You might say it’s curious that the scientific community has spent so much of its intellectual energy exploring the relationship between curiosity and aging while producing so little in the way of useful information.
Everyone from Ivan Pavlov to B. F. Skinner seems to have weighed in on the topic at some point; William James once called it “the impulse towards better cognition.” Yet their combined musings have only generated a tepid consensus suggesting that we naturally become gradually less curious as we grow older. It’s not that seniors have figured everything out, the thinking goes; it’s just that we’re no longer inspired to put forth the investigative efforts of our youth.
It may be a little more complicated than that, says UCLA psychologist Alan Castel, PhD.
“The psychology literature shows that oftentimes what’s known as trait curiosity, or a person’s general level of curiosity, tends to decline with age,” Castel explains. “But we thought that was a little bit strange and went against some of the things we saw in some of the older adult participants in our experiments.”
The key to understanding how curiosity evolves as we age, he argues, is recognizing that it surfaces both as a personality trait and as a response to a specific situation or state. In a report published last week in the journal PLOS One, Castel and his colleagues measured both types of curiosity among 2,000 study participants ranging in age from 20 to 84 and concluded that older adults were not nearly as incurious as earlier research has suggested.
Analyzing participants’ responses to a personality-oriented questionnaire, researchers concluded that trait curiosity — a measure of inherent inquisitiveness — did indeed tend to decline among the older respondents. But when asked to answer difficult trivia questions, those seniors were more likely than younger participants to show an interest in learning the correct answers before they were revealed. This indicated a higher level of state curiosity, researchers concluded.
Individuals typically display both types of curiosity, Castel notes, and those blessed with higher levels of trait curiosity also tend to exhibit more of the state variety. But, overall, the former type often dissipates as we grow beyond middle age, when we’re less focused on accumulating knowledge to support career, family, and other priorities. Our inherent urge to investigate becomes … well, less urgent.
“Our findings fit with some of my work on selectivity theory, which is that as we get older, we don’t want to stop learning; we’re just more selective about what we want to learn,” he says. “You see this in the context of lifelong learning: A lot of older adults will go back to take classes or pick up hobbies or engage in bird watching. I think it shows that this level of curiosity, if maintained, can really keep us sharp as we age.”
Castel and his crew didn’t set out to connect their findings to any particular aspect of cognitive health, but earlier research has shown how curiosity can benefit our aging brains. A study published last month in Scientific Reports, for instance, suggests that higher levels of curiosity are associated with healthier brain structures. Other evidence has emerged in recent years to credit our curious natures with boosting memory, sparking joy via a dopamine rush, enhancing creativity, and delaying cognitive decline.
“As we get older, maybe we want to be focused on the things that are important, and we forget the things that are less relevant,” Castel notes. “Anecdotally, a lot of older adults I speak to say that it’s important to stay curious. That fits with some of the research that shows that people who have early stages of dementia might show disinterest in things that they once enjoyed.”
I’m not remotely qualified to question Castel’s research, but I’d be curious to know whether my disinterest in, say, listening to ear-splitting garage-band music in cramped, smelly bars is a sign that my curiosity levels have diminished and I’m tumbling headlong into Alzheimer’s.
On second thought, though, I’m not sure I’d really want to know. Curiosity’s usefulness may have its limits.
The post PUMPING IRONY: Curiosity and Its Consequences appeared first on Experience Life.
https://experiencelife.lifetime.life/article/pumping-irony-curiosity-and-its-consequences/
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