I was feeling lost,’ she later said.

She knew she should be thinking about the next album, but she’d hit a roadblock:

‘I’ve always just been so curious as a person. I love learning. That’s also why I don’t want to do the same things over and over again.’

Music had lost its hold on her.

The problem with having superior tastes

Take two people you know. One of them loves everything. Whoever they meet, wherever they go, they’re enthusiastic about it all. They want to chat to everyone and find out everything they can about the world.

The other? They play it cool. They tell you it’s not their sport, not their type of art, not the right food. The person they just met? Boring. Too full of themselves. Doesn’t have the right outlook.

Other than their attitude, in what way is the second type of person superior to the first? They present a persona of aloofness and refined taste, but something fundamental is missing. Where’s their enjoyment of life?

For the philosopher Bertrand Russell, the first character had something the second was lacking: zest.

Zest is a spark, an energy, an enthusiasm for discovery. And there are many reasons someone might not have it. Maybe, like our second character, they want to seem cool and sophisticated. They might be afraid or lack confidence. It could be down to illness, or it might simply be a habit.

For Russell, zest gives life meaning. Zest is about keeping that childlike joy, that need to engage with everything we come across.

We lose this at school or work, Russell argues, when we forget how to direct our own attention and rely on others instead. Even when we can choose how to spend our time, we simply feel bored or tired.

Having zest requires more than just freedom. It requires, for Russell, ‘the smooth working of the psychological machine’. If we are afraid to try new things, to explore novel experiences, to make mistakes, our zest will take a hit.

Zest also helps draw us out of ourselves. Interest in the world around us prevents us obsessing about ourselves – our worries, what others think of us. Russell gives the example of Sherlock Holmes finding a hat on the street. Within an instant, he can describe the life of the owner through the tiny clues he discovers.

How can life fail to be fascinating, Russell asks, for someone who takes such an interest in mundane objects?

This one simple trick will make you a musical genius

PJ Harvey had zest in spadefuls. ‘I always think it’s so sad that when we get older, we tend to stop playing with our imagination like we do when we’re young,’ she said.

So what changed in 2016 to make her lose her love of music?

Before we find out what she did next, it’s important to understand a bit more about how she works.

Don’t tell her to sell out stadiums, her manager warns: ‘She’s not driven in any way by commercial imperatives. Really, she’s working to satisfy herself.’

And what drives her is relentless curiosity.

She started out as a sculptor. After she’d created something at art school, she immediately wanted to create its opposite. Even when she became famous through her music, she was inspired by filmmakers and painters rather than other musicians.

Her secret? Constantly challenge yourself. As she puts it: ‘it’s good to put oneself in unfamiliar situations. And that might be as simple as an instrument you don’t know how to play.’

Simple. Right.

She isn’t the only person to take this approach. REM’s Peter Buck wrote the riff to ‘Losing My Religion’ just after he’d bought a mandolin and was trying it out.

Some artists switch between media to challenge themselves. Picasso created prints, sculptures, ceramics and collages, each time finding a new way to express his ideas.

In Think Again, Adam Grant discusses the Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick. Except for a class on the good life, he never taught the same course twice. ‘I do my thinking through the courses I give,’ Nozick said.

There is a term in Zen Buddhism – Shoshin – meaning ‘beginner’s mind’. It encompasses openness, eagerness to learn and a lack of preconceptions. Most closely associated with the martial arts, it’s a way to counter the narrowing of thought that can creep in when people consider themselves experts.

It is this attitude – Shoshin – that PJ Harvey describes when she talks about the importance of putting yourself in unfamiliar situations.

With zest, it is easy to put yourself into the beginner’s mind. When you’re focused on what takes your interest and sparks your curiosity, you find yourself taking a path without knowing where it might lead.

But surely there are limits to this.

Maybe in music you can keep taking up a new instrument to inspire yourself, but what about a field like science, where there is so much to learn? Don’t you have to move past the beginner’s mind and become an expert before you make an impact?

Short-circuiting the ten-year rule

To become an expert at anything takes 10,000 hours of deliberate practice – or around 10 years. This is the way Malcolm Gladwell explained K. Anders Ericsson’s finding that top professional violinists put in thousands of hours more practice than those destined to become only amateurs.

Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein have spent their careers studying what separates Nobel winners from near-misses. And they think there’s another way to succeed.

Take Darwin, who mastered ten disciplines, by their count, ranging from botany to paleontology. This should have taken a century, but he managed to integrate ideas from all of them to form the theory of evolution in thirty years.

Top scientists (and Nobel winners in other fields) have that beginners’ mindset – Shoshin. They are constantly retraining themselves, unafraid of seeing themselves as ‘serious amateurs’. They can apply ideas they learn in one area to a different field.

Top scientists also have a wide range of hobbies, from the arts and drama to creative writing and crafts like woodwork. In fact, they are fifteen to twenty-five times more likely than the average scientist or US citizen to have hobbies.

Hobbies are correlated with every measure of success you can think of – from scientific papers published, grants received, companies founded to membership of academic bodies and receiving a Nobel Prize.

The least successful scientists see their hobbies as ‘regrettable wastes of time’ that don’t help further their careers. Successful scientists can see the link between everything they do. Their activities outside science help them to generate novel ideas.

What do Einstein and Sherlock Holmes have in common? Both did their best thinking while they were playing the violin.

Rediscovering her religion

PJ Harvey never stopped learning. She was always ready to put herself back into that beginner’s mindset.

In 2014, she took poetry classes with renowned poet Don Paterson, who has won as many poetry awards as PJ Harvey has for songwriting.

He asked her to share her poetry. She thought he was just being polite, but he insisted. They collaborated, and PJ Harvey eventually published a book of verse.

When PJ Harvey was feeling burnt out after a year of touring, she went to another creative friend for help – the director, writer and artist Steve McQueen.

Focus on what you enjoy, McQueen told her. Don’t worry about producing something, just follow your love of words, images and music.

‘It helped me re-find the joy,’ PJ Harvey said. ‘That joy that I could remember having initially, when I first started writing songs when I was 17’.

She spent eight years on an epic, book-length poem written in the ancient Dorset dialect she remembered hearing in her youth. She explored the landscape of her childhood in her mind and on the page.

After she finished, the album that had eluded her – and her fans – for almost a decade came in a three-week rush as the music to accompany the poem spilled out of her. It was released to widespread critical acclaim and earned PJ Harvey her eighth Grammy nomination.

McQueen’s advice helped PJ Harvey to remove the boundaries that had appeared in her mind. 

She rediscovered her zest.

Finding your zest

‘One of the sources of unhappiness, fatigue and nervous strain is an inability to be interested in anything that is not of practical importance in one’s own life,’ Bertrand Russell wrote.

We often try to force our thoughts down a particular path. If ideas don’t seem to fit into a particular project, we dismiss them. Like PJ Harvey, the direction we think we should be going in obscures the path we need to take to grow.

