What Makes Us Curious? - Dr Mario Livio - #042

**Chris Williamson** (0:01)
Hello, friends. This week, I'm sitting down with Dr. mario livio. He's an internationally known astrophysicist, a fellow of the American association for the Advancement of Science, best-selling author and a popular speaker. His new book, Why? What Makes Us curious, is a bit of a departure away from his previous topics on physics and astrophysics. And it's really, really interesting. The field of curiosity is a lot deeper and more complex than I thought. curiosity sounds like one word. Turns out that it is a whole host of very different and subtle things that all contribute together to manifest what we consider to be curiosity. So through the lens of the great Richard Feynman, Leonardo Da Vinci and many other famous historic examples, Dr. livio manages to lay out a lovely landscape for us to understand curiosity in this podcast. I owe him an awful lot for finding time to come and speak to me. I'm trying to avoid too much public audible masturbation here while I introduce this particular podcast, but feeling very excited about the next few months, I have booked without a doubt some of the best minds on the planet to come on this podcast. Mr. Jonathan Haidt, author of The Righteous Mind is coming on. Rory Sutherland, Vice Chairman of Ogilvy Advertising, which is one of the biggest advertising companies in the world. Thiago Forte of the Praxis Blog, plus an awful lot of other guests that I can't even talk about yet. And on top of that, myself, Johnny and Youssef are doing our first ever live podcast this week for Communicorp's Christmas Conference. Now Communicorp own Smooth FM, Capital FM, and a number of different areas along with a few other broadcasting companies. And for some reason they are allowing us to sit down in front of all of their marketing executives this Thursday and talk about influence, the podcasting platform generally, and doing a live Q&A on stage in front of an audience at the Tyneside Cinema. So although my sphincter is puckering with the nerves, I'm absolutely buzzing to get stuck in. And hopefully, as long as they let me do it, I'll actually be publishing the podcast live through this channel as well. In the meantime, we're going to find out what makes us curious. Here's Dr. livio.
mario livio, welcome to Modern Wisdom. How are you today?

**Mario Livio** (2:49)
Thank you. My pleasure.

**Chris Williamson** (2:51)
It's really good to have you on. So when I was having a look at the different options to go through for this podcast with yourself, your backlog of books is, it's pretty vast. There's an awful lot that we could have decided to cover, but your most recent book is On curiosity. That's right.

**Mario Livio** (3:10)
Correct, yes. So it's called Why? What Makes Us curious?

**Chris Williamson** (3:16)
That's a departure from the maths and physics based books that you've published before. What's the reason for this move towards this? What particular curiosity drove you to write about curiosity?

**Mario Livio** (3:33)
Right. So indeed it is a departure. I am an astrophysicist myself and all my previous books were either about physics, mathematics, things like that, astrophysics. I'm neither a psychologist nor a neuroscientist. So indeed this is a departure. But what happened was that I was always and still am an extraordinarily curious person. And about five years ago or so, a little more, I just became extremely curious about curiosity itself. So I spent the last five years or so, you know, reading almost every article that, you know, about research that was done on curiosity in both psychology and neuroscience. I interviewed many researchers that work in this field. Actually, not that many, because not that many work in this field specifically.
And I visited some labs and this resulted in this book.

**Chris Williamson** (4:39)
Is it, to a broad degree, quite new ground then that you've been doing, putting the work of what is curiosity together? You said that there doesn't appear to be a vast body of knowledge that already exists. Did this require a lot of work on your part?

**Mario Livio** (4:53)
Yes, a lot of work on my part. I mean, look, let's face it, I mean, the researchers in psychology and in neuroscience, they do the real work on curiosity. What I have done was trying to put together some sort of a summary of the type of work that they have been doing. I did discover that some of them are so immersed in very, very specific topics regarding curiosity that sometimes even they are not fully aware of the whole picture in terms of the research done in this field. So hopefully my book does serve some purpose of trying to give the slightly bigger picture, even if by a non-specialist.