Twelve years ago, while studying for a Master’s in Open and Distance Education with the Open University, I tried to make sense of the many competing theories of learning. I remember feeling overwhelmed by them all: behaviourism, constructivism, social learning, experiential learning, transformative learning. Each theory illuminated something important, yet none quite captured the whole picture. I read everything I could get my hands on, at first in libraries, then second hand books and iBooks I could read on Kindle.
To impose some order on the chaos, I grouped the theories together and tried to see the connections between them. I love a Mindmap. I have a whiteboard by my desk. I used a metaphor that still pleases me. Imagine a large bowl of clear water. Now drip twelve different coloured inks into it. Each ink spreads, merges, overlaps and alters the others. That seemed to me a better picture of learning than any tidy diagram. I created plenty of diagrams and adored Engstrom however divorced from reality his circuit boards were.
Even then I suspected something deeper was going on beneath the theories themselves.
Neuroscience- another pet interest
What fascinates me now is how much neuroscience has started to confirm that instinct. Learning is messy, interconnected, embodied, emotional and social all at once. The brain is not a filing cabinet. It is something more dynamic, and at the centre of it all sits a force that is both simple and mysterious: curiosity.
The Child Who Asked Too Many Questions
If I look back honestly, curiosity was present very early in my life. As a child I asked questions constantly. Endless questions. I wanted explanations, discussions, possibilities. Why was something the way it was? How did it work? What would happen if you changed it?
My father, understandably perhaps, did not always share my enthusiasm.
Too often the answer was some variation of:
“Because I told you so.”
“Stop asking why.”
“Don’t ask why, ask how high!”
Those moments are revealing. Even when the conversation stopped, the curiosity did not. The questions simply moved inward.
There were moments when curiosity was allowed to breathe. If my father happened to be engaged in something practical, he might show us how to clean a shotgun, polish shoes, put up a rope ladder, plant rhododendrons or identify birds in the garden. In those moments learning came alive. Not because anyone said “you must learn this,” but because there was something real to explore.
And Mum sat with us to draw – an art teacher she could show us how and explain why. I sat for hours on the kitchen bench watching her cook. Our grandfather was great to- whatever he was up to he had a grandchild at his knees: oiling the lawnmower, changing a tyre on the car, putting up wallpaper, painting a bathroom wall.
Looking back now, those experiences already contained the seeds of something I only understand later: curiosity thrives when exploration is permitted.
The Strange Case of Latin
School, however, revealed the opposite.
I studied Latin for nine years. Nine years.
Today I remember little of it.
What I do remember is one conjugation that stuck in my mind at the time because it seemed faintly ridiculous: the declension of mensa, meaning “table.” We were required to chant the grammatical variations of a table with absolute seriousness. And the story of how Rome was founded by Romulus and Remus.
I used to joke that after nine years of Latin I could still “decline how to love a table.” But the joke hides something important.
The learning never truly happened.
Years later, when I encountered the Danish learning theorist Knud Illeris, I discovered his concept of defence learning. Sometimes the mind simply blocks learning when it feels pointless, imposed, or threatening to identity.
That explained Latin perfectly.
The brain had quietly refused.
The Brain as a Prediction Machine
Modern neuroscience now offers a powerful way to understand curiosity.
The brain, it seems, is fundamentally a prediction engine. It is constantly asking three basic questions:
What will happen next? What does this signal mean? What action should I take?
To answer these questions, the brain builds internal models of the world. It tries to predict reality before reality happens.
Learning occurs when those predictions fail.
When the brain expects one thing and encounters another, it generates what neuroscientists call a prediction error. That error signal is one of the key drivers of learning. Dopamine rises, attention sharpens, and the brain updates its internal model.
Too little prediction error and nothing new is learned. Everything is already known.
Too much prediction error and the system collapses into confusion or stress.
So the brain seeks a very specific zone between the two.
Where Curiosity Lives
Curiosity appears precisely in that zone.
We become curious when something is not fully understood but feels understandable with effort. A puzzle just beyond our current knowledge.
