The neurobiology of curiosity as a lesson for teachers

Abstract

The central idea of the present text is to show that in the formation of the students of tomorrow's world, a fundamental role belongs to the idea of curiosity. Scientific knowledge has recently become, thanks to technological development and the increasingly computerized era, a way of life in which the skills to understand and handle the applications and software increasingly present in everyday life have become inherent requirements of a life quality. Therefore, there is a need for education based on scientific knowledge to be much more present in the school curriculum of the students who will form tomorrow's society. Perhaps one of the most effective means by which students benefit from a science education is the systematic stimulation of native curiosity. We show some ethological and neurological foundations of curiosity that we consider sufficient for a reformulation of standard pedagogy.

Full text

Jus et Civitas
Vol. IX (LXXIII)
No. 1/2022
1 - 7
A Journal of Social and Legal
Studies
The neurobiology of curiosity as a lesson for teachers
Dragoș Grigorescu
Petroleum-Gas University, Bd. Bucharest, no. 39, Ploiesti, Romania
E-mail: dgrigorescu@upg-ploiesti.ro
DOI: 10.51865/JETC.2022.1.01
Abstract
The central idea of the present text is to show that in the formation of the students of tomorrow's world, a
fundamental role belongs to the idea of curiosity. Scientific knowledge has recently become, thanks to
technological development and the increasingly computerized era, a way of life in which the skills to
understand and handle the applications and software increasingly present in everyday life have become
inherent requirements of a life quality. Therefore, there is a need for education based on scientific
knowledge to be much more present in the school curriculum of the students who will form tomorrow's
society. Perhaps one of the most effective means by which students benefit from a science education is the
systematic stimulation of native curiosity. We show some ethological and neurological foundations of
curiosity that we consider sufficient for a reformulation of standard pedagogy.
Keywords: Curiosity; neurobiology; ethology; education; imitation; neophilia; exploration
Introduction
The most appropriate context to discuss curiosity, if we consider the education of
children, is that of understanding curiosity as a fundamental trait of being human. A
kind of natural or imposed instinct that pushes anyone to learn new things, a force that
characterizes every human being, even if in varying degrees. From the point of view of
education, this tax would constitute the best justification for the public education
system. One could hardly imagine a more natural justification for compulsory
education: school meets the natural desire of students to learn new things. Therefore, the
school responds to a natural need that characterizes the human species. Whether or not
the school actually takes this perspective is debatable and not the subject of this study.
Here we try to draw attention to the prospect of correlating institutional education and
natural child development as it emerges from the latest research in biology, psychology
and ethology. At issue is the question of who needs the school more, the society, the
community or the student, the child. Does the school meet the primary needs of the
child or society? These considerations of the philosophy and sociology of education are
not the subject of our study either, but at the introductory level at least, conclusions or
general inquiries of the above type are necessary for a correct education of the next
generations. In the current educational landscape, a new character has appeared, the
student as a biological being. Of course, this character is not absolutely new, in fact, he

2 Dragoș Grigorescu
has always been present in the history of pedagogy and in the conceptions of education
throughout time. But at the same time he lacked or failed to impose himself. Each time a
different type of student was in the foreground, usually the one that best corresponded
to the educational ideal contained in the educational paradigm that invented it. In one
way or another a perfect student, a student who became a special case of a perfect
student, was conquering the whole scene. The Greeks called this ideal paideia. From the
ancient Greeks, through the Middle Ages and into late modernity, the natural, biological
student was secondary. Only with J. J. Rousseau the biology student gets the spotlight,
but not for long, as he is quickly rejected and sent to the back of the class. However,
naturalistic pedagogy gained an important presence in contemporary pedagogy,
especially under the pressure of research in psychology that forced pedagogy to
consider themes such as personality, attention, motivation or imagination, all analyzed
from the perspective of effective learning. Today, the student is the subject of
pedagogical and biological analysis, especially from the perspective of age psychology,
which proposes a harmonization between teaching tools, analytical programs and lesson
contents with the intellectual and physical capacities of children. Within these concerns,
a more pronounced intervention is still needed. We believe that in the family of research
that is relevant for education, it is necessary that, in addition to psychology, ethology
should also appear.
Curiosity, imitation and education – an ethological perspective
The evolutionary development of the human being culminates for many of us in the
ability to learn and its reverse, education. Thus the preoccupation to learn, to form the
new progeny, knew a fundamental social approach and became education, that is, a
founding story about man himself, as if we were born to learn. Indeed, human cultural
and social development, technical progress and social innovation have been very closely
intertwined with education. Through education, man rewrote the entire evolutionary
past from the perspective of a present that placed homo sapiens sapiens at the top of the
pyramid of life. Education, like a mirror, from Plato until today, is mainly responsible
for the vanity with which we call ourselves sapiens, i.e. beings superior to nature. This
complacent image began to lose ground dramatically in the face of scientific discoveries
brought to the fore by ethology and comparative psychology. In reality, ethologists such
as Morris (2015) show us, the roots of educability are found in a process of raising and
caring for young in mammals, and this process is the expression of a balance between
two rival forces, self-preservation and exploration. The closest form of education to
self-preservation is imitation. The child directly takes on behaviors of the surrounding
adults who provide him with the security and affectivity necessary for natural
development. In addition, many of the behaviors exhibited in adulthood were acquired
as imitative absorption during childhood. It was only in the 20th century that ideas such
as the absorbing mind of the child came to the attention of educators, and it continues
today that the understanding and acceptance of this idea is transformed into current
pedagogical practice. M. Montessori stated that we discovered that education is not
something done by the teacher, but that it is a natural process that develops
spontaneously in the human being (Montessori, 2017, p.12). The spontaneity in question
here refers primarily to imitation as an unmediated transfer process made by the young
child from the self-confident adult in handling the surrounding reality.

