Psychologyspeaking topic
A story you're forced to abandon halfway sticks in your mind far longer than one that reaches its ending. Curiosity creates an almost bodily tension, a hunger for information. Why is not knowing sometimes a stronger drive than knowing?
— the information gap theory of curiosity (Loewenstein)
practice with this topic
Set the timer (5-30 min), take 20 seconds of prep if you like, start talking. Jot your thoughts onto the sticky-note board.
similar topics
- Sleep and memory: why does the brain replay what we learned during the day while we sleep at night? If you want to remember something, which matters more, studying or sleeping?
- Choice overload: why do more options leave us less happy and less decisive? Faced with endless choice, why do we sometimes prefer not to choose at all?
- Overgeneralization: turning one bad experience into 'it always goes this way'. How does a single event become a rule for your whole life?
- As a child, one summer felt endless; now a whole year flies by. Yet the clock still ticks at the same speed. If time itself hasn't changed, what exactly is speeding up: the life we live, or the mind that measures it?
- The Milgram obedience experiment: would we obey far enough to hurt a stranger just because an authority figure told us to? Does our conscience go quiet once we hand responsibility to whoever gave the order?