Searching for Learning
How to avoid being clickbaited by your own brain
You can learn anything on the internet, so why do I so often learn things I don’t want to know? When I’m surfing the web, I want to be drawn in by articles on Europe’s political history, but I end up reading trivia such as a menu from Alcatraz prison. Why am I not curious about the things I want to be curious about? Across evolutionary time, curious animals were more likely to survive because they learned about their environments; a forager that occasionally skipped a reliable feeding ground to explore might find an even better place to eat. Humans, too, will forgo a known payoff to investigate the unknown. In one experiment, subjects were asked to choose one of four photos, each carrying some chance of paying a cash prize. Photos repeated, so subjects learned to pick the best-paying, but when a novel photo popped up, they chose it more often than the odds dictated they should. This preference for novelty is the reason manufacturers periodically tweak product packaging.
But it’s good to know about your environment even if it doesn’t promise a reward right now; knowledge may be useless today but vital next week. Therefore, evolution has left us with a brain that can reward itself; satisfying curiosity feels pleasurable, so you explore the environment even when you don’t expect any concrete payoff. Infants prefer to look at novel pictures compared with familiar ones.
What’s more, curiosity doesn’t just ensure new opportunities for learning; it enhances learning itself. Curiosity causes a brain state that amplifies learning.
A function of curiosity – to heighten memory – is the key to understanding why we’re curious about some things and not others. We feel most curious when exploration will yield the most learning.
Suppose I ask you, “What’s the most common type of star in the Milky Way?” You’ll obviously feel no curiosity if you already know the answer. But you’ll also feel little interest if you know nothing about stars; if you learned the answer, you couldn’t connect it to other knowledge, so it would seem nearly meaningless. We’re most
curious when we sense that the environment offers new information in the right proportion to complement what we already know.
Note that your brain calculates what you might learn in the short term – your long- term interests aren’t a factor. That’s why a cardiac surgeon will nevertheless find a conference presentation on the subject boring if her brain decides that it won’t add to her knowledge. Conversely, when she watches a documentary on type fonts, her brain may calculate that this will be a rich source of information.
It’s that disconnect between longand short-term interests that makes frothy internet articles so frustrating. The feeling of curiosity promised you’d learn something and, admittedly, you did – now you know French citizens’ favourite macaron flavour – but you’re disappointed because your new knowledge doesn’t contribute to your long-term interests. You’ve been clickbaited by your own brain.
If following curiosity results in disappointment, maybe it shouldn’t be allowed to take the lead. Why not just search for topics you truly want to learn about? That sounds logical, but some searches will yield thousands of hits and no way of knowing which offers the just-right match to your current knowledge that will maintain your curiosity.
If you wish for more serious reading when you surf the web, the opportunistic approach is actually fine. You just need to frequent better foraging grounds.
Many websites that snare your time feature scores of stories on the front page, banking that one will strike each reader’s sweet spot of knowledge. So visit websites that use the same strategy but offer richer content: for example, JSTOR Daily or ScienceDaily.
Albert Einstein famously advised a young student to “never lose a holy curiosity”. Given our evolutionary history, there’s little danger any of us will. The challenge is changing its focus from the momentary to something more enduring.
We’re most curious when offered new information in the right proportion to complement what we already know