The neurobiology of curiosity as a lesson for teachers 3
The child's final behavior is not the result of a process of internalization and awareness
of moral or coexistence values considered good or desirable in themselves so that these
values form a panacea from which all members of the community can be nourished.
This panacea is in reality a philosophical dream of humanity's morality, a dream we
have moved closer to or moved away from historically speaking, but in the end it will
remain a dream. At least until the next humanity. The behavior of the young child is the
fruit of imitation, and some developmental processes begin with imprinting, as a
standard lesson that will turn into copies or repetitions all subsequent events similar to
those that generated that template lesson, the pattern. In D. Morris's terms: it is the
unaltered obedience to these imprints (along with our carefully hidden instinctual starts)
that makes it so difficult for societies to change their habits and "beliefs" (Morris, 2015,
p. 119). That is precisely why education is such a difficult bet to win. Our chances of
winning the bet, however, increase once we ethologically reinterpret the human being in
the school: the student. The instinctive force with which humanity clings to its own
imprints and forms of imitation is formidable, never stifled. The only hope is only the
diminution of this inner voice that holds humanity prisoner in a few fundamental
experiences and that is heard again and again when something new does not fit perfectly
into the pattern. The fear of the new, neophobia, is not by chance primordial in the inner
consciousness of humanity because she was the one who ensured his survival. We are
born to survive, not to learn. The biological purpose of life is to remain personal in life
as much as possible, and if this is impossible, then let's find an impersonal form of
survival: reproduction. In this way, the inadequacy between education and the child's
natural development becomes even more significant. Fortunately, the story of humanity
does not stop at imitation, even if it is the seal that will follow us on whatever planet we
go. In addition to the great imitation, we also have a little curiosity.
The science of human behavior focused on the biological dimensions of all life,
ethology, convincingly shows us that in addition to imitation leading to behavioral
patterns exportable to all individuals of the species, there is an unequal opposing force
that balances the final behavior of mankind enough to transform the primate from the
genus homo into the dominant life form for the entire planet. It's about curiosity. Once
an individual's security has been assured to a reassuring degree, then the impulse to seek
something new sets in, something that does not fit into the repetitive patterns that thus
become boring. Curiosity is manifested on the one hand strictly individually, as an
instinct present in every human being, but on the other hand, curiosity is transferred to
the species level, as a general specific behavior. There are curious people, just as there
are curious communities. The proportions may differ depending on the balance line of
the individual or the group he belongs to. A man's life is the expression of a balance
between the behavioral patterns of childhood and the tendency towards something new
or something else that emerges from these patterns. This relationship can shift
throughout a lifetime and have high or low points, which psychologists will call crises.
Likewise, a community can find a balance between internal stability and periods of
exploration. Many times this need for exploration has turned into wars in history.
Exploration and related aggression spawned empires and social innovation on a scale
throughout history. Intelligence itself, so proudly placed by homo sapiens as a jewel on
the crown of masters of nature and life, is the expression of humanity's need for
exploration. Surpassing security generated intelligence, war and aggression entailed

