Curious Minds

Curious about something? Google it. Look at it. But is curiosity simply information seeking? According to this exhilarating, genre-bending book, what's left out of the conventional understanding of curiosity are the wandering tracks, the weaving concepts, the knitting of ideas, and the thatching of knowledge systems-the networks, the relations between ideas and between people. Curiosity, say Perry Zurn and Dani Bassett, is a practice of connection: it connects ideas into networks of knowledge, and it connects knowers themselves, both to the knowledge they seek and to each other.

Zurn and Bassett-identical twins who write that their book "represents the thought of one mind and two bodies"-harness their respective expertise in the humanities and the sciences to get irrepressibly curious about curiosity. They identify three styles of curiosity-the busybody, who collects stories, creating loose knowledge networks; the hunter, who hunts down secrets or discoveries, creating tight networks; and the dancer, who takes leaps of creative imagination, creating loopy ones. Investigating what happens in a curious brain, they offer an accessible account of the network neuroscience of curiosity. The book performs the very curiosity that it describes, inviting listeners to participate-to be curious with the book and not simply about it.