Tortoises and hares: Why smart people fail to learn
Let’s return to the US in the late 1920s. In California, Lewis Terman’s geniuses have just started to attend high school, the vision of a glittering future still stretching out before them, but we are more interested in a young boy called Ritty, tinkering away in his home laboratory in Far Rockaway, New York.
The “lab” comprised an old wooden packing box, equipped with shelves, a heater, a storage battery, and an electric circuit of light bulbs, switches, and resistors. One of Ritty’s proudest projects was a homemade burglar alarm, so that a bell would sound whenever his parents entered his room. He used a microscope to study the natural world and he would sometimes take his chemistry set into the street to perform shows for the other children.
The experiments did not always end as he had planned. One day, he began to play with the ignition coil from a Ford car. Could the sparks punch holes through a piece of paper, he wondered? They did, but before he knew it the paper was ablaze. When it became too hot to hold, Ritty dropped it into a wastepaper bin—which itself caught light. Conscious of his mother playing bridge downstairs, he carefully closed the door, and smothered the fire with an old magazine, before shaking the embers onto the street below.1
None of this necessarily marks Ritty as anything out of the ordinary: myriad children of his generation will have owned chemistry sets, played with electric circuits, and studied the natural world with a microscope. He was, by his own admission, a “goody-goody” at school, but by no means remarkable: he struggled with literature, drawing, and foreign languages. Perhaps because of his poorer verbal skills, he apparently scored 125 in a school IQ test, which is above average but nowhere near the level of the “geniuses” in California.2 Lewis Terman would not have given him much thought compared to the likes of Beatrice Carter, with her astronomical score of 192.
But Ritty kept learning anyway. He devoured the family encyclopedia, and as a young adolescent he soon took to teaching himself from a series of mathematics primers—filling his notebooks with trigonometry, calculus, and analytic geometry, often creating his own exercises to stretch his mind.3 When he moved to the Far Rockaway High School, he joined a physics club and entered the Interscholastic Algebra League. He eventually reached the top place in New York University’s annual math championship—ahead of students from all the city’s schools. The next year, he began his degree at MIT—and the rest is history.
Schoolchildren would later learn Ritty’s full name—Richard Feynman—as one of the most influential physicists of the twentieth century. His new approach to the field of quantum electrodynamics revolutionized the study of subatomic particles4—research that won him a Nobel Prize in 1965 with Sin-Itiro Tomonaga and Julian Schwinger.5 (It was an accolade that none of Terman’s cohort would achieve.) Feynman also helped uncover the physics behind radioactive decay, and made vital contributions to America’s development of the atomic bomb during the Second World War, a role that he later deeply regretted.
Other scientists believed that the depths of his thinking were almost unfathomable. “There are two kinds of geniuses: the ‘ordinary’ and the ‘magicians,’ ” the Polish mathematician Mark Kac wrote in his autobiography. “An ordinary genius is a fellow that you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many times better. There is no mystery as to how his mind works. Once we understand what they have done, we feel certain that we, too, could have done it. It is different with magicians . . . the working of their minds is for all intents and purposes incomprehensible. Even after we understand what they have done, the process by which they have done it is completely dark . . . Richard Feynman is a magician of the highest calibre.”6
But Feynman’s genius did not end with physics. During a sabbatical from his physics research at Caltech, he applied himself to the study of genetics, discovering the ways that some mutations within a gene may suppress each other. Despite his apparent inaptitude for drawing and foreign languages, he later learned to be a credible artist, to speak Portuguese and Japanese, and to read Mayan hieroglyphs—all with the relentlessness that had driven his education as a child. Other projects included a study of ant behavior, bongo drumming, and a long-standing fascination with radio repair. After the 1986 Challenger disaster, it was Feynman’s tenacious inquiring mind that exposed the engineering flaw that had caused the space shuttle to explode.
As Feynman’s biographer James Gleick wrote in a New York Times obituary: “He was never content with what he knew, or what other people knew. . . . He pursued knowledge without prejudice.”7
The stories of Lewis Terman’s “geniuses” have already shown us how people of great general intelligence often fail to build on their initial potential. Despite their early promise, many of the Termites reached old age with the uneasy feeling that they could have done more with their talents. Like the hare in Aesop’s most famous fable, they began with a natural advantage but failed to capitalize on that potential.
Feynman, in contrast, claimed to have started out with a “limited intelligence,”8 but he then applied it in the most productive way possible, as he continued to grow and expand his mind throughout adulthood. “The real fun of life,” he wrote to a fan in 1986, just two years before he died, “is this perpetual testing to realize how far out you can go with any potentialities.”9
The latest psychological research on learning and personal development has now started to see an astonishing convergence with the theory of evidence-based wisdom that we have explored so far in this book, revealing additional cognitive qualities and mental habits, besides intelligence, that may determine whether or not we flourish like Feynman.
