Dani Bassett & Perry Zurn on The Neuroscience & Philosophy of Curious Minds

This is a podcast by and for the curious — and yet, in over three years, we have pointed curiosity at nearly every topic but itself. What is it, anyway? Are there worse and better frames for understanding how desire and wonder, exploration and discovery play out in both the brain and in society? How is scientific research like an amble through the woods? What juicy insights bubble up where neuroscientists, historians, philosophers, and mathematicians meet to answer questions like these? And how long of a path must we traverse to get there?

In this episode, we talk with SFI External Professor Dani Bassett, physicist and neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania, and their birth twin Perry Zurn, philosopher at American University in Washington, DC. You might consider each one of two lenses in a stereoscopic inquiry. Their new MIT Press book Curious Minds: The Power of Connection bridges quantity and quality to recast curiosity as a phenomenon of networks — as a kind of “edgework” (generative, drawing new associations) instead of “acquistion” (of individuals collecting facts). The brain, after all, is made of networked neurons, and society’s a kind of super-brain of networked people, so why not think in terms of links?  Their research offers a taxonomy of kinds of curiosity — three different ways that people move through knowledge networks. Traveling across a web of related ideas, rupturing and mending, weaving, percolating, synthesizing, we embody and perform the objects of their academic study. We hope you find this lively and self-referential conversation offers you a helpful map as you draw your distinct connectome through the world of what is and what could be known...

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Thank you for listening…

EDITORIAL CORRECTION: We mention a review of Cormac McCarthy's latest novels in this discussion. The correct link is to James Wood’s piece in The New Yorker, not Michael Gorra’s in NYRB. 

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Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano.

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Mentioned & Related Links:

Curious Minds: The Power of Connection

by Perry Zurn and Dani Bassett (MIT Press, 2022)

Curiosity as filling, compressing, and reconfiguring knowledge networks

by Shubhankar P. Patankar, Dale Zhou, Christopher W. Lynn, Jason Z. Kim, Mathieu Ouellet, Harang Ju, Perry Zurn, David M. Lydon-Staley, Dani S. Bassett

Murray Gell-Mann on information overload (from A Crude Look At The Whole) [Video]

The Arrival of the Fittest: How Nature Innovates by SFI External Professor Andreas Wagner

Complexity 99: Alison Gopnik on Child Development, Elderhood, Caregiving, and A.I.

Complexity 80: Mingzhen Lu on The Evolution of Root Systems & Biogeochemical Cycling

Busybody, Hunter, Dancer: Three Historical Models of Curiosity

by Perry Zurn

Hunters, busybodies and the knowledge network building associated with deprivation curiosity

by David M. Lydon-Staley, Dale Zhou, Ann Sizemore Blevins, Perry Zurn & Danielle S. Bassett

Complexity 29: On Coronavirus, Crisis, and Creative Opportunity with David Krakauer

The Dimensions of Experience: A Natural History of Consciousness by Andrew P. Smith

Complexity 68: W. Brian Arthur on Economics in Nouns and Verbs (Part 1)

Complexity 90: Caleb Scharf on The Ascent of Information: Life in The Human Dataome

Complexity 94: David Wolpert & Farita Tasnim on The Thermodynamics of Communication

Complexity 35: Scaling Laws & Social Networks in The Time of COVID-19 with Geoffrey West (Part 1)

Complexity 87: Sara Walker on The Physics of Life and Planet-Scale Intelligence

The extent and drivers of gender imbalance in neuroscience reference lists

by Jordan D. Dworkin, Kristin A. Linn, Erin G. Teich, Perry Zurn, Russell T. Shinohara & Danielle S. Bassett

Underflows: Queer Trans Ecologies and River Justice by Cleo Wölfle Hazard

The Sounds of Life by Karen Bakker

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Dirk Brockmann’s interactive explorables

Nicky Case’s interactive explorables

The Thing From The Future (speculative futurism card game by Stuart Candy & Jeff Watson at Situation Lab)

Bayo Akomolafe (re: networks, the nonhuman turn, and questioning the rhetoric of individuals as “designers”)

LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models

by Christoph Schuhmann, Romain Beaumont, Richard Vencu, Cade Gordon, Ross Wightman, Mehdi Cherti, Theo Coombes, Aarush Katta, Clayton Mullis, Mitchell Wortsman, Patrick Schramowski, Srivatsa Kundurthy, Katherine Crowson, Ludwig Schmidt, Robert Kaczmarczyk, Jenia Jitsev

Complexity 86: Dmitri Tymoczko on The Shape of Music: Mathematical Order in Western Tonality

Dani & Perry on SFI External Professor Sean Carroll’s MINDSCAPE Podcast