The more curious we are on a topic, the more it is easier to learn and memorize information on that same topic.
This is something common sense, which we all “know”, but which today finds scientific evidence thanks to research published in these days in the Neuron magazine and which has highlighted what happens in the brain when curiosity is stimulated.
The enrolled participants have been subjected to a combination of curiosity evaluation test regarding a series of questions, awarding tests of a state of curiosity and memory tests. In some parts of the study, people have also been subjected to cerebral magnetic resonance imaging.
Firstly, as expected, when people were very curious to discover the answer to a question, they were also more capable of learning this information.
More surprising, however, is that once their curiosity had been aroused, they also showed better learning than that information they met during the test and that for them were completely foreign (i.e. that information for which they were not initially intrigued).
People were even better able to remember the information learned during the “curious state” for a next period of 24 hours.
Secondly, the researchers found that when curiosity is stimulated, there is a greater activity in the brain circuit related to the reward.
This would demonstrate that the intrinsic motivation recruits the same areas of the brain that are involved in the concrete, extrinsic motivation. This reward circuit is based on dopamine, a chemical messenger that transmits messages between neurons.
Third, the team discovered that, when learning motivated by curiosity is activated, the activity in the hippocampus increases, a region of the brain that is important for the formation of new memories, just as the interactions between the hippocampus and the reward circuit increase.
Thus curiosity recruits the reward system, and the interactions between the reward system and the hippocampus seem to put the brain in a state where you are more likely to learn and keep information, even if this information is not of particular interest or relevance.
It is perhaps experience of each of us to have met a teacher at least once in our life or simply someone who has been able to stimulate our curiosity and who has allowed us to learn something that we still remember after a long time.
These results certainly confirm to many professionals and experts of learning what experience has already taught them: curiosity can put the brain in a state that allows you to learn and preserve any type of information, like a vortex that sucksing everything we are motivated to learn, and also everything around!
Understanding the relationship between motivation and memory could also stimulate new approaches to improve memory not only in healthy individuals, but also in people with neurological problems, and promote new ways for the treatment of patients with disorders that affect memory.