By encouraging us to engage and stretch our minds, these characteristics can boost our learning and ensure that we thrive when we face new challenges, ensuring that we make the most of our natural potential. Crucially, however, they also provide an antidote to the cognitive miserliness and one-sided thinking that contributes to some forms of the intelligence trap—meaning that they also result in wiser, less biased reasoning overall.
These insights may be of particular interest to parents and people working in education, but they can also empower anyone to apply their intelligence more effectively.
Let’s first consider curiosity, a trait that appears common in many other high achievers besides Feynman.
Charles Darwin, for instance, had failed to excel in his early education and, like Feynman, he certainly didn’t consider himself to be of above average intelligence, claiming that he had “no great quickness of apprehension or wit which is so remarkable in some clever men.”10
“When I left the school I was for my age neither high nor low in it,” he wrote in an autobiographical essay.
And I believe that I was considered by all my masters and by my father as a very ordinary boy, rather below the common standard in intellect. . . . Looking back as well as I can at my character during my school life, the only qualities which at this period promised well for the future were that I had strong and diversified tastes, much zeal for whatever interested me, and a keen pleasure in understanding any complex subject or thing.11
It is difficult to imagine that Darwin could have ever conducted his painstaking work on the Beagle—and during the years afterwards—if he had not been driven by a hunger for knowledge and understanding. He certainly wasn’t looking for immediate riches or fame: the research took decades with little payoff. But his desire to learn more caused him to look further and question the dogma around him.
Besides his groundbreaking work on evolution, Darwin’s ceaseless interest in the world around him would lead to some of the first scientific writings on the subject of curiosity, too, describing how young children naturally learn about the world about them through tireless experimentation.12
As later child psychologists noted, this “need to know more” was almost like a basic biological drive, or hunger, for a young infant. Despite this scientific pedigree, however, modern psychologists had largely neglected to systematically explore its broader role in our later lives, or the reasons that some people are naturally more curious than others.13 We knew that curiosity was crucial for taking our first intellectual steps in the world—but little after that.
That was partly due to practical difficulties. Unlike general intelligence, there are no definitive standardized tests, meaning that psychologists have instead relied on more tangential indicators. You can observe how often a child asks questions, for instance, or how intensely they explore their environment; you can also design toys with hidden features and puzzles, and measure how long the child engages with them. With adults, meanwhile, one can use self-reported questionnaires, or behavioral tests that examine whether someone will read and probe new material or if they are happy to ignore it. And when modern psychologists have turned to these tools, they have found that curiosity can rival general intelligence in its importance over our development throughout childhood, adolescence, and beyond.
Much of that research on curiosity had examined its role in memory and learning,14 showing that someone’s curiosity can determine the amount of material that is remembered, the depth of the understanding, and the length of time that the material is retained.15 This isn’t just a question of motivation: even when their additional effort and enthusiasm is taken into consideration, people with greater curiosity still appear to be able to remember facts more easily.
Brain scans can now tell us why this is, revealing that curiosity activates a network of regions known as the “dopaminergic system.” The neurotransmitter dopamine is usually implicated in desire for food, drugs, or sex—suggesting that, at a neural level, curiosity really is a form of hunger or lust. But the neurotransmitter also appears to strengthen the long-term storage of memories in the hippocampus, neatly explaining why curious people are not only more motivated to learn, but will also remember more, even when you account for the amount of work they have devoted to a subject.16
The most interesting discovery has been the observation of a “spill-over effect”—meaning that once the participants’ interest has been piqued by something that genuinely interests them, and they have received that shot of dopamine, they subsequently find it easier to memorize incidental information too. It primes the brain for learning anything.
Importantly, the research shows that some people are consistently more interested in the world around them. And these individual differences in curiosity are only modestly related to general intelligence. This means that two people of the same IQ may have radically different trajectories depending solely on their curiosity, and a genuine interest in the material will be more important than a determination to succeed.
For this reason, some psychologists now consider that general intelligence, curiosity and conscientiousness are together the “three pillars” of academic success; if you lack any one of these qualities, you are going to suffer.
The benefits do not end with education. At work, curiosity is crucial for us to pick up the “tacit knowledge” that we explored in Chapter 1, and it can protect us from stress and burnout, helping us to remain motivated even when the going gets tough. It also powers our creative intelligence, by encouraging us to probe problems that others had not even considered, and by triggering counterfactual thinking as we ask ourselves “what if . . . ?” 17
A genuine interest in the other person’s needs even improves our social skills and helps us to uncover the best potential compromise—boosting our emotional intelligence.18 By encouraging us to look more deeply for unspoken motivations in this way, curiosity seems to lead to better business negotiations.
