Staying Sharp by Henry Emmons MD

Author:Henry Emmons, MD
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Touchstone

Full of Wonder about What’s Next

“ ‘Curiouser and curiouser,’ cried Alice . . . ‘Oh, my poor little feet, I wonder who will put on your shoes and stockings for you now, dears?’ ”10 While in Wonderland, where nothing was as it was expected to be, Alice found her body growing upward and becoming taller, leaving her feet far below her hands. Her comment, reflected in the very title of the book (Alice in Wonderland), highlights the link between curiosity and those aspects of our lives that have yet to completely reveal themselves. Alice knew she was facing a predicament that was strange, to say the least, but her thoughts already turned toward figuring out what she might do given the uncertain situation she found herself in.

This orientation toward the future is at the very core of what our brains are designed to do. Intelligence has been found to be less about what we know, our mastery of facts and figures, than about how effectively we are able to predict what will happen based on the information available to us. When we know just enough about something new to engage our attention and focus, curiosity provides the motivational drive to explore our environment (or ourselves!) so we can learn if we were right or wrong. When something is vaguely familiar or partially recognizable, studies show, brain areas involved in focusing attention and encoding new learning become more active at the same time that subjects in these studies report a feeling of curiosity.11,12 Perhaps that is why there is such a strong correlation between intelligence and curiosity: an intelligent mind is often a curious mind, and a curious mind gathers new experiences that add to our storehouse of accumulated knowledge and wisdom.

When our clients come to us, it is often because certain problems in their lives have become so routine, so automatic, and so apt to occur without thinking, that the odds of coming up with a new solution to an old problem are quite low. Part of our therapeutic approach is to engage and activate our clients’ curiosity to discover new solutions. It is often a hugely rewarding experience for people to discover a new resource within themselves or a new way of addressing a problem that has long resisted change.

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