A New Map of Wonders by Caspar Henderson

Author:Caspar Henderson [Caspar Henderson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Granta Books
Published: 2017-03-16T04:00:00+00:00

Curiouser and curiouser

The very young may experience a sense of confusion, revelation and delight, but do they have a sense of wonder? Annie Dillard suggests not: ‘They bewilder well, but few things surprise them. [Everything] is new to [them], after all, and equally gratuitous.’ Over time, however, infants do become increasingly aware of regularities in experience and begin to develop a sense that there is a world and there are people distinct from them. With loving and supportive carers and fellows, they certainly become increasingly curious about the outside world as they grow.

Curiosity is not, of course, peculiar to human beings. Many animals are curious, especially when circumstances are benign enough for them not to be preoccupied by the immediate challenge of survival. Even Caenorhabditis elegans, the humble worm with 302 neurons mentioned in Chapter 4, will, when placed in a big patch of its favourite food and plenty of potential mates, often go looking elsewhere. Some worms can’t get no satisfaction. But highly intelligent animals such as New Caledonian crows are especially curious. Through trial, error and observation as they grow, baby crows learn how to fashion sticks into barbed hooks with which to extract grubs from holes. Their curiosity enables them to develop a deep understanding of how physical objects work and interact, and to learn to use that knowledge to accomplish their goals.

But humans are more curious than almost any other animals, and even very young humans are better than New Caledonian crows at noticing the novel, the accidental and the serendipitous, and at using that experience to imagine new opportunities. And once sparked, curiosity in humans seems to be hard to stop. When, through curious behaviour, we light upon a new discovery, a dopamine ‘hit’ is delivered to reward centres in the brain, increasing the likelihood that we will remember the discovery. Way beyond babyhood and throughout our lives, humans are often insatiably inquisitive, and our curiosity peaks in circumstances where we think we have a good idea of an answer or outcome but don’t know for sure. Hence, the more we know, the more scope there is for us to be curious.

By the age of three or four children start to make mental ‘maps’ of causal relations between things and people. They may decide, for example, that because eating makes you grow, therefore eating more will make you grow indefinitely. (This is what happens to Alice in Wonderland when she eats the cake marked ‘Eat me’.) And as children mature, these causal maps become increasingly complex and accurate, extending to desires and beliefs, emotions and actions – their own and other people’s. They also use these maps to imagine different ways that the world could be, with an ever-increasing number of possibilities and counterfactuals. This, says Alison Gopnik, is the foundation of the great flowering of pretend play in early childhood in which fantasy and imagination transform the world around young children. Underpinning it all, she stresses, is love: just as children can learn freely because they are protected by adults, they can imagine freely because they are loved.

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