The result is a richer and more fulfilling life. One landmark study tracked the lives of nearly eight hundred people over the course of two six-month periods, questioning them about their personal goals. Using self-reported questionnaires to measure ten separate traits—including self-control and engagement—the researchers found that curiosity best predicted their ability to achieve those goals.19
If you are wondering how you would compare to these participants, consider the following sample questions and score how accurately they reflect the way you feel and behave, from 1 (not at all) to 5 (extremely):
• I actively seek as much new information as I can in new situations.
• Everywhere I go, I am out looking for new things or experiences.
• I am the kind of person who embraces unfamiliar people, events and places.20
The people who strongly endorsed these kinds of statements were more likely to succeed at whatever they set their mind to achieve. Curiosity was also the only trait that consistently boosted well-being during those twelve months. In other words, it didn’t just increase their chances of success; it made sure that they enjoyed the process too.
All of which helps us to understand how people like Darwin and Feynman could achieve so much in their lives. The hunger to explore had exposed them to new experiences and ideas that didn’t fit with the current orthodoxy; it then drove them to dig deeper to understand what they were seeing and to find novel solutions to the problems they uncovered.
Someone with greater intelligence might have initially found it easier to process complex information than either of these two men, but if they lacked a natural curiosity they are unlikely to have been able to maintain that advantage. It shows us, again, that general intelligence is one crucial ingredient of good thinking—but it needs many other complementary traits to truly flourish.
The real mystery is why so few of us manage to maintain that childlike interest, with many studies showing that most people’s curiosity drops rapidly after infancy. If we are all born with a natural hunger to learn, and that trait can bring us so many benefits well into adulthood, what causes so many people to lose it as we age? And how can we stop that decline?
Susan Engel, at Williams College, Massachusetts, has spent the best part of the last two decades looking for answers—and the results are shocking. In her book The Hungry Mind, she points to one experiment, in which a group of kindergarten children were allowed to watch one of their parents in a separate room through one-way glass. The parents were either asked to play with the objects on a table, to simply look at the table, or to ignore the objects completely as they chatted to another adult. Later on, the children were given the objects to inspect—and they were far more likely to touch and explore them if they had seen their parents doing the same.
Through the subtlest of actions, their parents’ behavior had shown the children whether exploration was desired or discouraged, enhancing or damping their interest, and over time, these attitudes could become ingrained in their minds. “Curiosity is contagious, and it’s very difficult to encourage curiosity in kids if you don’t have any experience of curiosity in your own life,” Engel said.
A parent’s influence also comes through their conversation. Recording twelve families’ dinner-table conversations, she noticed that some parents routinely offer a straight answer to a child’s questions. There was nothing actually wrong with what they said—they were not notably uninterested—but others used the opportunity to open up the subject, which would inevitably lead to a chain of further questions. The result was a far more curious and engaged child.
Engel’s research paints an even bleaker picture of our education systems. Toddlers may ask up to twenty-six questions per hour at home (with one child asking 145 during one observation!) but this drops to just two per hour at school. This disengagement can also be seen in other expressions of curiosity—such as how willing they are to explore new toys or interesting objects—and it becomes even more pronounced as the child ages. While observing some fifth-grade lessons, Engel would often go for a two-hour stretch without seeing a single expression of active interest.
This may partly be due to teachers’ understandable concerns about maintaining order and meeting the demands of their syllabus. Even so, Engel believes that many teachers are often too rigid, failing to let students pursue their own questions in favor of adhering to a predefined lesson plan. When observing one class on the American Revolution, for instance, she saw one boy politely raise his hand after fifteen minutes of nonstop lecture. “I can’t answer questions right now,” the teacher replied in a brisk tone. “Now it’s time for learning.” You can see how that attitude could quickly rub off on a child, so that even someone of greater intelligence simply stops trying to find things out for themselves.
Darwin, incidentally, had found that rigid classical education almost killed his interest, as he was forced to learn Virgil and Homer by heart. “Nothing could have been worse for the development of my mind,” he wrote. Fortunately, he had at least been encouraged to pursue his interests by his parents. But without any nourishment at home or at school, your appetite to learn and explore may slowly disappear.
Engel points out that anxiety is also a curiosity killer, and very subtle cues may have a big impact; she has even found that the expression of interest is directly correlated with the number of times a teacher smiles during the lesson.
