Curiosity is so fundamental to our innate nature that we are oblivious to its indispensability in our lives. Throughout our time on earth, we delve into the information-seeking realm through ways including but not limited to the Internet, TV, Books, etc. Curiosity is thus our ability to seek information to reduce the uncertainty from the unknown with its non-physiological expression causing neuropsychiatric disorders.
Although curiosity is such a basic tenet, we are largely unaware of its neurobiological mechanisms. Only recently, with the advent of novel methodologies such as fMRI and optogenetics, certain brain regions have been linked to various traits pertaining to curiosity.
One such trait, novelty-seeking is an adaptive behavior that requires higher-order cognitive learning as its true nature is unknown due to disassociation with our past and current experience, the reason they are termed novel.
Why study novelty-seeking behavior? While it may not necessarily be true, in most workplaces we determine success through rewards gained due to our actions. These actions in most circumstances are rewarded highly if they are high on novelty. This further indicates why only a few people are rewarded highly as compared to others. It is mainly due to the fact that they are more curious or their cognitive function is tuned to higher-order novelty-seeking behavior.
Thus, to make any workplace productive with creative and novel ideas, it is indispensable to understand specific neurobiology linked to it that can be tweaked in the future with appropriate drugs. While this may completely sound like a science fiction story, advanced neurobiological methodologies such as optogenetics have evolved to associate various brain regions with curiosity.
One such recent study led by Ahmadlou has identified a brain region termed Zona Incerta (ZI) which mainly consists of GABAergic neurons. These neurons are also called inhibitory neurons that regulate the neuronal activity in our brain. ZI has been associated with various other functions such as sleep, fear, defense mechanisms, food, etc. This indicates that various subregions of ZI control other functions than novelty-seeking. As the authors report, activation of neurons in a subregion of ZI caused a fasted mouse to seek novelty over food who otherwise would choose food driven by natural instincts.
Ahmadlou led an interesting set of experiments to identify novelty-seeking in primates and rodents. To study novelty-seeking in primates, gaze shifts were utilized as a means to study the same. Monkeys made gaze shifts quickly towards those familiar objects which allowed them to view novel objects as compared to the other familiar objects. In rodents, novelty-seeking was observed as mice mostly avoided familiar objects after sniffing (termed shallow investigation) whereas exhibited greater interest through the expressions of biting, and carrying (termed deep investigation) towards novel objects or conspecifics. It can thus be seen that ZI largely governs novelty-seeking behavior in primates and rodents and this observation can be extrapolated to humans as well considering similarities and dissimilarities in the brain’s structure-function relation.
Perceptual novelty seeking is one piece of the curiosity puzzle as it is largely defined by information seeking to reduce uncertainty from an unknown. It further seems imperative to explore links between novelty-seeking and uncertainty-reducing information-seeking behavior in humans. As new methodologies are developed, more experiments with lower organisms will enhance our understanding of this complexity by identifying regions and subregions in the brain dealing with different aspects of curiosity.