We can all heed Steve McQueen’s suggestion to go back to the fundamental things we love, like PJ Harvey’s focus on words, music and images. Whether it’s through learning a new instrument, a new artistic medium or teaching a new course, we always have the option of embracing the beginner’s mindset.

Sources:

Books:

Malcolm Gladwell (2008) Outliers: The story of success

Adam Grant (2021) Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know

Academic Sources:

Ericsson, K. A., Krampe, R. T., & Tesch-Römer, C. (1993). The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance. Psychological Review, 100(3), 363–406.

Root-Bernstein, R., Allen, L., Beach, L., Bhadula, R., Fast, J., Hosey, C., Kremkow, B., Lapp, J., Lonc, K., Pawelec, K., Podufaly, A., Russ, C., Tennant, L., Vrtis, E., & Weinlander, S. (2008). Arts foster scientific success: Avocations of Nobel, National Academy, Royal Society, and Sigma Xi members. Journal of Psychology of Science and Technology, 1(2), 51–63

Root-Bernstein, M., & Root-Bernstein, R. (2022). Polymathy among Nobel Laureates as a creative strategy—The qualitative and phenomenological evidence. Creativity Research Journal, 35(1), 116–142.

Root-Bernstein, R., & Root-Bernstein, M.  (2020) A Statistical Study of Intra-Domain and Trans-Domain Polymathy among Nobel Laureates, Creativity Research Journal, 32:2, 93-112,

Root-Bernstein, R., & Root-Bernstein, M. (2020). Polymathy. In M. Runco & S. Pritzker (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Creativity (3rd ed., Vol. 2, pp. 375-381). Elsevier, Academic Press.

Interviews:

Louise Brailey (1 June 2023) Into the woods with PJ Harvey. Crack Magazine. https://crackmagazine.net/article/profiles/pj-harvey-cover-story/

Liam Fay (9 October 2024). Happy Birthday PJ Harvey: Revisiting a classic interview. Hot Press. https://www.hotpress.com/music/happy-birthday-pj-harvey-revisiting-a-classic-hot-press-interview-23053712

Stephen Gallacher (17 May 2022) Don Paterson on poetry, PJ Harvey and why we need to use or risk losing our local dialects. The Sunday Post. https://www.sundaypost.com/fp/don-paterson

Stephen Gallacher (21 August 2022) ‘People think I live in a cave and eat children. I don’t mind. I accept it’: Enigmatic rock siren PJ Harvey is happy to let book of poems speak for her. The Sunday Post. https://www.sundaypost.com/fp/pj-harvey-interview/

Dorian Lynskey (24 April 2011). PJ Harvey: England Shake interview. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2011/apr/24/pj-harvey-england-shake-interview

Ann Powers (6 July 2023). ‘Life and death is such a fine line’: PJ Harvey on creating in a place between worlds. NPR Music. https://www.npr.org/2023/07/06/1185749989/pj-harvey-i-inside-the-old-year-dying-orlam-interview

Jared Richards and Karen Leng (18 March 2025). PJ Harvey, one of rock’s most influential figures, reflects on 35 years of making noise and never standing still. ABC News. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-03-18/pj-harvey-2025-interview-australia/105059736

The post Zest for Life: How Curiosity Beats the 10-Year Rule appeared first on Get Curious.

Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine – at least, the portion he did manage to build. Ada Lovelace published the first ‘computer programme’ for it.

Science Museum London. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

‘Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.’

Frederick Douglass

What do Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin and Mary Wollestonecraft have in common?

What about Ada Lovelace and Jimi Hendrix?

For most people, learning happens at school. The traditional method can hamper innovation, though. If we fill everyone’s heads with the same ideas, can we really expect creative and original thoughts to pop out?

Autodidacts are people who teach themselves. Mostly. They might have had some schooling and found teachers along the way, but their knowledge is unique. Their way of thinking about the world is unlike anyone else’s.

Becoming responsible for your own education is not a simple process. There are false starts and dead ends. Hours spent on something you just don’t get.

But for autodidacts, the difficulty of the process is its strength. You can learn things other people can’t – or won’t. Because the journey is unpredictable, so are the results.

Teaching yourself

Given the choice, many autodidacts may have chosen the conventional learning route. 

They did things differently because they had to.

They were excluded because, like Ada Lovelace and Mary Wollestonecraft, they were women, like Michael Faraday and Andrew Carnegie, they were too poor to receive an education, like Leonardo da Vinci, they were born out of wedlock, or Frederick Douglass and Jimi Hendrix, their skin was the wrong colour.

Their unconventional routes to knowledge gave them the tools to change the world. Michael Faraday’s discoveries changed our understanding of electricity and magnetism. Mary Wollstonecraft’s work laid the foundations for women’s rights movements. Frederick Douglass became a legendary speaker and pioneering abolitionist.

For many autodidacts, being outside the mainstream meant they could challenge convention. They didn’t need to follow the rules their peers were taught.

Many of these figures seem to have little in common. It’s hard to imagine two revolutionaries more different than Frederick Douglass, the social reformer, and Michael Faraday, the physicist. But, like many other autodidacts, they read obsessively.

Faraday, when he was an apprentice bookbinder, read every book he bound, taking meticulous notes in the process. As a slave, Frederick Douglass wasn’t allowed to learn to read and write, so he taught himself and later escaped. The urge to discover more through books stayed with him for life.

Superficially, the stories of Jimi Hendrix – born into poverty in Seattle in 1942 – and Ada Lovelace – the nineteenth-century English aristocrat – have little to connect them. They had different goals, faced different challenges and overcame these in different ways.

Like many autodidacts, however, their path to greatness hides lessons that we can all learn from. Their stories show the lengths you have to go to change the way the world thinks.

Lesson 1: The barriers you face can become your greatest strengths

So, you want to become a rock guitarist?

You want to change the face of rock and roll music forever.

You want your name and face to become synonymous with the instrument.

Where do you start?

A guitar, obviously. You’ll need lessons. Only then can you begin to dream.

Often, it’s our conventional assumptions that can hold us back. And our constraints can provide an opportunity to change the way things are done.

Jimi Hendrix didn’t have an easy start in life. He struggled at school and spent hours under the teacher’s desk as punishment for talking to friends.

Outside school, he was writing his own poetry so complex his cousin had to read each line again and again to understand it.

His parents were alcoholics and often fought. They separated when Hendrix was nine and his mother died when he was fifteen. His father refused to take him to the funeral, offering him a shot of whisky instead, as that was how men dealt with loss.

There was never a spare cent when Hendrix was growing up, so Hendrix had to help his father out removing rubbish from people’s houses. One day he came across a ukulele in an old woman’s house.

The ukulele only had one string.

He asked the woman if he could keep it.

He began to teach himself music while listening to the radio. It was rare to hear black musicians, so he played along to Elvis and Buddy Holly on his single-stringed ukulele.

A year later, he got his first acoustic guitar for $5. This was all he could afford. It was a right-handed guitar, and Hendrix was left-handed, so he restrung it and played it upside-down.