In another experiment, she studied groups of nine-year-olds in a science lesson. Their task was simple—they had to drop raisins into a mixture of vinegar, baking soda, and water, to see if the bubbles would make them float. In half of the lessons, the teacher set out the instructions and then left the children to get on with their work, but in others, the teacher deviated from the lesson plan slightly. She picked up a Skittle candy and said, “You know what, I wonder what would happen if I dropped this instead.”
It was a tiny step, but having observed the teacher’s expression of curiosity, the children engaged more enthusiastically with the lesson—continuing their endeavours even when the teacher left the room. It was a stark contrast to the control condition, in which the children were more easily distracted, more fidgety, and less productive.
Although Engel’s work is still ongoing, she is adamant that it’s time to bring these insights into the classroom. “There’s a lot we still don’t know and that’s a very exciting thing for us as scientists. But we know enough to say that schools should be [actively] encouraging curiosity . . . and that it can be very powerful. A kid who really wants to know things—you practically can’t stop them from learning.”
We will soon discover the ways that Feynman managed to keep his curiosity to achieve his potential—and why this also contributes to better reasoning and thinking. Before we examine those ground-breaking discoveries, however, we also need to examine one other essential ingredient for personal and intellectual fulfillment: a characteristic known as the “growth mind-set.”
This concept is the brainchild of Carol Dweck, a psychologist at Stanford University, whose pioneering research first attracted widespread attention in 2007 with a best-selling book, Mindset. But this was just the beginning. Over the last decade, a series of striking experiments has suggested that our mind-sets can also explain why apparently smart people fail to learn from their errors, meaning that Dweck’s theory is essential for our understanding of the intelligence trap.
Like Robert Sternberg, Dweck was inspired by her own experience at school. During sixth grade, Dweck’s teacher seated the class according to IQ—with the “best” at the front, and the “worst” at the back. Those with the lowest scores were not even allowed the menial tasks of carrying the flag or taking a note to the principal. Although she was placed in row one, seat one, Dweck felt the strain of the teacher’s expectations.21 “She let it be known that IQ for her was the ultimate measure of your intelligence and your character.”22 Dweck felt that she could trip up at any moment, which made her scared to try new challenges.
She would remember those feelings when she started her work as a developmental psychologist. She began with a group of ten- and eleven-year-olds, setting them a number of stretching logical puzzles. The children’s success at the puzzles was not necessarily linked to their talent; some of the brightest quickly became frustrated and gave up, while others persevered.
The difference instead seemed to lie in their beliefs about their own talents. Those with the growth mind-set had faith that their performance would improve with practice, while those with the fixed mind-set believed that their talent was innate and could not be changed. The result was that they often fell apart with the more challenging problems, believing that if they failed now, they would fail for ever. “For some people, failure is the end of the world, but for others, it’s an exciting new opportunity.”23
In experiments across schools, universities, and businesses, Dweck has now identified many attitudes that might cause smart people to develop the fixed mind-set. Do you, for instance, believe that:
• A failure to perform well at the task at hand will reflect your overall self-worth?
• Learning a new, unfamiliar task puts you at risk of embarrassment?
• Effort is only for the incompetent?
• You are too smart to try hard?
If you broadly agree with these statements, then you may have more of a fixed mind-set, and you may be at risk of sabotaging your own chances of later success by deliberately avoiding new challenges that would allow you to stretch beyond your comfort zone.24
At Hong Kong University, for instance, Dweck measured the mind-set of students entering their first year on campus. All the lessons are taught in English, so proficiency in that language is vital for success, but many students had grown up speaking Cantonese at home and were not perfectly fluent. Dweck found that students with the fixed mind-set were less enthusiastic about the possibility of taking an English course, as they were afraid it might expose their weakness, even though it could increase their long-term chances of success.25
Besides determining how you respond to challenge and failure, your mind-set also seems to influence your ability to learn from the errors you do make—a difference that shows up in the brain’s electrical activity, measured through electrodes placed on the scalp. When given negative feedback, people with the fixed mind-set show a heightened response in the anterior frontal lobe—an area known to be important for social and emotional processing, with the neural activity appearing to reflect their bruised egos. Despite these strong emotions, however, they showed less activity in the temporal lobe, associated with deeper conceptual processing of the information. Presumably, they were so focused on their hurt feelings, they weren’t concentrating on the details of what was actually being said and the ways it might improve their performance next time. As a result, someone with the fixed mind-set is at risk of making the same mistakes again and again, leading their talents to founder rather than flourish.26
In school, the consequences may be particularly important for children from less advantaged backgrounds. In 2016, for instance, Dweck’s team published the result of a questionnaire that examined the mind-sets of more than 160,000 tenth-graders in Chile—the first sample across a whole nation. As the previous research would have predicted, a growth mind-set predicted academic success across the group, but the team also examined the way it benefited the less privileged children in the group. Although the poorest 10 percent of children were more likely to have a fixed mind-set, the researchers found those with the growth mind-set tended to perform as well as the richest children in the sample, from families who earned thirteen times more money. Although we can only read so much from a correlational study, the growth mind-set seemed to be driving them to overcome the many hurdles associated with their poverty.27
Beyond education, Dweck has also worked with racing car drivers, professional football players, and Olympic swimmers to try to change their mind-sets and boost their performance.28
Even people at the height of their career can find themselves constrained by a fixed mind-set. Consider the tennis player Martina Navratilova, the world champion who lost to the sixteen-year-old Italian Gabriela Sabatini at the Italian Open in 1987. “I felt so threatened by those younger kids,” she later said, “I daren’t give those matches 100%. I was scared to find out if they could beat me when I’m playing my best.”29
Navratilova identified and adjusted this outlook, and went on to win Wimbledon and the US Open, but some people may spend their whole lives avoiding challenge. “I think that’s how people live narrow lives,” Dweck told me. “You take this chance to play it safe, but if you add up all those moments you are far into the future and you haven’t expanded yourself.”