4 Dragoș Grigorescu
advantages gained by exploring the environment. Human intelligence is a product of
war (Storm, 2015). If today we prefer to define ourselves as the most intelligent being
on the planet, then we will have to accept that we owe this position to aggression and
that we will also be forced to accept the title of being the most cruel on the planet. In
order to bring out the uncomfortable realities about our deep nature, including when we
talk about our most human behaviors or capacities, authors like F. de Waal spend a lot
of work of persuasion and adopt styles of expression that can surprise unsuspecting
audiences, for example in works which apparently question our human intelligence in
appreciating animal intelligence (de Waal, 2019). In de Waal it is not necessarily human
intelligence that is questioned, but rather our intelligence and especially our sincerity in
accepting truths about us as a species that do not coincide with our desires about
ourselves. For the world we live in to be a peaceful place open to values that value life
above all else, we must accept that we are the most formidable social product of war
and cruelty.
At the social level, the relationship between imitation and exploration can be seen as a
struggle between conservative forms that tend to give absolute value to those behaviors
that respect past traditions or forms of life and the tendencies to replace these ancestral
behaviors. Religion based on ancestral rituals is a good example. The very widespread
tendency of associating national identity with the oldest possible forms and traditions is
also another eloquent example. Value comes from preserving traditional culture.
Divinity is present in the religious act to the extent that it respects an initial mode of
manifestation. Initiates are the keepers of the pattern that must remain unchanged.
Social novelty must therefore overcome well-rooted instincts. Rigidity in maintaining
patterns can endanger the viability of a community just as the unproblematic openness
of a community to novelty can impair its continuity. Fortunate is the society that enjoys
the gradual acquisition of a perfect balance between imitation and curiosity, between
slavish, mindless copying and progressive, rational experimentation (Morris, 2015,
p.121).
In terms of education, things happen in a similar way. There is a broad class of
pervasive behaviors that form the core of teaching practices in most schools, along with
a smaller class of practices that encourage didactic exploration and experimentation. A
kind of conservative pedagogy that imitates and an exploratory pedagogy that innovates.
The instinctual tendencies of didactic practice respect the principle of imitation and self-
preservation. Pedagogical novelty is a secondary instinct that balances the balance to the
extent that it manages to pair symbiotically with self-preservation. Given that today's
social environment is one in which the security of the individual and the satisfaction of
basic needs are no longer a chapter of urgency and alarm as in the olden days, the
balance between imitation and curiosity should give more weight to curiosity. The
primary mission of the new education is to respond to students' need for exploration.
The best way for the school to achieve this is to become a school of exploration. If
school remains in the area of securing the individual's future, with a job or social
integration through imitation, then exploration and creativity will suffer, and students
will lack the courage to explore an uncertain future. Lacking the exploratory exercise
that involves risk management based on accepting the unpredictable, students will be
hesitant in the face of the unknown and will inevitably resort to the tendency to return to
the safe ground of the forerunners. In the face of an ever-increasing flow of newness
induced by the revolution of artificial intelligence and cognitive and moral

The neurobiology of curiosity as a lesson for teachers 5
bioenhancement, the most natural reaction is to freeze and resist processing the
newness, which will make the future even more difficult to manage. Without children
able to handle the unknown and unpredictable we cannot hope for a future balanced
between innovation and imitation. Childish, native curiosity, as a thirst or love of
novelty, can be extended to a satisfactory level towards mature ages only by educational
intervention. Children with good cognitive and emotional tone never stop exploring, but
adults easily give up exploring as they get older and become conservative and resistant
to the new in old age. To prevent this from happening, we have only one remedy:
exploratory education. A self-teaching school of ethology is one in which the search for
answers is the daily task, not the answers. The student in such a school is engaged in
searching, never satisfied by any answer, however clear and reassuring it may be. The
ethological educational ideal is one of engagement in the search for new perspectives.
Each answer or task completed must generate another question that calls for further
exploration. Without a pedagogy of exploration, students will learn conservation
reflexes at an early age and fall behind in imitation and conformity. Curiosity killed the
cat, but saved humanity and a future for education.
The ethological perspective on the relationship between neophobia and neophilia invites
us to look at things with caution. The link between the two fundamental behavioral
traits cannot be reduced to a two-sided coin, as if the two balance symmetrically.
Researchers such as W. Pisula have provided experimental data that well describe this
complicated relationship: The data (..) demonstrated that the genesis of fear of novelty
is complex and cannot be reduced to one extreme on the novelty seeking dimension, as
a simple opposite of novelty-preference (Pisula, 2009, p. 79). But all the more the
expectations that this relationship finds a balance through education and schooling
grow, as long as ethology itself shows us the importance of this relationship for the
becoming of the individual.
The neurobiological argument of the exploration-based school
More recently, W. Pisula (2009) speaks of a genetically predetermined behavior of
research, of exploration, which once satisfied produces functional changes in the
individual, brain and behavior, a kind of bi-directional connection, which is nevertheless
a behaviorist scheme, as D. O. Hebb and D. Berlyne once thought, without reducing
themselves to this scheme. For example, Pisula claims, at the end of a remarkable effort
to synthesize information about the neural mechanisms involved in the search for
novelty (exploration), that the whole process of curiosity, explained as relationships
between neurotransmitters, leads to a behavior regulated by the satisfaction of curiosity.
A modus vivendi for evolved brains, especially in mammals: Research into the
neurobiological basis of exploratory behaviors and novelty seeking is far from
complete. However, we have made considerable progress. Among neurotransmitters,
dopamine seems to be the most important factor regulating exploratory behavior.
Functionally, we know beyond any doubt that the rewarding value of novelty is strictly
related to universal reward mechanisms. Structurally, we associate curiosity
mechanisms with such cerebral structures as: nucleus accumbens, hippocampus,
amygdala, dorsal cortex in reptiles, and medial prefrontal cortex in mammals. (Pisula,
2009, p. 110). In other words, although the neurobiology of exploratory behavior
(novelty seeking neurobiology in Pisula's terms) is still in its infancy, we already know