This contributed to his unique sound, but it also had symbolic significance. Even when he could afford a left-handed guitar, he continued playing a right-handed one upside down – it reinforced his image as someone who upturned convention.

According to music professor Jeanne Bamberger, many musical prodigies face a ‘midlife crisis’ during adolescence following a childhood undergoing an intense and often externally dictated practice regime. During this teenage period of self-discovery, they question what makes them special. They begin to wonder how they can do the things they’ve always taken for granted. It’s a period that can make or break their musical careers.

As an autodidact, Hendrix didn’t face this crisis. He was just getting started.

His journey almost ended, though, before it really began.

Lesson 2: Steal, borrow, appropriate – it’s all a learning experience

When Hendrix was nineteen, he was caught riding in a stolen car. 

It wasn’t the first time. 

He was given a choice – army or jail. He joined the 101st Airborne Division but was discharged a year later for his lack of focus. He didn’t want to be a soldier; he just wanted to play guitar.

It wasn’t a wasted experience. Hendrix was intensely attached to sounds. He absorbed them in the same way others might revel in a meal at a Michelin-starred restaurant.

He realised he wanted to make his guitar sound like the horn in the swing bands he’d heard on his father’s records, or like the wind rushing past his ears as he plunged towards the earth as a paratrooper. 

But as a black musician during a time of segregation, he struggled to get gigs. Later, he talked about the hell of sleeping outside between tenements, rats running across his chest. At times, he was reduced to eating orange peel and tomato paste.

It would have been easy for Hendrix to give up. Try rejoining the army – or go back to stealing cars.

Instead, when he was given a gig, he wasn’t going to waste the opportunity. He made sure he was noticed.

He created the most electrifying live performance possible.

When he saw something he liked, Hendrix incorporated it into his repertoire. In Seattle, he saw a guy playing guitar with his teeth. Hendrix copied him. And learnt to play his guitar behind his head for good measure.

His live act gained a reputation; soon, the crowds began to get out of control. When an audience in Munich invaded the stage, Hendrix fled. He smashed his guitar in the process. The crowd went wild. Hendrix incorporated the guitar destruction into his act.

Lesson 3: Learn from everyone

Everything he heard or saw became a lesson for Hendrix. He wasn’t limited by genre. ‘I just hate to be in one corner,’ he said. He learnt the blues and rock and roll but also listened to Bob Dylan and classical music.

He covered other people’s songs, imbuing them with a manic energy. He experimented with distortion and feedback, incorporating the newly invented wah-wah pedal that makes songs like Voodoo Child so distinctive.

If Hendrix had been properly trained, the jazz musician Miles Davis noted, it would have affected the way he expressed himself. Had he ‘known all that other stuff,’ he might have played a different way.

It was the challenges he faced that allowed Hendrix to reinvent rock music.

But challenge can come in many forms. The way we overcome them defines who we are and what we can achieve.

Lesson 4: Choose the right teacher

It’s almost impossible to imagine an upbringing more different to Jimi Hendrix’s than that of Ada Lovelace.

Her father was the poet Lord Byron. He had been expecting a ‘glorious boy’ and was disappointed when he didn’t get one. Ada’s parents separated a month after she was born. Byron left England, never to return.

Ada’s mother was terrified that Ada might inherit Lord Byron’s madness. She later said of Ada, ‘I am told she is clever — I hope not; and, above all, I hope she is not poetical.’

To keep her away from the ‘poetical’, Ada was forced to follow a strict educational curriculum tailored to the mathematical and the logical. When Ada was six, her mother found out that geography was her favourite lesson. Lady Byron sacked Ada’s tutor and replaced the geography lessons with arithmetic.

When her mother thought she wasn’t working hard enough, Ada was put into solitary confinement, made to lie motionless and to write letters of apology.

Still, Ada was lucky to get any education.

Universities and scientific institutions were closed to women, but her connections gave her access to some of the greatest minds in the country.

She began corresponding with Augustus De Morgan, the first professor of mathematics at the University of London. De Morgan was impressed by her intellect. Had she been a young man about to go to Cambridge, De Morgan thought, the powers Ada possessed could have made her a mathematician of ‘first-rate eminence’.

He told Ada’s mother that Ada could reach the boundaries of mathematical knowledge – and even push beyond them.

Another tutor, Mary Somerville, the first person in history to be described as a ‘scientist’, had even more influence over Ada’s story – and the story of the computer.

Lesson 5: Cross boundaries

Somerville introduced Ada, aged seventeen, to the inventor Charles Babbage. Babbage was working on a calculation machine for the British government, the Analytical Engine.

It was one of the most ambitious projects of its era, a mass of wheels and cogs. The Analytical Engine possessed many of the elements of a modern computer. It could be ‘programmed’ with punch cards. It could print an output. The position of its wheels formed its memory. The processor was ‘the mill’, a set of gears and cogs which could perform arithmetic.

It was too far ahead of its time. Babbage built parts and prototypes but never completed the machine.

His friend Ada, however, recognised the machine’s power. It was Ada who published the first programme for it, the first algorithm – the conversion of mechanical computing functions into logic.

Babbage saw the Analytical Engine as a powerful calculator. Ada thought it had more potential. If sounds could be turned into computing language, she thought, ‘the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.’

She also warned that the Analytical Engine could not produce original thought. While it could calculate, ‘it has no power of anticipating any analytical revelations or truths’.

A century after Ada’s publication, Alan Turing took issue with ‘Lady Lovelace’s objection’, arguing that machines could produce original results we couldn’t have predicted.

It is a debate that still rages today, with discussions about the capabilities of AI.

Ada’s passion was mathematics, but that alone wasn’t enough for her. She often expressed her thoughts through poetic rather than dry scientific language and brought her imagination to whatever she was studying. This allowed her to see the potential for the Analytical Engine – and, by extension, modern computers – before even its inventor could.

Lesson 6: You don’t need exams or grades

Ada had tutors, who helped drive her towards the boundaries of mathematics – and beyond, into the theory of computing, a world that had not previously existed.

Hendrix created his own curriculum. He played a single-string ukulele because that was all he had. He learned the songs of Elvis and Buddy Holly because that was what they played on the radio. He borrowed from the acts he saw on stage – mainly black musicians – because those were the ones he was allowed in to see.

It wasn’t organised. It didn’t have milestones or grades. Progress would have been frustratingly hard to measure. But Hendrix was driven along by a need to learn and play, something so deep it was impossible to put into words.

Lesson 7: Whatever you choose to do, work hard at it

There is no shortcut to greatness. Hendrix’s appetite for playing the guitar was voracious. He regularly spent eight to ten hours a day practising. Sometimes, he even went to sleep holding his guitar.

Later, in the studio, he insisted on hundreds of takes. The records had to match the sound in his head.

Ada Lovelace was recognised as a great mathematician at 18 and it was around this time she became interested in the Analytical Engine. She didn’t write her groundbreaking notes on the machine for another decade, though. In between, she wasn’t idle; she was always seeking new ways to learn.

