Thursday, 21 February 2008

What is interesting?

The Curious Italian Goat - Photo taken in the Dolomites, 2004

What makes something interesting? Paul Silvia, a cognitive scientist has some answers. From his and others' research he reckons there are two things. The first is unsurprising, the second is less so.
  1. "an event’s novelty–complexity, which refers to evaluating an event as new, unexpected, complex, hard to process, surprising, mysterious, or obscure" (Silvia's 2008 CDIPS paper, p.58)
  2. "people feel able to comprehend them and master the challenges that they [the novelty-complexity] pose (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990)." (p.58)
This second point means that experts can be interested in things that cause novices to turn off because they have the knowledge to comprehend them.

This creates a self-fulfilling cycle: the more you are interested, the more you learn about something, the more interesting stuff there is.

Interesting things should then be novel and sufficiently complex to engender curiosity but comprehensible enough not to deflate that inquisitiveness.

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