curiosity wk 6

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“I have no special talents, I am only passionately curious…” – Einstein (1952) 1 Source: Jaworski & Peter Curiosity CLDM Summer 2012

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Page 1: Curiosity wk 6

“I have no special talents, I am only passionately curious…” – Einstein (1952)“I have no special talents, I am only passionately curious…” – Einstein (1952)

1Source: Jaworski & Peter

CuriosityCLDM

Summer 2012

Page 2: Curiosity wk 6

 1. What causes curiosity or interest?

2. How is curiosity different than interest or openness to experience?

3. What are the positive (negative) consequences?

4. Is curiosity “field specific” (e.g., humanities scholar vs. high tech exec)?

5. Is it possible to be both curious and “execution focused”?

6. Does society have “thinkers” and “doers” – or can they coexist?

Agenda

2Source: Jaworski & Peter

Page 3: Curiosity wk 6

So, what is curiosity?

Question:

3Source: Jaworski & Peter

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• “William James differentiated between two types of curiosity. The first entailed an emotional blend of excitement and anxiety with respect to exploring and enjoying novelty.” The second was scientific curiosity or metaphysical wonder, evoked by “an inconsistency or a gap in… knowledge” - (Seligman and Peterson, p. 127)

• “…Individuals with a strong endowment of curiosity proffer a specific advantage in life because attention is more fluid and novel ideas, objects and relationships can be found, enjoyed, explored and integrated into an expanding self. In principle, these aspects of curiosity aid survival – for example, finding plants with medicinal properties, increasing social resources, discovering new habitats…” – (see Seligman and Peterson, 127).

•The cognitive process theory posits that curiosity is a function of assimilating and accommodating novel stimuli into one’s schematic framework of the self and the world. (Beswick, 1971)

Definitions for Curiosity:

Source: Jaworski & Peter

Page 5: Curiosity wk 6

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Hierarchy Of Curiosity:

Openness To ExperienceOpenness To Experience

CuriosityCuriosity

Diverse CuriosityDiverse Curiosity Specific CuriositySpecific Curiosity

Openness to new ideas

Openness to new ideas

Future Orientation

Future OrientationSociabilitySociabilityCourageCourage Enjoy problem-

solvingEnjoy problem-

solving

Comments:•A psychological predisposition

•Goal-directed behavior, with positive emotional core…

•Diverse: novelty seeking, emotional blend of excitement and novelty

•Drivers:

Specific Curiosity: increase one’s knowledge; evoked by gap in knowledge

+ + ++ +

Source: Jaworski & Peter

Page 6: Curiosity wk 6

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Creativity strongly linked to “self-actualization” – Maslow’s Definition

•Efficient perception of reality•Appreciation of the beautiful and sublime•Autonomy & independence•Acceptance of self, others and nature•Identification and sympathy with humanity•Focus on impersonal issues•Democratic character, freedom from prejudice•Mystic experiences . . .

Curiosity & Creativity:

Source: Jaworski & Peter

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1. Exploratory

2. Awareness of the new

3. Sensitivity to gaps in understanding and knowledge of the self and the

world

4. Greater allocation of attention and energy to recognizing and pursuing cues of novelty and challenge

5. Cognitive evaluation and behavioral exploration of challenging activities

6. Flow like states of absorption in these activities

7. Integration of experiences to broaden personal or interpersonal capital

Curiosity: Core Components

Source: Jaworski & Peter

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3 Dimensional Perspective On Curiosity:

Source: Jaworski & Peter

1. Flow, Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, (Mind-state motivating many individuals Pursuing a curious challenge)

2. The Spirit of the Beehive, Victor Erice: 1973 (curious explorations of innocence)

3. The Emperor of All Maladies: Siddhartha Mukherjee, (history of a malady; cancer a curiosity occupying the minds of scores of physicians, surgeons, healers, chemists, pharmacists … etc.)

Page 9: Curiosity wk 6

So, what is flow? How is it linked to curiosity? Is it?