Lesson 8: Find your calling

Jimi Hendrix and Ada Lovelace died young. Who knows what they could have achieved if Hendrix had lived past twenty-seven and Ada past thirty-six.

It’s testament to their achievements, though, that we still remember them. Even in the short time they had, they made their mark on the world. They did this, in part, by following their heart.

In elementary school, Hendrix clung to a broom, holding it like it was a guitar. He went everywhere with it. He was so attached to it that the school’s social worker got involved. She wrote to the school insisting that unless they bought him a guitar, he might suffer permanent psychological damage.

The school authorities weren’t convinced.

Later, he promoted himself to a cigar box with an elastic band across it before finding the single-stringed ukulele.

Ada’s combination of obsessive, self-led learning and imagination was evident from a young age. Aged twelve, she decided she wanted to fly. She constructed wings, testing out every material she could find. Like Leonardo da Vinci, she made a careful study of birds’ wings and anatomy. She even wrote a book, Flyology, showing her findings.

Jimi Hendrix and Ada Lovelace didn’t start off as geniuses. They became one through a combination of determination, imitation, innovation, and taking every opportunity to learn.

By following the way of the autodidact – finding mentors, combining ideas and focusing on learning rather than exams or grades – you can take responsibility for your own education.

This way, you can build a body of knowledge that is as unique that of Ada Lovelace or Jimi Hendrix.

Sources:

On Jimi Hendrix:

Morrissey, A.-M. (2001) Beyond the image: The giftedness of Jimi Hendrix. Roeper Review, 24(1), 5–11 

van der Bliek, R. (2007) The Hendrix chord: Blues, flexible pitch relationships, and self‑standing harmony. Popular Music, 26(2), 343–364. 

Waksman, S. (1999). Black sound, black body: Jimi Hendrix, the electric guitar, and the meanings of blackness. Popular Music and Society, 23(1), 75-113

Whiteley, S. (1990) Progressive rock and psychedelic coding in the work of Jimi Hendrix. Popular Music, 9(1), 37–60 

On Ada Lovelace:

Hollings, C., Martin, U., & Rice, A. (2017) The early mathematical education of Ada Lovelace. BSHM Bulletin: Journal of the British Society for the History of Mathematics, 32(3), 221–234 

Hollings, C., Martin, U., & Rice, A. (2017). The Lovelace–De Morgan mathematical correspondence: A critical re-appraisal. Historia Mathematica, 44(3), 202-231 

University of St Andrews. MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive: Quotations from Ada Lovelace. Available at: https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Lovelace/quotations/

Other sources:

Bamberger, J. (1982). Growing up prodigies: The midlife crisis. New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development, 1982(17), 61-77

The post Educate Yourself appeared first on Get Curious.

Frida Kahlo (L) by Guillermo Kahlo (1932) and Montaigne (R) by Daniel Dumonstier (c. 1588)

‘I would rather be an expert on me than on Cicero’

Montaigne

An eventful bus ride

Age six, Frida Kahlo contracted polio. The standard medical treatment at the time was rest and isolation.

It wouldn’t be the only time in her short life she would be confined to her home.

Her father, an architectural photographer, watched the loneliness eating little Frida up. He taught her how to develop and retouch photos. The techniques she learnt – the tiny brushstrokes, how to take care of her equipment – stayed with her for life.

She returned to school, marked forever by her disease. One leg was shorter than the other, and her peers mocked her for it. Art was a source of comfort to her. She became an apprentice to her father’s friend, an engraver, to help her family out, although she never considered a career as an artist.

A high-achieving, if rebellious student, she was only one of a handful of girls admitted to the prestigious National Preparatory School in Mexico City. She was planning to study medicine when the accident happened.

Kahlo was returning home from school with her boyfriend, Alejandro Gómez Arias, when she realised she’d left her umbrella behind. They got off the bus and went back for it. The next bus that came along was so crowded they only just managed to squeeze on.

Gómez Arias later described the incident:

The tram with two wagons approached the bus slowly. It slammed into the middle of the vehicle. The bus had a strange flexibility. It twisted and didn’t break … As soon as the bus reached its maximum flexibility, it cracked into thousands of pieces

When Kahlo came to, her friends were helping her up, which wasn’t an easy job: she had been impaled by an iron handrail, ‘the way a sword pierces a bull,’ as she would later describe it. The handrail had pierced her abdomen. Her spine was broken in three places, her leg in eleven and her uterus had been punctured.

The first weeks passed in a blur of surgery and blood transfusions. She wrote to Gómez Arias about how she knew she should be lucky to be alive, but she hated spending so much time in the ‘piggy filthy hospital’.

Afterwards, she spent months at home in a plaster cast that extended from her collarbone to her pelvis. She couldn’t even get out of bed. Returning to school was unthinkable.

Although her body was immobile, her mind was as active as ever. She needed an outlet for her racing thoughts. She had a special easel made so she could paint in bed and had a mirror placed next to her so she could see herself.

‘I paint myself because I am often alone and I am the subject I know best,’ she later wrote.

This was the moment her curiosity turned inwards.

Brains in vats

It was the French philosopher René Descartes who first separated the mind from the body. In a series of radical thought experiments, he questioned the very nature of reality. How can we know that the external world isn’t the creation of an ‘evil demon’?

The move inspired countless sci-fi books and movies like The Matrix. We might be brains in a vat, for all we know. Our sensory information could be the product of an artificial intelligence, uploaded directly into our brains.

‘I think, therefore I am,’ Descartes concluded – all we can be certain of is that we are a series of connected thoughts.

Descartes gave the mind a life of its own. The body was relegated to something we can’t truly know, something ‘out there’ in the world and therefore of secondary importance to the mind.

Providing the body works, we often give it little thought. A much later philosopher, Martin Heidegger, said that we treat tools as ‘ready-to-hand’ – we don’t notice the hammer, only the nail we’re trying to drive into the wall. The hammer is an extension of our arm. It is only when the hammer breaks that we see it once again as a tool.

It can be the same for the body.

A calm retirement

Four years before Descartes was born, and two hundred miles to the south, another philosopher lay dying, a philosopher who had been unafraid of exploring his own body to the fullest.

In 1571, aged 38, Montaigne – or Michel Eyquem, Seigneur de Montaigne, to give him his full title – retired from public life. The first half of his life had been eventful enough. He had toured Europe, been a courtier to King Charles IX, and served as Mayor of Bordeaux.

He had also lost many of those he loved, including his best friend and his brother. In all, he would go on to lose five of his six children.

Montaigne had experienced his own brush with death, too. Two years before, he had been thrown from his horse and lay ‘dead, stretched on my back, my face all bruised and skinned’. He claimed that this experience – and the days that followed, which he spent inert in bed – cured him of his fear of death.

Montaigne took up residence in the round library in one of his chateau’s towers and began to write. He had no doubt about what his primary focus would be. ‘I myself am the subject of my book,’ he wrote. ‘Were I a good pupil there is enough, I find, in my own experience to make me wise.’