Dweck’s research has gained widespread acclaim, but the attention is not always well directed, with many people misreading and misinterpreting her work. A Guardian article from 2016, for instance, described it as “the theory that anyone who tries can succeed,”30 which isn’t really a fair representation of Dweck’s own views: she is not claiming that a growth mind-set can work miracles where there is no aptitude, simply that it is one of many important elements, particularly when we find ourselves facing new challenges that would cause us to question our talents. Common sense would suggest that there is still a threshold of intelligence that is necessary for success, but your mind-set makes the difference in whether you can capitalize on that potential when you are outside of your comfort zone.
Some people also cite the growth mind-set as a reason to rhapsodise over a child’s every achievement and ignore their flaws. In reality, her message is quite the opposite: overpraising a child for effort or success may be almost as damaging as scolding them for failure. Telling a child that “you’re smart” after a good result, for example, appears to reinforce a fixed mind-set. The child may begin to feel embarrassed if they put a lot of effort into their studies—since that would detract from their smartness. Or they may avoid future challenges that might threaten to take them down off this pedestal. Ironically, Eddie Brummelman at the University of Amsterdam has found that excessive praise can be particularly damaging to children with low self-esteem, who may become scared of failing to live up to parental expectations in the future.31
We shouldn’t avoid showing pride in a child’s achievements, of course; nor should we shy away from offering criticism when they have failed. In each case, the researchers advise that parents and teachers emphasise the journey that led to their goal, rather than the result itself.32 As Dweck explains, “It is about telling the truth about a student’s current achievement and then, together, doing something about it, helping him or her become smarter.”
Sara Blakely, the founder of the intimate clothes company Spanx, offers us one example of this principle in action. Describing her childhood, she recalled that every evening after school her father would ask her, “What did you fail at today?” Out of context, it might sound cruel, but Blakely understood what he meant: if she hadn’t failed at anything, it meant that she hadn’t stepped out of her comfort zone, and she was limiting her potential as a result.
“The gift he was giving me is that failure is [when you are] not trying versus the outcome. It’s really allowed me to be much freer in trying things and spreading my wings in life,” she told CNBC. That growth mind-set, combined with enormous creativity, eventually allowed her to ditch her job selling fax machines to invest $5,000 in her own business. That business is now worth more than a billion dollars.33
Dweck has recently been exploring relatively brief mind-set interventions that could be rolled out on a large scale, finding that an online course teaching schoolchildren about neuroplasticity—the brain’s ability to rewire itself—reduces the belief that intelligence and talent are fixed, innate qualities.34 In general, however, the average long-term benefits of these one-shot interventions are significant but modest,35 and more profound change would almost certainly require regular reminders and deliberate consideration from everyone involved.
The goal, ultimately, is to appreciate the process rather than the end result—to take pleasure in the act of learning even when it’s difficult. And that itself will take work and perseverance, if you have spent your whole life believing that talent is purely innate and success should come quickly and easily.
In light of all these findings, Feynman’s astonishing personal development—from tinkering schoolboy to world-class scientist—begins to make a lot of sense.
From early childhood, he was clearly overflowing with an irrepressible desire to understand the world around him—a trait that he learned from his father. “Wherever we went there were always new wonders to hear about; the mountains, the forests, the sea.”36
With this abundant curiosity, he needed no other motivation to study. As a student, it would drive him to work all night on a problem—for the sheer pleasure of finding an answer—and as a working scientist, it allowed him to overcome professional frustrations.