Question:

9Source: Jaworski & Peter

Page 10: Curiosity wk 6

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Curiosity – The Psychology Dimension

Source: Jaworski & Peter

Flow, Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, (Mind-state motivating many individuals pursuing a curious challenge)

Page 11: Curiosity wk 6

Flow: Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi

11Source: Csikzentmihalyi

The Psychology Of Optimal Experience:

How does it feel to be in Flow?1. Goals are clear

2. Feedback is immediate

3. Balance Between Opportunity and Capacity: “flow occurs when both challenges and skills are high and equal to each other...”

4. Concentration Deepens

5. The Present Matters

6. Control is no problem

7. Sense of time is altered

8. Loss of ego

Page 12: Curiosity wk 6

Flow States And Curiosity:

12Source: Jaworski & Peter

“...the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.” – Csikszentmihalyi, p. 4

“Flow will examine the process of achieving happiness through control over one’s inner life...” – Csikzentmihalyi, p. 6

“..direct control of experience, the ability to derive moment-by-moment enjoyment from everything we do, can overcome the obstacles to fulfillment...” – Csikszentmihalyi, p. 8

“...the mark of a person who is in control of consciousness is the ability to focus attention at will, to be oblivious to distractions, to concentrate for as long as it takes to achieve a goal, and not longer. And the person who can do this usually enjoys the normal course of everyday life.” – Csikszentmihalyi, p. 31

Page 13: Curiosity wk 6

Enjoyment – Ancillary Factor Powering Curiosity:

13Source: Jaworski & Peter

Csikszentmihalyi On Factors That Qualify As Descriptive Of Enjoyment (Essential For “Flow”)

1. the task must be one we have a chance of completing

2. concentrate on what we are doing

3. task has goals

4. task gives us feedback

5. absorption that removes awareness of the worries and frustrations of everyday life

6. exercise a sense of control

7.concern of self disappears, and the sense of self emerges stronger after flow experience is over

8. duration of time is altered

Page 14: Curiosity wk 6

Active Pursuit of Flow-States: Is It The Challenge?

14Source: Jaworski & Peter

“…What drove me?...It’s about trying to express something in the only way that most of us know how – because we don’t write Bob Dylan songs or Tom Stoppard plays. We try to use the talents we do have to express our deep feelings, to show our appreciation of all the contributions that came before us, and to add something to that flow. That’s what has driven me.” – Steve Jobs, p. 570

“…personal growth facilitation model of curiosity posits that recognizing and pursuing novelty, uncertainty and challenge is the foundation for enhancing personal and interpersonal capital…” -(Kashdan, Rose & Fincham: 2002)

Flow States Could Be About Work That Maybe Perceived As BORING NOT NOVEL!

Csikszentmihalyi’s story of person who made “Lox Sandwiches” at a Manhattan Deli:

“... one might have expected him to have found his task boring, but he discussed it with the enthusiasm of a poet or a surgeon. He described how every fish he picked up was different from its predecessor. He would hold the fish by its tail and slap it against the marble counter; looking at it and feeling it ripple until he developed a 3 dimensional mental X ray of its anatomy. Then he would pick up one of his five knives – which he sharpened to perfection several times a day – and go about the business of slicing the fish as finely as possible with the fewest moves, discarding the least amount of good meat. “ – p. 102

Page 15: Curiosity wk 6

How does curiosity relate to the Spirit of the Beehive?

In particular is Ana “curious?” Can curiosity lead to positive and negative outcomes?

