Amalya Sukiasyan Speaking from personal experience, I’ve always associated learning with a deep sense of childlike curiosity. In my view, curiosity is the most essential trait for genuine learning. It is the drive to explore the unknown that makes meaningful engagement with material possible.

From a neuroscientific perspective, curiosity is closely linked to the brain’s dopamine system, which plays a critical role in motivation and the ability to sustain attention and enter a state of flow—both of which are essential for effective learning.

Given this, I believe the primary goal of educators should be to cultivate and sustain curiosity. Without it, critical thinking cannot fully take root. Curiosity is not just an emotional or intellectual inclination—it is the gateway to deeper analysis, creativity, and long-term academic growth.

I totally agree with the reply by Jairo Diaz: understanding curiosity must be rooted in personal experience. Because curiosity combines personal (subjective) and objective information seeking. This is well illustrated in spatial representation, in human and rats as well.

By the way, I have often been surprised to hear that animals cannot be curious.

This forces me to transform the proposed question in adding another question, i.e. is there an animal component in intellectual curiosity?

Thank you for having addressed an apparently casual question that points to the role of academic motivation in the curiosity for "research", another definition required for this forum.

yours sincerely, Françoise

Intellectual curiosity in academic research is like that nosy neighbor who needs to know what’s going on behind every door — except instead of peeking through curtains, you’re poking around the human mind (which is even messier).

In psychology, curiosity is basically your internal fuel. Without it, you’d open a textbook, see a bunch of fancy words like cognitive dissonance or psychoanalytic transference, yawn dramatically, and switch to scrolling cat videos instead. But with curiosity? Suddenly, you need to know why people sabotage their own happiness, why we dream about showing up to school naked, or why your friend says “I’m fine” when they’re very clearly not fine.

Good research starts when you think, “Wait a minute… what if we tested this weird thing no one’s thought of yet?” It’s the mental itch that says, “There’s more to this story.” It keeps you up at night — not because you’re stressed (okay, also because you’re stressed) — but because you’re genuinely excited to connect dots no one else has connected.

Without intellectual curiosity, academic research would be like assembling IKEA furniture without bothering to check if you have all the screws. Sure, you might technically finish, but the results probably won’t stand up to any weight.

So in psychology, curiosity turns everyday “Why are people like this?” into experiments, theories, and the occasional existential crisis. And if you’re really curious, you’ll keep digging — because the human mind is the one thing we all carry but still barely understand.

I would conclude by saying that curiosity is what stops researchers from just shrugging and saying, “People are weird, guess we’ll never know why.” Instead, they say, “Challenge accepted.”

Warm regards,

Rakesh

Thank you all for sharing your insights. Intellectual curiosity is indeed an essential human characteristic, which challenges narrow-mindedness, broadens one's mental horizons, and enriches intellectual capacities.

As for animal curiosity, I believe they perceive the world in their own way. Of course, even if we imagine or exaggerate, we wouldn't be able to say that animals have intellectual curiosity. They do have curiosity, but it's not intellectual. It’s something that belongs, so to speak, to animal cognition, which lacks language, complex ways of self-expression, reflection, analysis, and synthesis.

Intellectual curiosity gives us opportunities to explore, challenge, imagine, and go beyond the surface of things. Unfortunately, not everyone is endowed with it. Sometimes, it's not the books or scientific findings that are less interesting — but rather a person's lack of intellectual curiosity that prevents one from engaging.