219 | Dani Bassett and Perry Zurn on the Neuroscience and Philosophy of Curiosity

219 | Dani Bassett and Perry Zurn on the Neuroscience and Philosophy of Curiosity

It's easy enough to proclaim that we are curious creatures, but what does that really mean? What kinds of curiosity are there? And how does curiosity arise in our brains? Perry Zurn and Dani Bassett are a philosopher and neuroscientist, respectively (as well as twins), whose new book Curious Minds: The Power of Connection explores these questions through an interdisciplinary lens. We break down the different ways that curiosity can manifest — collecting and creating loose knowledge networks, digging deeply to create a tight knowledge network, and creatively leaping to make unexpected connections.

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Perry Zurn received a Ph.D. in philosophy from DePaul University. He is currently an Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at American University. He is the co-founder of the Trans Philosophy Project and the associated Thinking Trans // Trans Thinking Conference. Among his previous works is Curiosity and Power: The Politics of Inquiry.


Dani Bassett received a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Cambridge. They are currently the J. Peter Skirkanich Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, with appointments in the Departments of Bioengineering, Electrical & Systems Engineering, Physics & Astronomy, Neurology, and Psychiatry, as well as an external professor of the Santa Fe Institute. Among their awards are the Macarthur Fellowship, the Lagrange Prize in Complex Systems Science (2017), and the Erdos-Renyi Prize in Network Science.


Jaksot(416)

161 | W. Brian Arthur on Complexity Economics

161 | W. Brian Arthur on Complexity Economics

Economies in the modern world are incredibly complex systems. But when we sit down to think about them in quantitative ways, it's natural to keep things simple at first. We look for reliable relations...

23 Elo 20211h 35min

160 | Edward Slingerland on Confucianism, Daoism, and Wu Wei

160 | Edward Slingerland on Confucianism, Daoism, and Wu Wei

Plato and Aristotle founded much of what we think of as Western philosophy during the fourth and fifth centuries BCE. Interestingly, that historical period also witnessed the foundation of some of the...

16 Elo 20211h 23min

AMA | August 2021

AMA | August 2021

Welcome to the August 2021 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). I take the large number of ques...

12 Elo 20213h 11min

159 | Mari Ruti on Lack, Love, and Psychoanalysis

159 | Mari Ruti on Lack, Love, and Psychoanalysis

Neuroscience has given us great insights into how our brains work. But there is still room for purely humanistic disciplines to help us think through our thoughts and emotions, not to mention the mean...

9 Elo 20211h 49min

158 | David Wallace on the Arrow of Time

158 | David Wallace on the Arrow of Time

The arrow of time — all the ways in which the past differs from the future — is a fascinating subject because it connects everyday phenomena (memory, aging, cause and effect) to deep questions in phys...

2 Elo 20211h 47min

157 | Elizabeth Strychalski on Synthetic Cells and the Rules of Biology

157 | Elizabeth Strychalski on Synthetic Cells and the Rules of Biology

Natural selection has done a pretty good job at creating a wide variety of living species, but we humans can't help but wonder whether we could do better. Using existing genomes as a starting point, b...

26 Heinä 20211h 17min

156 | Catherine D'Ignazio on Data, Objectivity, and Bias

156 | Catherine D'Ignazio on Data, Objectivity, and Bias

How can data be biased? Isn't it supposed to be an objective reflection of the real world? We all know that these are somewhat naive rhetorical questions, since data can easily inherit bias from the p...

19 Heinä 20211h 28min

155 | Stephen Wolfram on Computation, Hypergraphs, and Fundamental Physics

155 | Stephen Wolfram on Computation, Hypergraphs, and Fundamental Physics

It's not easy, figuring out the fundamental laws of physics. It's even harder when your chosen methodology is to essentially start from scratch, positing a simple underlying system and a simple set of...

12 Heinä 20212h 40min

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