Curiosity as a survival skill to navigate change
May 2025
One of my favorite childhood movies was Encino Man (1992), where a frozen Neanderthal — played by Brendan Fraser — is thawed out in a suburban L.A. garage.
Absurd, yes (and hilarious!) — but sometimes I wonder if we’re the ones being thawed out now, waking up each day to a world evolving faster than our brains can keep up.
As neuroscientists have shown (see here), our brains evolved to process information slowly. So today’s constant digital deluge often leads to stress, decision fatigue, and reduced productivity… Which is why, I think, we need to design our own mental software upgrades to survive this particular era.
Anne-Laure Le Cunff’s recent piece for Big Think offers one such upgrade — drawing on history and neuroscience to argue that curiosity isn’t just a feel-good, nice-to-have personality quirk. It’s a survival function. “We often think of change as something to endure,” she writes. “But change is how we grow. Curiosity activates dopaminergic pathways, strengthens hippocampal function, improves memory formation, and increases prediction error tolerance, which enhances our capacity to navigate uncertainty with greater flexibility and less reactivity.”
Key quote: “Curiosity is often treated as a personality quirk — something childlike and playful, maybe even optional. But neuroscience paints a different picture. When we’re curious, the brain’s dopaminergic system — the same one that lights up when we anticipate a reward — kicks into gear. Simply put, curiosity makes us feel good about the prospect of discovering something new.”
The certainty paradox
On a related note, here’s a paradox worth sitting with: We live in an age of unprecedented access to information — yet our collective sense of uncertainty has never felt higher. What’s going on here? Why is it that the more we know, the less we seem to be sure of?
This conversation between Annie Duke and applied behavioral scientist Elizabeth Weingarten unpacks this dynamic. “You can think of it as a cycle,” Elizabeth explains. “We’re getting uncertainty on one hand and it’s driving this behavior to want more certainty, and yet we’re not set up biologically or from a systems perspective to be able to do that. That’s why it’s really, really hard.”
Key quote: “Curiosity is often treated as a personality quirk — something childlike and playful, maybe even optional. But neuroscience paints a different picture. When we’re curious, the brain’s dopaminergic system — the same one that lights up when we anticipate a reward — kicks into gear. Simply put, curiosity makes us feel good about the prospect of discovering something new.”
A few more links I enjoyed:
Key quote: “I want to start with a historical analogy. In the industrial revolution, the focus shifted from humans and animals doing manual labor to building machines for mechanical labor. In the AI revolution, we’re going from cognitive labor being done by humans to cognitive labor being done by machines. If you’ve played with the most recent AI tools, you know: They’re very good coders, very good legal analysts, very good first drafters of writing, very good image generators. They’re only going to get better. Viewed through the lens of machines becoming the basis for the next generation of cognitive labor, it’s obvious what the strategic significance of these tools is.”
Key quote: “At the core, what it means to be “public” is going to have to change. Whether that happens in a controlled way (congress actually passing laws, like we’ve done for every other market structure change in U.S. history), or whether it happens through spontaneous disassembly (which is the path we’re on), is a societal choice we’re making without even talking about it much. “Opening up Private Assets” is not a solution, it’s a white flag.”
Key quote: “From a techno-humanist perspective, though, energy usage is non-negotiable. Reducing energy usage, or even slowing the rate of growth of energy usage — by increasing the price of energy, or making it less reliable — would quickly harm quality of life far more than a warmer climate.”
From the archives:
Key quote: “We believe that the economy and the stock market are best understood as biological systems: specifically, complex adaptive systems. Complex systems have unpredictable outcomes; therefore, as investors, we focus on companies that are adaptable, long-term focused, innovative, possess long-duration growth, and maximize non-zero-sum outcomes.”