He wrote about what he had seen on his travels, about how customs in one region seemed alien in another town, just down the road. He read about discoveries in the new world, where some people went around naked, and beauty standards were at odds with those in the world Montaigne knew firsthand.

Montaigne was not content with received wisdom or lazy generalisations. ‘Only fools have made up their minds and are certain,’ he wrote, then quoted Dante: ‘For doubting pleases me as much as knowledge’.

Full of people who are full of themselves

Despite the urging of the Delphi oracle to the people of Greece centuries before, Montaigne didn’t think anyone really knew themselves. Most people already assumed they were experts on themselves – their thoughts, their bodies, their likes, dislikes, strengths and irrationalities. There was little left to discover.

In the most personal way possible, Montaigne set out to prove them wrong.

He did this through meticulous notetaking and following the slow meandering of his thoughts. But most of all, he did it through careful observation. ‘We tell ourselves all that we chiefly need: let us listen to it.’

As his biographer Sarah Bakewell has put it, Montaigne invented the kind of writing we’re all used to reading online: ‘The twenty-first century is full of people who are full of themselves’.

Some of Montaigne’s thoughts apply to the social media oversharer: ‘Many things that I would not care to tell any individual man I tell to the public.’ But Montaigne did not need to worry about constant feedback and immediate judgement. He was able to present a full picture of himself, his faults and failures, his flatulence and impotence, without worrying about creating a social media storm.

‘If my design had been to seek the favour of the world,’ Montaigne wrote, ‘I would have decked myself out better.’

Often, the things that people find most embarrassing are the most interesting things about them.

Montaigne’s unselfconscious approach meant that others could recognise themselves in what he wrote. If he had tried to fit in, or presented an airbrushed self-portrait to the world, his work would not have endured. Like Kahlo, it was what made him different that drove his creativity.

Anxiety and doom scrolling

Had Frida Kahlo lived a hundred years later and suffered her horrendous accident in 2025, her life may have turned out differently. Confined to a bed today, she may have lain day after day with only her phone for comfort, scrolling through photos of friends celebrating the end of exams, taking gap years and starting university. Friends beginning their own medical studies where hers had been cut short before they even began.

For psychiatrist Judson Brewer, anxiety builds when our responses fail to address our underlying feelings. He explains it as a series of triggers and responses, which develop into a cycle.

To take one example:

Trigger: Feeling anxious in bed after an accident; worrying about missing out

Behaviour: Scrolling

Reward: Distraction from anxiety

The only way to escape, according to Brewer, is to offer our minds something better than the reward they’re currently getting. Whether it’s smoking to relieve stress or eating to cope with anxiety, we need to get curious about our habits.

When we begin to concentrate and notice the sensations, the behaviour is rarely as satisfying as we imagine it to be. The endless pizza slices soon become bland; cigarettes have an unpleasant taste and leave the throat feeling raw. As Montaigne wrote, ‘pleasures are to be avoided, if greater pains be the consequence’.

Our brains reevaluate the compulsive cycle. When we observe our own behaviour, we can see that the way we comfort ourselves sometimes isn’t as rewarding as imagine.

Then we can start to look for a replacement.

Chewing sweets instead of cigarettes isn’t a long-term solution, though, argues Brewer. Our behaviour is still compulsive. The replacement behaviour still isn’t great for us. And we haven’t tackled the cause – the stress or anxiety.

Instead, we need to become curious about our feelings. How does it feel when the stress builds? What happens to our bodies when we’re feeling anxious? During his time as a junior doctor, Brewer began to get panic attacks. While he couldn’t stop these, he was able to use meditation techniques he’d learnt to ride them out. A sense of helplessness would have exacerbated the issue. Instead, Brewer noted what was happening to his body. Over time, the attacks became less frequent before stopping completely.

Curiosity can replace our compulsive behaviour. We can begin to enjoy this exploration of our feelings and sensations, just as Montaigne dedicated himself to understanding his own experiences. It becomes a way to address the greatest challenges that life can throw our way.

One person who took this to the extreme was Frida Kahlo.

I paint my own reality

As she recovered from the accident, Kahlo toyed with the idea of becoming an artist. She joined the Mexican Communist Party, through which she got to know Diego Rivera, the great painter of murals. They married and toured the world together. Rivera was a champion of Kahlo’s work, but his frequent affairs left her feeling lonelier than ever.

Her health was also a constant issue. Although she became pregnant numerous times, she didn’t carry any to term. Throughout, she never tried to dull her feelings or shy away from her experiences. After one miscarriage, she painted Henry Ford Hospital, depicting herself naked in a pool of blood on a hospital bed, tethered by an umbilical cord to the foetus that she had lost preterm.

Painting gave her experiences meaning. Even – especially – the painful ones.

Through the final years of her life, while Kahlo continued to push the boundaries of art, she also fought for the rights of those whose voices were not heard. She spoke out against sexism and racism. She advocated for the inclusion of artwork by women and people of colour in exhibitions and often painted herself in traditional Mexican dress.

Kahlo described Rivera as ‘eternally curious,’ but she could equally have applied this to herself. Her curiosity about her experiences ran in parallel with a constant questioning of the structure of society – its assumptions and inequalities.

She didn’t let anything – or anyone – else define her. Her accidents didn’t define her, and she wouldn’t let society either. When her right leg had to be amputated above the knee, she wrote in her diary, ‘Feet, what do I need you for when I have wings to fly?’

Don’t build a wall around your suffering

It would be easy to imagine her simply as the tragic figure shown in Henry Ford Hospital, but that wouldn’t be the complete story. ‘It is not worthwhile to leave this world without having had a little fun in life,’ she wrote.

Throughout her illness, Kahlo was still the life and soul of the party. She loved singing Mexican ballads, her Tehuana costumes brought colour wherever she went and her friends noted that she could drink her guests under the table.

Her home, the Casa Azul, became the embodiment of her personality, with its cobalt-blue walls and bright, tiled kitchen, shelves covered with ancient Aztec artefacts and garden full of animals, including monkeys, parrots and even a deer.

Like Montaigne four centuries earlier, Kahlo found comfort in self-expression rather than compulsive or addictive behaviour. ‘Don’t build a wall around your suffering,’ she apparently warned: ‘It may devour you from the inside.’

Social media encourages us to present a façade to the world. We often celebrate those who seem to have it all worked out. Whose skin is free of wrinkles. Whose family life is devoid of tragedy and complications. Who do not have physical or mental health issues.

These are not people we can learn from, though. They are not the people whose stories will last.

Instead, it is the artwork of Frida Kahlo, who expressed herself despite – and through – her illness, that is among some of the most highly valued in the world.

It is within the words of Montaigne, determined to discover and confront his flaws, that generation after generation have found comfort and meaning.

‘Painting completed my life,’ Kahlo wrote. ‘I lost three children and a series of other things that would have fulfilled my horrible life. My painting took the place of all of this.’

