Curiosity may kill the cat but it may also make it easier for people to learn new information, according to new research on what happens inside the brain when curiosity is piqued. The study was conducted by researchers from the University of California at Davis.
The findings were published online in the Cell Press journal Neuron. According to Dr. Charan Ranganath, professor at the UC Davis center for neuroscience and principal researcher in this study, the study showed that when curiosity is piqued, it activates the brain circuit related to reward.
“It’s a very primitive circuitry that probably evolved to help us go get food or to get creatures to reproduce,” said Ranganath. “That was exciting to link a thing that we would think is very high level to this very basic brain circuitry.”
The idea behind the study was to look at the role of curiosity in promoting memory. For this purpose, about 20 participants aged 18 to 31 were given a series of trivia questions. If they did not know the answers to them, they were asked to rate their level of curiosity to learn the answer to those questions.
After this step, the participants went through magnetic resonance imaging scanners before the answers were given to them, and while they were waiting, they were shown the picture of an unrelated face.
Ranganath added that when they looked at memory performance, people were unsurprisingly better at remembering the answer to the trivia questions that they were curious about, than the one they were not curious about.
“What was more interesting is that they were also better at remembering the faces they saw while they were anticipating the trivia question,” Ranganath said.
To him, this shows that the participants’ high interest about the question made them remember the faces even though they were not particularly interested in them.
“What we think is going on is that when people are curious it puts their brain in a state that is more likely to suck up information and it can even suck up information that is not really relevant to what got them curious in the first place,” Ranganath said.
The scanners showed that not only the reward brain circuit was activated but it also showed increased interactions between this reward circuitry and the hippocampus, a part of the brain known to be important for new learning. This only happened when people were in a curious state, before seeing the answers to the trivia questions.
“People whose brain natural reward system is more ramped up when they get curious are the ones who are going to learn more effectively,” Ranganath said.
He said the dopamine released to the hippocampus during the curious state may be causing the new learning to be more likely to stabilize and less likely to be forgotten.
Dopamine transmission changes with aging and the researcher said these findings could help find ways to enhance learning and memory in healthy people as well as patients with neurological conditions. Ranganath said further research should look at whether or not disorders that affect dopamine transmission also affect the influence of curiosity or motivation on memory.