Question:

15Source: Jaworski & Peter

Page 16: Curiosity wk 6

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Curiosity – The Film Dimension

Source: Jaworski & Peter

The Spirit of the Beehive, Victor Erice: (curious explorations of innocence)

Page 17: Curiosity wk 6

The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), Dir. Victor Erice

17Source: Jaworski & Peter

Synopsis: “Six-year-old Ana is a shy girl who lives in the manor house in an isolated Spanish village on the Castille Plateau with her parents Fernando and Teresa and her older sister, Isabel. The year is 1940, and the civil war has just ended with the Franco’s victory over the Republic. Her aging father spends most of his time absorbed in tending to and writing about his beehives; her much younger mother is caught up in daydreams about a distant lover, to whom she writes letters. The entire family is never seen together in a single shot. Ana's closest companion is Isabel, who loves her but cannot resist playing on her little sister's gullibility…”

Curiosity Sequence; Experiencing the eerie “Frankenstein” Film:

At the beginning of the film, a mobile cinema brings Frankenstein to the village and the two sisters go to see it. Ana finds the film more interesting than frightening, particularly the scene where the monster plays benignly with a little girl, then accidentally kills her. She asks her sister, "Why did he kill the girl, and why did they kill him after that?" Isabel tells her that the monster didn't kill the girl and isn't really dead; she says that everything in films is fake. Isabel says the monster is like a spirit, and Ana can talk to him if she closes her eyes and calls him: "It's me, Ana".

Ana's fascination with the story increases when Isabel takes her to a desolate abandoned sheepfold, which she claims is the monster's house. Ana returns alone many times to look for him but finds only a large footprint. One day, Isabel screams from a distant part of the house, and when Ana comes to investigate, she lies perfectly still on the floor, pretending to be dead. That night, Ana sneaks out and while looking at the night sky, closes her eyes. In the next scene, a fugitive republican soldier leaps from a passing train and limps to the sheepfold to hide.Ana finds the soldier hiding in the sheepfold. Instead of running away in terror, she feeds him and even brings him her father's coat and watch. This odd, wordless friendship ends abruptly when Franco’s police come in the night, find the republican soldier and shoot him. The police soon connect Ana's father with the fugitive and assume he stole the items from him. The father discovers which of the daughters had helped the fugitive by noticing Ana's reaction when he produces the pocket watch she had given to him. When Ana next goes to visit him, she finds him gone and fresh blood on the ground. Her father confronts her as she gazes at the blood, and she runs away.

Page 18: Curiosity wk 6

The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), Dir. Victor Erice

18Source: Jaworski & Peter

Sequence:

Ana is mesmerized watching Frankenstein with Maria (innocently arranging daisies)…she asks Isabel to explain the meaning of the film, how “real” is Frankenstein and how may she speak with him or approach him…

Ana’s father in the meantime views the honeycomb and the frenetic activity of the worker bees and their queen, as metaphoric or allegory… to deepen his philosophical contemplation on “futility”, “work”, “death” and the beauty of the trap; the “honeycomb”…

Note: Play sequence 16:00 to 24:15 (in film version) or 1:42 to 9:57 in youtube (Spirit of the Beehive, 2/7)

Page 19: Curiosity wk 6

How did curiosity play a role in the Accidental Empires?

Question:

19Source: Jaworski & Peter

Page 20: Curiosity wk 6

Was Farber curious? What other character traits would you use to describe him?

Were the scientists imaginative, curious, hard-working, tenacious in the face of criticism – all of the above?

Question:

20Source: Jaworski & Peter

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Curiosity – The History Dimension

Source: Jaworski & Peter

6. The Emperor of All Maladies: Siddhartha Mukherjee, (history of a malady; cancer a curiosity occupying the minds of scores of physicians, surgeons, healers, chemists, pharmacists … etc. for the lifetime of humanity…)

Page 22: Curiosity wk 6

Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies

22Source: Jaworski & Peter

Geographic and Historic Antecedents of Humanity’s Encounter with Cancer”

(Egyptian) Imhotep: 17th C. BC“….it is under these clarifying headlamps of an ancient surgeon that cancer first emerges as a

distinct disease. Describing case forty-five Imhotep advises…”This is a case of bulging masses I have to contend with… large, spreading and hard; touching

them is like touching a ball of wrappings, or they may be compared to the unripe hemat fruit, which is hard

and cool to the touch.” – p. 40

(Egyptian) Imhotep: 17th C. BC“….it is under these clarifying headlamps of an ancient surgeon that cancer first emerges as a

distinct disease. Describing case forty-five Imhotep advises…”This is a case of bulging masses I have to contend with… large, spreading and hard; touching

them is like touching a ball of wrappings, or they may be compared to the unripe hemat fruit, which is hard

and cool to the touch.” – p. 40

Louis Leakey:

Louis Leakey discovered a jawbone dating from 2 million years ago from a nearby site that carried the

signs of a peculiar form of lymphoma found endemically in southeastern Africa … If that finding

does represent an ancient mark of malignancy, then cancer, “…far from being a modern disease, is one of the oldest diseases ever seen in a human specimen –

quite possibly the oldest…” – p. 43

Louis Leakey:

Louis Leakey discovered a jawbone dating from 2 million years ago from a nearby site that carried the

signs of a peculiar form of lymphoma found endemically in southeastern Africa … If that finding

does represent an ancient mark of malignancy, then cancer, “…far from being a modern disease, is one of the oldest diseases ever seen in a human specimen –

quite possibly the oldest…” – p. 43

Herodotus, Greece, 440 BC:Histories written around 440 BC, the Greek historian Herodotus records the story of Atossa, the queen of

Persia, who was suddenly struck by an unusual illness….In the middle of her reign, Atossa noticed a

bleeding lump in her breast… she descended into a fierce and impenetrable loneliness. She wrapped herself in

sheets, in a self-imposed quarantine. …Darius doctors may have tried to treat her, but to no avail. Ultimately a Greek slave named Democedes persuaded her to allow

him to excise the tumor.

Herodotus, Greece, 440 BC:Histories written around 440 BC, the Greek historian Herodotus records the story of Atossa, the queen of

Persia, who was suddenly struck by an unusual illness….In the middle of her reign, Atossa noticed a

bleeding lump in her breast… she descended into a fierce and impenetrable loneliness. She wrapped herself in

sheets, in a self-imposed quarantine. …Darius doctors may have tried to treat her, but to no avail. Ultimately a Greek slave named Democedes persuaded her to allow

him to excise the tumor.

Paleo-Pathologist, Aufderheide:

1000 year old gravesite in a remote, sand swept plain in the southern tip of Peru: At the Chiribiya site, Aufderheide a paleopathologist from the

Univ. of Minnesota in Duluth…“the mummy was of a young woman in her midthirties, found sitting, with her feet curled up, in a shallow clay grave. When Aufderheide examined her, his fingers found a hard “bulbous mass” in her left upper arm. The

papery folds of skin, remarkable preserved, gave way to that mass, which was intact and studded with spicules of bone. This, without question, was

a malignant bone tumor, an osteosarcoma.” – p. 43

Paleo-Pathologist, Aufderheide:

1000 year old gravesite in a remote, sand swept plain in the southern tip of Peru: At the Chiribiya site, Aufderheide a paleopathologist from the

Univ. of Minnesota in Duluth…“the mummy was of a young woman in her midthirties, found sitting, with her feet curled up, in a shallow clay grave. When Aufderheide examined her, his fingers found a hard “bulbous mass” in her left upper arm. The

papery folds of skin, remarkable preserved, gave way to that mass, which was intact and studded with spicules of bone. This, without question, was

a malignant bone tumor, an osteosarcoma.” – p. 43

Page 23: Curiosity wk 6

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Multiple Pathways Necessary to Defeat or RestrainSuch an Insidious “Enemy”:

Openness To ExperienceOpenness To Experience

CuriosityCuriosity

Diverse CuriosityDiverse Curiosity Specific CuriositySpecific Curiosity

Openness to new ideas

Openness to new ideas

Future Orientation

Future OrientationSociabilitySociability

CourageCourage

Enjoy problem-solving

Enjoy problem-solving

+ + ++ +

Source: Jaworski & Peter

Lasker: fairy godmother of medical research…“…The Laskers were professional socialities, in the same way that one can be a professional scientist or a professional athlete; they were extraordinary networkers, lobbyists, minglers, conversers, persuaders, letter writers, cocktail party-throwers, negotiators, name-droppers, deal makers. Fund-raising – and, more important, friend-raising – was instilled in their blood, and the depth and breadth of their social connections allowed them to reach deeply into the minds – and pockets – of private donors and of the government.” – p. 111