Frida Kahlo showed herself, unfiltered.

Her curiosity about herself and her place in the world showed what it means to be human.

Sources

On Montaigne

Sarah Bakewell (2011) How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer

Alain de Botton (2000) The Consolations of Philosophy

Montaigne’s Essays (I’ve used Penguin’s 2004 edition)

On Frida Kahlo

BBC (2023) Becoming Frida Kahlo

Alicja Zelazko / Encyclopaedia Britannica (2025) Frida Kahlo https://www.britannica.com/biography/Frida-Kahlo

Museo Frida Kahlo (2025) https://www.museofridakahlo.org.mx

Other sources

Judson Brewer (2022) Unwinding Anxiety (Also, see his 2016 TED talk, ‘A Simple Way to Break a Bad Habit’)

“Portrait of Michel de Montaigne” — Condé Museum — Public domain. Source: Wikimedia Commons, File: Montaigne_1578.jpg.

“Frida Kahlo, by Guillermo Kahlo” — Public domain. Source: Wikimedia Commons, File: Frida_Kahlo,_by_Guillermo_Kahlo.jpg.

Composite image created by GetCurious.Blog; images cropped and combined from the originals.

The post Get curious about yourself appeared first on Get Curious.

When his stepfather died, Newton’s mother moved back to the family home with Newton’s three stepsisters. Newton was sent to board in a town eight miles away. He was bullied at school. As an escape, he found projects to immerse himself in. He built sundials and performed astronomical calculations. He built a water wheel and watched the water flow along the stream, sometimes moving effortlessly, sometimes swirling chaotically.

Newton was destined to take up farming, the family business, but showed little aptitude for it. His head was too full of ideas. He failed to repair the farm’s fences and allowed the pigs to trespass onto his neighbour’s land – and soon found himself in court.

But fate intervened in Newton’s favour. His schoolmaster saw his potential. Together with Newton’s uncle, who had studied at Cambridge before joining the clergy, they arranged for Newton to be sent to his uncle’s old college, Trinity.

My best friend is the truth

Even at Cambridge Newton was at the bottom of the pecking order. His mother, now a wealthy widow, chose to give Newton only a tiny allowance. To pay his way, he had to work as a servant for the richer students. He wasn’t allowed to dine with his peers at high table, but once the other students had finished eating, he could finish off their leftovers.

To those around him, there was little sign he was marked out for greatness, but in his notebooks, something extraordinary was happening.

Isaac Newton’s handwritten notes on Aristotle’s Organon.

Image from Cambridge Digital Library via Wikimedia Commons

Ever since the fall of the Roman Empire, most scholars had spent their energy arguing about what the ancients wrote. Whatever Plato and Aristotle were ignorant of wasn’t worth knowing. Recently, people had started to doubt these limits – and Newton was one of them.

A section of his university notebook was titled quaestiones quaedam philosophicae – certain philosophical questions. This was reserved for his thoughts on whatever he was studying – Descartes, Galileo and Hobbes. He took careful notes and analysed ideas he came across with a critical eye. At the top of the section he wrote a motto: Amicus Plato amicus Aristoteles magis amica veritas

Plato is my friend, Aristotle is my friend, but my best friend is the truth.

It echoed the motto of the Royal Society, founded in London the year before Newton started at Cambridge. (Newton would later become its president.)

Nullius in verba.

Take nobody’s word for it.

Newton’s ability to doubt became his superpower. He let himself be guided by nature and, in the process, transformed our understanding of the universe.

After three years at Cambridge, Newton was awarded a scholarship, releasing him from valet duties for his fellow students. His notebook also showed signs of his prowess in mathematics: it contained theories nobody had seen before.

But just as things were beginning to improve, the plague arrived. Colleges shut down. Newton had to return home.

The world’s paramount mathematician

It would have been easy for him to despair. His relationship with his mother and stepsisters was difficult at best. His newfound independence was gone. Worse, so was his access to the lectures and books that inspired him.

He could have asked himself: Why me? Why now?

Instead, he asked different questions. Strange questions.

What is light made of?

Where does colour come from?

Why does an apple fall downwards – never sideways or upwards?

What makes a cannonball continue through the air after it’s been fired?

What is space made of? How long does it go on for?

Can you break time down into tiny parts, like you can break matter down into atoms?

Some of these questions had never been asked before.

He didn’t just ask questions, he also pursued the answers relentlessly. He turned the front room of the family home into one of the world’s most advanced optics laboratories. He filled a precious notebook – passed down by his stepfather – with page after page with calculations.

By the time he returned to Cambridge almost two years later he had become, according to his biographer James Gleick, ‘the world’s paramount mathematician’.

Doubt everything

Doubt, as a starting point, was not a new idea. The Sceptics of ancient Greece had made it the foundation of their philosophy. If you’re considering an argument, they said, keep piling up the evidence for each side. Soon, you’ll see that both are equally strong – or equally weak. No question can be answered with any certainty.

That’s one way to prevent you making a fool of yourself by jumping to conclusions, but it’s hardly a constructive way to make new discoveries.

Newton had a different method of doubting. It was a way of creating knowledge, not simply of dismissing other people’s ideas. His combination of perceptive questions with meticulous observation and thorough mathematics allowed him to create laws that have lasted for centuries.

Later in life, Newton became obsessed with alchemy. Chemistry was only just emerging from alchemy’s shadow, and Newton brought a rigour the discipline had never seen before. He sniffed and tasted every new chemical, every new vapour (filling his body with toxic mercury in the process). But he also brought precision to his measurements, carefully weighing and recording everything he did.

Newton didn’t doubt everything, but his standards of proof were much higher than those who had gone before. He was issuing a challenge for his rivals to up their game.

The plague over, Newton returned to Cambridge and continued his work. Years passed and he turned from student to professor. He barely left his rooms. The only thing he published was a geography textbook (lecturing on the subject was part of his remit as mathematics professor).

Then a friend, astronomer Edmund Halley, arrived with news. Newton’s great rival Robert Hooke, Curator of Experiments at the Royal Society, was going to publish his own theory of gravity. Newton knew from his correspondence with Hooke that Hooke’s ideas were much less developed than his own, but there was no way Newton could let Hooke get there first.

Newton worked relentlessly to make his ideas publishable. Previously, he had been a recluse. Now, it was as if his human, embodied life, disappeared entirely. He ate little, and when he did, took meals standing up. On the rare occasions he wandered out of his rooms, he looked confused and retreated quickly.

In 1687, the Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica – the Principia – was published, providing the foundation for modern physics to this day. 

Cognitive Misers

In 1984, psychologists Susan Fiske and Shelley Taylor introduced the term cognitive miser in their book Social Cognition. Just as a miser is someone who carefully guards their money, a cognitive miser is someone reluctant to use their precious cognitive resources. They often end up taking mental shortcuts and are happy to accept what they’re told. The theory explains why we rely on stereotypes rather than seeing people as individuals, why we can be scammed by an offer that sounds too good to be true and why we reason based on the evidence in front of us rather than doing our own research.

