THE ESSENTIAL
- A curious attitude promotes memory and allows for better learning.
- A study has shown that a curious mind leads to better memorization skills.
- However, depending on the desired goal, you must adopt the best way to learn and memorize.
To boost your brain’s performance, embrace a curious mind rather than a hasty attitude. Here’s what researchers at Duke University concluded when studying motivational patterns that promote memorization and learning. Their work was presented in 2022 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Curiosity stimulates memory
For this study, scientists recruited 420 adults and asked them to imagine that they were thieves in an art museum. Participants were randomly divided into two groups and exposed to different scenarios. In the first project, called “urgent”, volunteers were informed that they had to immediately steal the works. To the members of the “curious” group, it was explained to them that they were carrying out reconnaissance to plan a future heist.
All participants then had to explore a museum ofart virtual with four colored doors, each representing a room. By clicking on it, they discovered paintings in the room and their value. The rooms contained more or less valuable works. The next day, the volunteers had to find the paintings seen the day before on a list. If they managed to recognize the most valuable paintings, they received money.
“Participants in the “curious” group who imagined planning a robbery had better memory the next day. They correctly recognized more paintings. They remembered the value of each painting. And the reward stimulated memory, so the valuable paintings were more likely to be remembered. We did not see this among the participants in the urgent group who imagined carrying out the heist.”specifies author Alyssa Sinclair in a press release.
Although members of the “urgent” group had lower memory scores, they were better able to identify which doors concealed more expensive rooms. Thus, they still managed to find more valuable paintings and their gain was approximately $230 more than that of the “curious” group..
Brain and learning: there is no best technique
According to the researchers, the difference in the two strategies and their results (better memory vs paintings of greater value) does not mean that one technique prevails over the other. You just have to use the one that best suits your goals.
“And you’re hiking and there’s a bear, you don’t want to think about long-term planning. You need to focus on getting out of there right now“explains Dr. Alison Adcock, who also worked on the study. She adds that it can also be useful in less difficult situations but requiring short-term action, such as encouraging people to get vaccinated against Covid-19.
For her colleague Alyssa Sinclair, the study also highlighted that putting people under stress is bad for long-term memory. “Sometimes you want to motivate people to look up information and remember it in the future… Maybe for this you need to put them in “curious mode” so they can actually retain this information.“
