Why Fear Kills Curiosity and What That Means for AI - with Chantel Prat, Cognitive Neuroscientist

**Chantel Prat** (0:00)
The truth is that if you think you already know the answer, you will feel zero curiosity. And if you feel zero curiosity, your brain is not set up to learn. And that's just if you think you already know the answer. If you feel insecure, you think it could be better than you, you think it could take your job, then it's like not just not knowing the answer, but feeling some kind of threat.
That would cause you to actively sort of create these defense mechanisms and move away from this new experience, whether it's AI or a coach. Hi, I'm Chantel Prat. I'm a cognitive neuroscientist who studies individual differences and the way brains make sense of the world. I'm really excited about this conversation and learning how AI can help us be more of ourselves and more of who we want to be in the future.

**Jeremy Utley** (0:47)
How do you think about, as a neuroscientist with significant output requirements, why is input important? And then how does one, knowing that it's important, how does one protect it?

**Chantel Prat** (1:00)
That's such a good question. Okay. First of all, why is input important? Like this is my absolute favorite thing about, well, gosh, I have a lot of favorite things about the human brain, but I think one of my favorite things is how adaptable it is, right? When we talk about, and I should sort of center this by saying, my specialty is individual differences. So I'm always focused on the unique ways our different brains make sense of the world.
And every brain really is different, shaped by our genes and our lived and imagined experiences.
And I think there are lots of kind of pop psychological examples of how we miss this. We think that other people think like us, whether we think in words or pictures or how we make sense of things. But in fact, our brains are shaped by our inputs from the beginning. So language is one of my areas of expertise. And a newborn infant can hear all of the sounds in every language that any human makes, not perfectly, but they can make all of the distinctions.
And they become tuned to their environment. So in the place of instincts that let other animals kind of hit the ground running, we have a brain that's born to learn about our environment. How to succeed in the place that we were born in, and then from every input, our brain restructures in ways that it believes is setting us up for success in similar environments. So we're always learning. Every thought is a learning event, and that learning is preparing you for some imagined future. My husband, I'll give him credit, Andrea Stacco. He teaches cognitive psychology at our university, and he uses the metaphor of a footprint in the sand as the way that a memory or an experience changes your brain. So it's not the case that any idea or any input has a local effect. I mean, we've got 86 billion neurons that are, you know, tasked with this human experience. And much like a footprint in the sand, an experience makes its mark on your brain by moving probably hundreds of millions of neurons into different patterns of connectivity with one another. So newness is really, to me, it's very, very important because you might have this experience, you might remember it, you might say, oh, when I did this, this happened. But it also changes the shape of you, it changes the statistics that your brain is taking in a way that you may not be able to appreciate consciously. So for me, input is just everything.

**Jeremy Utley** (3:55)
Well, I agree. I mean, I'm obsessed with input. Anybody who listens to this podcast and anybody who listens to mine and Mahanvar's private conversations, I would say they're primarily input-oriented. I mean, we are input obsessives. So here's my question. As someone who has been to South by Southwest many times, you're just coming off of your South by Southwest kind of afterglow.
Why is it even for those of us who love input, there is this really challenging pressure towards output. So the way that manifests for me is when I'm at South by, I'm looking at the schedule of unknown inputs that can have indiscernible impact on my life in lots of ways, and then I've got phone calls that I can join. And I've observed to myself, sometimes I sit in my hotel room and I schedule a stupid phone call that I could do anytime.
It's almost like this out of body experience where I'm seeing this being who supposedly and at least theoretically values input, who's in an input rich environment and goes, yeah, you know what, I'm just gonna, I'm gonna go to what's comfortable. Why is that? Why is it so hard to make space?