6 Dragoș Grigorescu
with a satisfactory degree of confidence that the impulse/instinct/drive of curious human
behavior is integrated among the dopaminergic reward mechanisms at the limbic level.
Therefore, curiosity, along with other stable and known rewarding behaviors - hunger,
sleep, relating - ensures the balance between neophobia and neophilia (Pisula, 2009, p.
67). Curiosity is therefore one of the mechanisms to reduce stress hormones, and
satisfied curiosity becomes an anxiety-reducing behavior. The lesson for pedagogues is
that stimulating and maintaining students' interest in knowledge is at the same time a
way of education for a quality of life, well-being and, last but not least, mental health.
Well-being education, for both students and teachers, must consider the balanced ratio
between exploratory behavior and resistance to the new. Moreover, the teacher now has
the task of exerting a regulatory role from the outside to the inside on the student, and
the path based on the neurobiology of exploratory behavior is one of the best. If the
educator has in mind a learning through discovery in the sense presented here, then
education becomes its own reward, that is, we are dealing with a stimulation of intrinsic
motivation. For illustration we reproduce below the scheme of cortical mechanisms of
behavior oriented towards exploration according to Pisula (2009, p.107).
Fig.1. Jellestad F.K., Folleso G.S., and Ursin H. (1994),
The connection, better said regulation, between the amygdala, responsible for the
automatic mechanisms related to stress as a manifestation of fear (neophobia), and the
hippocampus, located under the cerebral cortex, involved in the management of
memory and orientation processes (neophilia), is visible. The behavioral grid
interpretation of these electrochemical reactions between neurotransmitters shows us
concretely the importance we must give to the management of curiosity, both in the
classroom and the processes related to research and discovery, but also in the wider
context of maintaining mental health through training people in activities where the
stimulation of exploratory behavior is the main objective.

The neurobiology of curiosity as a lesson for teachers 7
Bibliography
1. Waal de, F. (2019), Are we smart enough to understand animal intelligence?
Humanitas, Bucharest.
2. Furtună, D. (2015), Homo Aggressivus, Chișinău Publishing House.
3. Montessori, M. (2017), The absorbing mind, Vremea Publishing House, Bucharest.
4. Morris, D. (2015), The naked monkey, Art Editorial Group, Bucharest.
5. Pisula, W. (2009), Curiosity and Information Seeking in Animal and Human
Behavior, Brown Walker Press.
Neurobiologia curiozității ca lecție pentru profesori
Rezumat
Ideea centrală a textului de față este de a arăta că în formarea elevilor lumii de mâine un rol
fundamental revine ideii de curiozitate. Cunoașterea științifică a devenit în ultima perioadă, grație
dezvoltării tehnologice și erei tot mai informatizate, un mod de viață în care competențele de înțelegere și
manevrare a aplicațiilor și softurilor din ce în ce mai prezente în viața de zi cu zi au devenit cerințe
inerente unei vieți de calitate. Prin urmare este nevoie ca educația bazată pe cunoașterea științifică să fie
mult mai prezentă în programa școlară a elevilor care vor forma societatea de mâine. Poate unul dintre
cele mai eficiente mijloace prin care elevi beneficiază de o educație științifică este stimularea sistematică
a curiozității native. Arătăm câteva temeiuri etologice și neurologice ale curiozității pe care le socotim
suficiente pentru o reformulare a pedagogiei standard.