When first arriving as a professor at Cornell, for instance, he began to fear that he could never live up to his colleagues’ expectations; he began to suffer burnout, and the very thought of physics began to “disgust” him. Then he remembered how he had once “played” with physics as if it were a toy. He determined from that point on to experiment with only the questions that actually interested him—no matter what others might think.
Just when many would have lost their curiosity, he had reignited it once more—and that continued desire to “play” with complex ideas would ultimately lead to his greatest discovery. In the cafeteria of Cornell, he watched a man throwing plates in the air and catching them. Feynman was puzzled by their movement—the way they wobbled, and how that related to the speed at which they were spinning. As he put that motion into equations he began to see some surprising parallels with an electron’s orbit, eventually leading to his influential theory of quantum electrodynamics that won a Nobel Prize. “It was like uncorking a bottle,” he later said. “The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate.”37
“Imagination reaches out repeatedly trying to achieve some higher level of understanding, until suddenly I find myself momentarily alone before one new corner of nature’s pattern of beauty and true majesty revealed,” he added. “That was my reward.”38
Along the way, he was aided by a growth mind-set that allowed him to cope with failure and disappointment—beliefs he passionately expressed in his Nobel lecture. “We have a habit of writing articles published in scientific journals to make the work as finished as possible, to cover all the tracks, to not worry about the blind alleys or to describe how you had the wrong idea first, and so on,” he said. Instead, he wanted to use the lecture to explain the challenges he had faced, including “some of the unsuccessful things on which I spent almost as much effort, as on the things that did work.”
He describes how he had been blind to apparently fatal flaws in his initial theory, which would have resulted in physical and mathematical impossibilities, and he was remarkably candid about his disappointment when his mentor pointed out these defects. “I suddenly realized what a stupid fellow I am.” Nor did the resolution of these difficulties come from single flash of genius; the moments of inspiration were separated by long periods of “struggle.” (He repeated the word six times during the speech.)
His colleague Mark Kac may have considered him “a magician of the highest calibre,” an “incomprehensible” genius, but he took an earthier view of himself. Unlike many other high achievers, he was willing to acknowledge the blood, sweat, and tears, and sometimes tedious drudgery, that he had faced for the sheer “excitement of feeling that possibly nobody has yet thought of the crazy possibility you are looking at right now.”39
By enhancing our learning and pushing us to overcome failures in these ways, curiosity and the growth mind-set would already constitute two important mental characteristics, independent of general intelligence, that can change the path of our lives. If you want to make the most of your intellectual potential, they are essential qualities that you should try to cultivate.
But their value does not end here. In an astonishing convergence with the theories of evidence-based wisdom, the very latest research shows that both curiosity and the growth mind-set can also protect us from the dangerously dogmatic, one-sided reasoning that we explored in earlier chapters. The same qualities that will make you learn more productively also make you reason more wisely, and vice versa.
To understand why, we first need to return to the work of Dan Kahan at Yale University. As you may recall, he found intelligence and education can exaggerate “motivated reasoning” on subjects such as climate change—leading to increasingly polarized views.
Those experiments had not considered the participants’ natural interest, however, and Kahan was curious to discover whether a hunger for new information might influence the ability to assimilate alternative viewpoints.
To find out, he first designed a scale that tested his participants’ science curiosity, which included questions about their normal reading habits (whether they would read about science for pleasure), whether they kept up to date with scientific news, and how often they would talk about science with friends or family. Strikingly, he found that some people had a large knowledge but low curiosity—and vice versa. And that finding would be crucial for explaining the next stage of the experiment, when Kahan asked the participants to give their views on politically charged subjects such as climate change.
As he had previously shown, greater knowledge of science only increased polarization between left and right. But this was not true for curiosity, which reduced the differences. Despite the prevailing views of most conservative thinkers, more curious Republicans were more likely to endorse the scientific consensus on global warming, for instance.
It seemed that their natural hunger for understanding had overcome their prejudices, so that they were readier to seek out material that challenged their views. Sure enough, when given the choice between two articles, the more curious participants were more willing to read a piece that challenged rather than reinforced their ideology. “They displayed a marked preference for novel information, even when it was contrary to their political predispositions,” Kahan wrote in the accompanying paper.40 In other words, their curiosity allowed the evidence to seep through those “logic-tight compartments” that normally protect the beliefs that are closest to our identities.
Kahan admits to being “baffled” by the results; he told me that he had fully expected that the “gravitational pull” of our identities would have overpowered the lure of curiosity. But it makes sense when you consider that curiosity helps us to tolerate uncertainty. Whereas incurious people feel threatened by surprise, curious people relish the mystery. They enjoy being taken aback; finding out something new gives them that dopamine kick. And if that new information raises even more questions, they’ll rise to the bait. This makes them more open-minded and willing to change their opinions, and stops them becoming entrenched in dogmatic views.