• Robert Weinberg’s epiphany in the midst of a blizzard: isolating the “oncogene” (p. 372)

• Weinberg and Hanahan – “hallmarks of cancer” – p. 391

1. Self-sufficiency – cancer cells acquire an autonomous drive to proliferate…pathological mitosis… activation of oncogenes – ras or myc

2. Insensitivity to growth-inhibitory signals:3. Evasion of programmed cell death (apoptosis)4. Limitless replicative potential5. Sustained angiogenesis- drawing out their own

supply of blood and blood vessels6. Tissue invasion and metastasis – colonizing

other organs…

• Thad Dryja(ophthalmologist-turned-geneticist) finding a piece of DNA missing in tumor cells: (p. 379)

Page 24: Curiosity wk 6

Softer Roads Of Understanding & Orientation…for The Oncologist

24Source: Jaworski & Peter

Siddharth Mukherjee on coming back from “the strange land”:

“…To me, these were miracles enough. It is an old complaint about the practice of medicine that it inures you to the idea of death. But when medicine inures you to the idea of life, to survival, then it has failed utterly. The novelist Thomas Wolfe, recalling a lifelong struggle with illness, wrote in his last letter, “I’ve made a long voyage and been to a strange country, and I’ve seen the dark man very close.”…But surely, it was the most sublime moment of my clinical life to have watched that voyage in reverse, to encounter men and women returning from the strange country – to see them so very close, clambering back…” – p. 400

Doctor’s Skill in assisting the patient to “reconcile with death” and hope for miraculous “remission”: Susan Sontag’s experience with the “unfeeling” doctor versus the “good” doctor…

“…There was no hope, he told her flatly. And not just that; there was nothing to do but wait for cancer to explode out of the bone marrow. All options were closed, His word – the Word – was final, immutable, static. “Like so many doctors,” Rief recalls, “ he spoke to us as if we were children but without the care that a sensible adult takes in choosing what words to use with a child.” – p. 306

“…for a woman who wanted to live twice as energetically, to breathe the world in twice as fast as anyone else – for whom stillness was mortality. It took months before Sontag found another doctor whose attitude was vastly more measured and who was willing to negotiate with her psyche. Dr. A. was right, of course, in the formal, statistical sense. A moody, saturnine leukemia eventually volcanoed out of Sontag’s marrow, and, yes, there were few medical options But Susan Sontag’s new physician also told her precisely the same information, without ever choking off the possibility of a miraculous remission. He moved her in succession from standard drugs to experimental drugs to palliative drugs. It was all masterfully done, a graded movement toward reconciliation with death, but a movement nonetheless – statistics without stasis. ” – p. 307

Openness To ExperienceOpenness To Experience

Page 25: Curiosity wk 6

What causes curiosity or interest?

Question:

25Source: Jaworski & Peter

Page 26: Curiosity wk 6

How is curiosity different than interest or openness to experience?

Question:

26Source: Jaworski & Peter

Page 27: Curiosity wk 6

What are the positive (negative) consequences?

Question:

27Source: Jaworski & Peter

Page 28: Curiosity wk 6

Is curiosity “field specific” (e.g. humanities scholar vs. high tech exec)?

Question:

28Source: Jaworski & Peter

Page 29: Curiosity wk 6

Is it possible to be both curious and “execution focused”?

Question:

29Source: Jaworski & Peter

Page 30: Curiosity wk 6

Does society have “thinkers” and “doers” – can they co-exist?

Question:

30Source: Jaworski & Peter

Page 31: Curiosity wk 6

….

Journal Questions

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What does curiosity mean for you?

1. Is curiosity a necessary “core value” to be successful in organizations or ministry?

2.How will you nurture your curiosity?

3.What is an example of curiosity in the Bible or the History of Christianity? Explain how this was used by God.

4.How might God use your curiosity?

Source: Jaworski & Peter