It suits us all to be cognitive misers at times. When we’re buying a car, we accept the dealer’s promises about its safety record, about the car’s mileage and details of previous owners. When our kids tell us how their day has gone, we don’t cross-reference their account with their friends and teacher.

There is a lot that we just have to accept. Life’s too short to question everything. But sometimes, we take others’ word for it when we should challenge them.

Newton could have accepted Aristotle’s idea that things won’t move unless they’re being pushed. But then he wouldn’t have come up with his laws of motion. He could have accepted the idea that a prism contains the spectrum of colours and gives them to white light as it passes through. He could have accepted the mathematics of the day without building calculus. It would have saved him a lot of time and mental energy. But it would also have prevented him being remembered as a genius for publishing the Principia.

Instead, he never stopped questioning.

At least, he never stopped questioning where maths and science were concerned. Just like all of us, though, there were some things Newton didn’t question.

When other scientists came up with similar theories, his instinct was to attack their methods and claim credit himself. He could have questioned this instinct. He could have expended effort getting to know more about the scientists and their views. This approach might have ended up in the kinds of collaborations that produce theories we’re still using today. But until his death, Newton wasted his time and energy trying to prove them wrong, and that he had got there first, sometimes to the point of faking a paper trail to prove it.

Later in life, as Master of the Royal Mint, he vigorously pursued counterfeiters – to the gallows, where possible. He could have questioned whether forgery should be worthy of capital punishment. Others did. He could have questioned the value of human life. But he chose to make an example out of those who tried to rival him in creating currency.

When to ask a question

The metaphor of the cognitive miser hides important differences between spending and reasoning. While money is finite and depreciates in value over time unless invested, our cognitive resources are elastic. The less we use them, the rustier they get.

In some ways, the analogy of the brain as a muscle is a more accurate one. We should be testing and straining our brain to build its strength, while making sure we rest it in between. Questioning, too, is a skill. The more we do it, the better we get at it.

We should all ask more questions, especially about the things that matter.

Nullius in verba.

Take nobody’s word for it.

We should question politicians’ promises. We should question the topics they bring up: Why do you think this is the most important issue? Why are you using this metaphor? What view of the world are you bringing?

We can question processes at work. We can look at the way we do things and ask why. Often, you’ll find people’s only explanation is that things have always been done this way. They might not like you asking but you probably can’t make any fundamental changes in the workplace without questioning the status quo (and upsetting a few cognitive misers in the progress).

We can question aspects of life that seem set in stone. Civil rights movements wouldn’t have happened unless someone had doubted the superiority of one group or one way of life over all others.

Sometimes, we have a duty to question.

Sure, we’re all cognitive misers from time to time, and that’s ok. We’d go crazy otherwise. But, like Newton, we need to work out which are the important questions to ask. Which questions might just change the world.

And we shouldn’t settle for the first thing that comes along, the first thing that sounds about right. Instead, we should demand to see the method. Question the process. And stop not just when we’re close or we have something that will sound plausible in a report but when we arrive at the correct answer.

Like Newton said, Plato is my friend, Aristotle is my friend, but my best friend is the truth.

Sources

Susan Fiske and Shelley Taylor (1984) Social Cognition

James Gleick (2003) Isaac Newton

The post Take Nobody’s Word For It appeared first on Get Curious.

The way to write a thriller is to ask a question at the beginning, and answer it at the end

Lee Child

Getting the sack

Jim Grant was about to be laid off. He’d worked for a TV studio his whole life. He didn’t know any other way to make a living. But as the union rep during times of trouble, Grant would be first for the chop.

Things didn’t look good. Other TV studios would find out about his union activities and give him a wide berth. He’d had the same job since he graduated from law school. And he had never even practised law, so he didn’t have that to fall back on.

Grant was about to turn forty. It didn’t seem like the ideal time to learn a new skill. But the day he was laid off, he took a walk to the shops and bought a pad of paper and a pencil. He sat down at the kitchen table and began to write. And he hasn’t stopped since.

The Cliffhanger

You might know Grant better as Lee Child. He’s the creator of Jack Reacher, the hulking ex-Military Police investigator known informally as ‘Sherlock Homeless’. His books have sold more than a hundred million copies and been turned into films starring Tom Cruise and a blockbuster Amazon Prime series.

Child didn’t need to reskill, it turned out. He had learnt everything he needed about creating the Reacher books during his time at the TV studio. To keep viewers tuned in during the ad breaks that came every fifteen minutes, TV producers put a question at the end of a segment, then revealed the answer after the break. Not the most dramatic cliffhanger, but it told Child something about human psychology. Putting a question at the end of each chapter in his Reacher books keeps readers flicking the pages. It’s a hint of new information. Or of danger. Child is the master of the surprise in the final sentence.

Child didn’t invent the cliffhanger, of course. Like Scheherazade, telling stories to King Shahryār night after night to postpone her own execution, The Arabian Nights has kept readers in suspense for centuries.

Dickens was a master of the craft. Commercial necessity was his teacher, as it was for Lee Child in the TV studio. Because his stories were serialised, Dickens had to keep readers hungry for the next instalment. There are stories of crowds storming the docks in New York as ships arrived from England to find out what happened to Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop.

The term ‘cliffhanger’ comes from Thomas Hardy’s A Pair of Blue Eyes. See if you think it still holds up as a how-to guide in the Netflix age of how to build tension.

In the novel, Henry Knight is wooing Elfride Swancourt, unaware of her relationship with another man. Henry and Elfride are walking along the cliffs when Henry’s hat is pulled from his head by a gust of wind. He leans over the cliff to retrieve it and is pulled over the cliff edge himself.

Here’s an abridged version (Victorian novels aren’t famed for their concision):

Knight was now literally suspended by his arms.

‘If I can only save you by running for help!” Elfride cried.

‘How long will it take you to run to Endelstow and back?’

‘Three-quarters of an hour.’

‘That won’t do; my hands will not hold out ten minutes.’

A minute—perhaps more time—was passed in mute thought by both. Suddenly the blank and helpless agony left her face. She vanished over the bank from his sight.

Knight felt himself in the presence of a personalized loneliness.

And there the chapter ends.

The Zeigarnik Effect

To understand why cliffhangers are effective, we need to turn to the work of the psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik.

Zeigarnik was sitting with her mentor Kurt Lewin in a busy Viennese café, so the story goes. Lewin was famed for his meandering conversations with friends that could last all afternoon. Eventually, he called the waiter over and asked how much they owed. The waiter knew what they’d all had and answered immediately. After the group finished their drinks, they were discussing the bill and Lewin called the waiter over again: ‘How much did we just pay?’ The waiter couldn’t tell him.