In other words, manageable uncertainty.
This is remarkably similar to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s idea of flow, where challenge and ability are perfectly balanced. Too easy and we are bored. Too difficult and we feel overwhelmed.
Curiosity thrives exactly in the middle.
The brain loves problems that are just difficult enough to solve.
Dopamine and the Pleasure of Understanding
Curiosity is not merely an intellectual activity. It is deeply biological.
When curiosity is triggered, the brain’s reward system activates. Dopamine rises in regions such as the ventral tegmental area and nucleus accumbens. The hippocampus, responsible for memory formation, becomes more active.
This produces a remarkable effect. When people are curious about something, they remember not only the answer but also unrelated information encountered at the same time.
Curiosity primes the brain for learning.
Which explains something I recognise in myself very clearly. When I become fascinated by a subject, learning accelerates almost effortlessly. Reading leads to more reading. Questions lead to further questions.
The system feeds itself.
Curiosity as an Evolutionary Strategy
Seen from an evolutionary perspective, curiosity solves a fundamental survival problem.
Animals must explore their environment to survive. Too little curiosity and they miss food, resources or opportunities. Too much curiosity and they risk danger.
Evolution therefore tuned curiosity very carefully.
Animals explore when environments change, when resources are uncertain, and when gaps in knowledge appear.
Humans inherited an unusually powerful version of this system.
Which explains a great deal of human behaviour: science, storytelling, puzzles, gossip and exploration.
All of these are forms of information foraging.
Two Kinds of Curiosity
Researchers often distinguish between two forms of curiosity.
The first is perceptual curiosity, which arises from novelty in the senses: unusual sounds, bright colours, strange objects. Many animals share this type.
The second is epistemic curiosity: the desire to understand.
This is the curiosity that drives philosophy, history, science and learning theory. It is the curiosity that asks not just what is happening but why it happens.
If I look at my own life, it is this second form that has always been strongest.
Curiosity and Safety
Curiosity, however, only flourishes in certain conditions.
If learning threatens identity, the brain often blocks it. That is exactly the defence learning Illeris described.
Curiosity therefore requires a sense of safety. Exploration must feel permitted rather than judged.
This is something I recognise strongly in coaching environments as well. Good coaching does not merely deliver instructions. It creates a space where experimentation feels possible.
Learning accelerates when people feel free to explore.
Curiosity and Story
Humans are especially curious about stories.
Stories create prediction gaps.
What happens next?
Why did that happen?
What does it mean?
The entire structure of narrative depends on curiosity.
Which perhaps explains why my own writing projects — whether The Form Photo, historical stories, or even blog reflections — often revolve around mystery and discovery. A narrative is essentially a structured way of feeding curiosity forward.
Each revelation resolves one uncertainty while creating another.
The Arrival of AI
And now something remarkable has happened.
Artificial intelligence has dramatically expanded the bandwidth of curiosity.
In the past, following a question might require hours in a library, searching through books, cross-referencing sources, waiting days or weeks to connect ideas.
Now a question can immediately trigger explanation, synthesis, counter-argument and hypothesis generation.
Curiosity becomes a conversation.
I find myself using AI in exactly this way: to explore writing ideas, coaching methods, neuroscience, cooking, gardening, sports science, storytelling and more. It does not replace thinking. Instead it acts as an amplifier for thinking.
Where curiosity once hit barriers, it can now keep flowing.
The Pleasure of the Moment of Insight
One final idea has stayed with me.
People often assume curiosity is about wanting answers. But neuroscientists increasingly believe something slightly different.
The brain enjoys the reduction of uncertainty.
The pleasure lies not just in the answer itself but in the moment the puzzle resolves — that brief flash when confusion suddenly becomes clarity.
You can almost feel it.
It is a small spark of understanding.
And perhaps that spark is what has been driving me all along — from the child asking too many questions in the kitchen, through postgraduate study, through writing and coaching, and now through endless conversations with AI.
Curiosity, it seems, is not just how we learn.
It may be the engine that keeps learning alive for an entire lifetime.
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