In ongoing research, Kahan has found similar patterns for opinions on issues such as firearm possession, illegal immigration, the legalization of marijuana, and the influence of pornography. In each case, the itch to find out something new and surprising reduced the polarization of people’s opinions.41
Further cutting-edge studies reveal that the growth mind-set can protect us from dogmatic reasoning in a similar way, by increasing our intellectual humility. Studying for a doctorate under the supervision of Carol Dweck at Stanford University, Tenelle Porter first designed and tested a scale of intellectual humility, asking participants to rate statements such as “I am willing to admit if I don’t know something,” “I actively seek feedback on my ideas, even if it is critical” or “I like to compliment others on their intellectual strengths.” To test whether their answers reflect their behavior, Porter showed that their scores also corresponded to the way they react to disagreement on issues like gun control—whether they would seek and process contradictory evidence.
She then separated the participants into two groups. Half read a popular science article that emphasised the fact that our brains are malleable and capable of change, priming the growth mind-set, while the others read a piece that described how our potential is innate and fixed. Porter then measured their intellectual humility. The experiment worked exactly as she had hoped: learning about the brain’s flexibility helped to promote a growth mind-set, and this in turn produced greater humility, compared to those who had been primed with the fixed mind-set.42
Porter explained it to me like this: “If you have the fixed mind-set, you are all the time trying to find out where you stand in the hierarchy; everyone’s ranked. If you’re at the top, you don’t want to fall or be taken down from the top, so any sign or suggestion that you don’t know something or that someone knows more than you—it’s threatening to dethrone you.” And so, to protect your position, you become overly defensive. “You dismiss people’s ideas with the notion that ‘I know better so I don’t have to listen to what you have to say.’ ”
In the growth mind-set, by contrast, you’re not so worried about proving your position relative to those around you, and your knowledge doesn’t represent your personal value. “What’s more, you are motivated to learn because it makes you smarter, so it is a lot easier to admit what you don’t know. It doesn’t threaten to pull you down from any kind of hierarchy.”
Igor Grossmann, incidentally, has come to similar conclusions in one of his most recent studies, showing that the growth mind-set is positively correlated with his participants’ everyday wise reasoning scores.43
Feynman, with his curiosity and growth mind-set, certainly saw no shame in admitting his own limitations—and welcomed this intellectual humility in others. “I can live with doubt, and uncertainty, and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing anything than to have answers which might be wrong,” he told the BBC in 1981. “I have approximate answers, and possible beliefs, and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I’m not absolutely sure of anything.”44
This was also true of Benjamin Franklin. He was famously devoted to the development of virtues, seeing the human mind as a malleable object that could be molded and honed. And his many “scientific amusements” spanned the invention of the electric battery, the contagion of the common cold, the physics of evaporation and the physiological changes that come with exercise. As the historian Edward Morgan put it: “Franklin never stopped considering things he could not explain. He could not drink a cup of tea without wondering why tea leaves gathered in one configuration rather than another.”45 For Franklin, like Feynman, the reward was always in the discovery of new knowledge itself, and without that endlessly inquisitive attitude, he may have been less open-minded in his politics too.
And Darwin? His hunger to understand did not end with the publication of On the Origin of Species, and he maintained a lengthy correspondence with skeptics and critics. He was capable of thinking independently while also always engaging with and occasionally learning from others’ arguments.
These qualities may be more crucial than ever in today’s fast-moving world. As the journalist Tad Friend noted in the New Yorker: “In the nineteen-twenties, an engineer’s ‘half-life of knowledge’—the time it took for half of his expertise to become obsolete—was thirty-five years. In the nineteen-sixties, it was a decade. Now it’s five years at most, and, for a software engineer, less than three.”46
Porter agrees that children today need to be better equipped to update their knowledge. “To learn well may be more important than knowing any particular subject or having any particular skill set. People are moving in and out of different careers a lot, and because we’re globalizing we are exposed to lots of different perspectives and ways of doing things.”