Intrigued, Zeigarnik set about investigating. She gave people simple tasks to do – solving puzzles, folding paper, or answering mathematical problems. Half of the participants were allowed to finish their activities; the other half were interrupted when they were engrossed in the activity. Zeigarnik was a pioneer of the experimental method in psychology. She made sure to carefully balance the time and difficulty of the tasks between the two groups. The only difference was whether the participants were allowed to complete the tasks. Her findings were clear: those who had been interrupted were twice as likely to recall what they had been doing as those who were allowed to complete the task.

She probed further. The most effective points to interrupt people were in the middle or towards the end of the task. Those just getting started were not as good at recalling what they had been doing. Zeigarnik also found that people who were more ambitious, or saw the lack of completion as a failure, had a better memory for the tasks.

Zeigarnik put the effect down to psychische Spannung, or ‘psychological tension’. The tension builds in the mind during the activity, peaking just before it’s finished. After the activity is done, the tension dissipates.

This is the same tension that a skilled novelist builds in their reader. Will Elfride make it back with help before Knight falls? The clock is ticking – the psychological tension is building. Access to Knight’s thoughts while he is hanging builds the suspense. Elfride returns – alone. How long can he hold on? Not long – not long enough for help to come. So the enterprising Elfride tears her clothing into strips and knots it into a rope, tying one end around her waist before throwing the other down to Knight. He makes it up and they embrace.

But there’s still that business of the love triangle to resolve…

A skilled novelist zooms in and out, building and releasing tension moment by moment, but leaving other questions simmering in the background. The tension is never fully released until the resolution at the end of the novel.

Zeigarnik’s work tells us why cliffhangers are useful: if a question isn’t resolved, it sticks in our mind. But this doesn’t tell us much about the characteristics of a successful cliffhanger.

For this, we need to turn to the work of another psychologist.

The Goldilocks Zone

For George Loewenstein, curiosity is a state of deprivation. Imagine someone asks you to name all the US states and you come up two short. You have an information gap – a space between your current knowledge and the knowledge you could have. It creates a desire, like an advert that promises a perfect life if only you buy the bottle of perfume or the latest SUV.

When your mind is focused on something you lack, your need for it increases. According to Loewenstein, the closer you come to the information, the more motivated you are to get it. Whenever your attention is caught by a clickbait headline or teasing advert, that’s Loewenstein’s version of curiosity tugging at your sleeve.

But not just any gap will do. There’s a ‘Goldilocks Zone’ where the gap is just the right size. 

Curiosity’s ‘Goldilocks Zone’: if the information gap between what we know and what we want to know is too small, we become bored; too large and we get confused. We become curious only when the gap is exactly the right size.

If you start asking primary school kids questions about quantum physics, you’re unlikely to elicit much curiosity. Ask quantum physicists about primary school science, and you’re only going to induce yawns. The gap between what you know and the tantalising information dangled in front of you has to be just the right distance to leap over.

When Lee Child puts Reacher in a dangerous situation, the solution has to raise questions. If there’s one bad guy between Reacher and freedom, he’s just going to crumple the guy’s head in. But ten, one of whom is the size of three average guys squashed together – that’s more interesting. The psychological tension ramps up.

A cliffhanger is a hard thing to get right. We’ve all seen far more clickbait headlines than we’ve clicked on, adverts than products we’ve bought and we’ve probably all stopped watching halfway through a series, leaving those questions dangling.

Often, this is because the gap is the wrong size: someone has failed to get to us to the peak curiosity point on the graph. At other times, though, we lose trust. That TV series that keeps throwing questions at us – who’s the mysterious woman we keep seeing in the distance? What does that weird writing mean? And what’s the secret the main character is hiding? At some point, we stop believing the questions are going to be resolved. There will simply be more cliffhangers. The writers themselves don’t know what the solutions are.

It’s easy to leave the protagonist hanging by a fraying rope over the mouth of a volcano, but harder to get them free when we’ve implied the situation is impossible to escape from.

A cliffhanger is a contract with a reader or viewer. Keep going, and the pay-off is going to be worth it. Authors neglect that contract at their peril.

When to follow the rules (and when to break them)

It was a Catholic priest, Ronald Knox, who wrote the first rules that detective novelists must follow if they are to play fair, including no supernatural forces at work, no scientific device that needs a long explanation at the end and no identical twins (unless the reader’s been prepared beforehand).

The cleverest writers know how to bend – and even break – the rules, and nobody does this better than Agatha Christie. The airport bestseller that claims to be genre-bending or with a twist you never saw coming – the chances are that Christie got there first.

There are a set of rules, though, that every suspense writer must follow if they hope to keep their readers. These were not put together by a novelist (or a priest) but a psychologist. In the same paper he described his Information-Gap theory, Loewenstein also described the situations that can pique someone’s curiosity:

1. When they’re presented with a puzzle

2. When they see a sequence of events with ‘an anticipated but unknown resolution’. People will make a prediction, and have to stick around to find out whether they’re right

3. When their expectations are violated

4. When they discover someone else has information they don’t

In The Science of Storytelling, Will Storr claims that Loewenstein wrote ‘a perfect description of the police-procedural drama’. Whether it’s a Lee Child novel or the latest crime drama streaming into your home, you’ll see these four methods being used. How-to guides on crime writing tell you to give the reader a body on the first page – but unlike the stories on the front page of the paper, there must be something impossible about the murder, something that doesn’t make sense. The tension will build through the use of red herrings, characters who must be the murderer but have an alibi. Virtually every character has a motive – the only one that doesn’t (spoiler alert) is probably the real killer.

Staring into the void

The curiosity that Loewenstein describes is a very particular form of curiosity. Lee Child learned his craft by putting trivia questions before ad breaks in TV shows. This is the same situation psychological researchers like Loewenstein present research subjects with in the laboratory. When we come across a new situation in the real world – when we’re travelling, or in the classroom or in a scientific laboratory – it isn’t always that easy to say what the gap is. Our curiosity is often provoked by something more complex than the four situations that Loewenstein outlines.

When the astronomer is presented with a shiny new telescope, the most powerful in history, and she stares into a galaxy nobody has ever seen before, what will she discover? Information-gap theory feels too limited for this case. There are no multiple-choice answers, no set of US states or lineage of kings and queens that can fill the gap. Instead, there’s a yawning, gaping, unknown. Depending on what the astrophysicist discovers, that psychological tension might carry on building and building.

These aren’t the kind of questions that underpin cliffhangers. Cliffhangers are controlled situations – controlled by the writer or the psychologist. But there are some situations that we just can’t control. And these are the situations that can drive a lifetime of curiosity.

When we gaze into the abyss, Nietzsche wrote, the abyss gazes back into us.

Sources

Books:

Thomas Hardy (1873) A Pair of Blue Eyes

Will Storr (2019) The Science of Storytelling

Academic sources:

George Loewenstein (1994) The psychology of curiosity: A review and reinterpretation, Psychological Bulletin, 116(1), 75-98

Colin M. MacLeod (2020) Zeigarnik and von Restorff: The memory effects and the stories behind them, Memory & Cognition ,48, 1073–1088

The post The Psychology of the Cliffhanger appeared first on Get Curious.