Study reveals brain regions sparking curiosity, driving creativity and innovation.
Curiosity is a vital aspect of the human mind. It’s responsible for moving society forward with groundbreaking ideas and inventions, keeping the world on the cutting edge of technology, and even allowing for a deeper connection with the natural world. Without curiosity, nothing would be well understood or progress in any meaningful way. But what causes the mind to be curious in the first place? That’s what researchers from Columbia’s Zuckerman Institute set out to explore, hoping findings using texforms in their recent study published in the Journal of Neuroscience would shed some light on the regions of the brain responsible for assessing ambiguity and sparking the curiosity necessary for creativity and innovation.
“Curiosity has deep biological origins,” explained Dr. Gottlieb, a principal investigator at the Zuckerman Institute in discussing that curiosity was a necessary survival mechanism for early mankind, allowing our ancestors to thrive in their primitive environment. As the brain began to make meaningful connections evident in their surroundings, through exploration mankind began to progress, eventually creating original prototypes for many necessities still in use today.
The study used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a noninvasive form of technology, to measure changes in blood-oxygen levels in the brains of 32 volunteers. FMRI allowed the team to document oxygen consumption in different brain regions as participants viewed a variety of images, displaying associated activity in each region.
Researchers specifically showed the participants texforms – random images of things like a walrus, frog, tank, or hat, which were distorted to different degrees – and they were asked to rate their confidence and curiosity regarding each item. The results showed an inverse relationship between confidence and curiosity in that the more confident participants were about their ability to define what the picture was supposed to be, the less curious they were about it in general – and vice versa.
Activity was heightened in the occipitotemporal cortex (OTC) region of the brain, which is responsible for vision and object recognition with previous studies demonstrating its ability to distinguish between animate and inanimate objects. The team developed a measure called “OTC uncertainty,” used to document how uncertain the region was about the category of a distorted texform. When participants were less curious about an image, the OTC activity matched with a specific category. However, when higher curiosity levels were present, the OTC displayed mixed activity patterns. In other words, it revealed that the participants were unsure about their ability to properly recognize the texform.
The anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), responsible for information gathering, and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), able to monitor subjective perceptions of value and confidence, were also active while the texforms were presented to the volunteers. Both areas showed heightened activity when participants felt confident about an image’s identity and less curiosity was evident.
“This is really the first time we can link the subjective feeling of curiosity about information to the way your brain represents that information,” Dr. Gottlieb said of the findings.
These initial results with texforms, while focused only on visualization, pave the way for exploring curiosity in other contexts as well. For example, one avenue for future research might be analyzing intellectual curiosity, such as that provoked by reading trivia questions. Investigating the brain’s response to these questions, or something similar, might reveal whether similar neural circuits are involved in processing uncertainty and curiosity across different types of brain-challenging activities. Abstract thinking and the ability for the brain to gather pieces of information to problem-solve complex puzzles is essential to creating new concepts relevant to advancing society.
“Curiosity entails a sort of enthusiasm, a willingness to expend energy and investigate your surroundings. And it’s intrinsically motivated, meaning that nobody is paying you to be curious; you are curious merely based on the hope that something good will come when you learn,” Dr. Gottlieb said. “Those are just some of the amazing things about curiosity.”
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