She points out that some companies, such as Google, have already announced that they are explicitly looking for people who combine passion with qualities like intellectual humility, instead of traditional measures of academic success like a high IQ or Grade Point Average. “Without humility, you are unable to learn,” Laszlo Bock, the senior vice president of people operations for Google, told the New York Times.47
“Successful bright people rarely experience failure, and so they don’t learn how to learn from that failure,” he added. “They, instead, commit the fundamental attribution error, which is if something good happens, it’s because I’m a genius. If something bad happens, it’s because someone’s an idiot or I didn’t get the resources or the market moved. . . . What we’ve seen is that the people who are the most successful here, who we want to hire, will have a fierce position. They’ll argue like hell. They’ll be zealots about their point of view. But then you say, ‘here’s a new fact,” and they’ll go, ‘Oh, well, that changes things; you’re right.’ ”
Bock’s comments show us that there is now a movement away from considering SAT scores and the like as the sum total of our intellectual potential. But the old and new ways of appraising the mind do not need to be in opposition, and in Chapter 8 we will explore how some of the world’s best schools already cultivate these qualities and the lessons they can teach us all about the art of deep learning.
If you have been inspired by this research, one of the simplest ways to boost anyone’s curiosity is to become more autonomous during learning. This can be as simple as writing out what you already know about the material to be studied and then setting down the questions you really want to answer. The idea is to highlight the gaps in your knowledge, which is known to boost curiosity by creating a mystery that needs to be solved, and it makes it personally relevant, which also increases interest.
It doesn’t matter if these are the same questions that would come up in an exam, say. Thanks to the spillover effect from the dopamine kick, you are more likely to remember the other details too, with some studies revealing that this small attempt to spark your engagement can boost your overall recall while also making the whole process more enjoyable. You will find that you have learned far more effectively than if you had simply studied the material that you believe will be most useful, rather than interesting.
The wonderful thing about this research is that learning seems to beget learning: the more you learn, the more curious you become, and the easier it becomes to learn, creating a virtuous cycle. For this reason, some researchers have shown that the best predictor of how much new material you will learn—better than your IQ—is how much you already know about a subject. From a small seed, your knowledge can quickly snowball. As Feynman once said, “everything is interesting if you go into it deeply enough.”
If you fear that you are too old to reignite your curiosity, you may be interested to hear about Feynman’s last great project. As with his famous Nobel Prize–winning discoveries, the spark of interest came from a seemingly trivial incident. During a dinner in the summer of 1977, Feynman’s friend Ralph Leighton had happened to mention a geography game in which each player had to name a new, independent country.
“So you think you know every country in the world?” Richard cheekily responded. “Then whatever happened to Tannu Tuva?” He remembered collecting a stamp from the country as a child; it was, he said, a “purple splotch on the map near Outer Mongolia.” A quick check in the family atlas confirmed his memory.
It could have ended there, but the lure of this unknown country soon became something of an obsession for the two men. They listened to Radio Moscow for any mentions of this obscure Soviet region, and scoured university libraries for records of anthropological expeditions to the place, which offered them small glimpses of the country’s beautiful saltwater and freshwater lakes in its countryside, its haunting throat singing and shamanic religion. They discovered that the capital, Kyzyl, housed a monument marking it as the “Center of Asia”—though it was unclear who had built the statue—and that the country was the source of the Soviet Union’s largest uranium deposit.
Eventually Leighton and Feynman found a Russian‒Mongolian‒Tuvan phrasebook, which a friend helped to translate into English, and they began writing letters to the Tuvan Scientific Research Institute of Language, Literature, and History, asking for a cultural exchange. However, each time they thought they had a chance of reaching their goal, they were rebuffed by Soviet bureaucracy—but they persevered anyway.
By the late 1980s, Feynman and Leighton believed they had finally found a way into the country: on a trip to Moscow, Leighton managed to arrange for a Soviet exhibition of Eurasian nomadic cultures to visit the US, and as part of his role as an organizer, he bargained a research and filming trip to Tuva. The exhibition opened at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles in February 1989, and it was a great success, introducing many more people to a culture that remains little known in the West.
Feynman, alas, never lived to see the country; he died on 15 February 1988 from abdominal cancer, before his longed-for trip could be arranged. Right until the end, however, his passion continued to animate him. “When he began talking about Tuva, his malaise disappeared,” Leighton noted in his memoir, Tuva or Bust. “His face lit up, his eyes sparkled, his enthusiasm for life was infectious.” Leighton recalls walking the streets with Feynman after one round of surgery, as they tested each other on Tuvan phrases and imagined themselves taking a turn through Kyzyl—a way of building Feynman’s strength and distracting him from his discomfort.
And in his last years, Feynman had piqued the interest of many others, resulting in a small organization, the Friends of Tuva, being founded to share his fascination; Feynman’s curiosity had built a small bridge across the Iron Curtain. When Leighton finally reached Kyzyl himself, he left a small plaque in memory of Feynman, and his daughter Michelle would make her own visit in the late 2000s. “Like [Ferdinand] Magellan, Richard Feynman completed his last journey in our minds and hearts,” Leighton wrote in his memoir. “Through his inspiration to others, his dream took on a life of its own.”