The Engine of Learning

In the chapter Context is Everything, I talked about how learning something new isn't something that just magically happens, but rather is a result of a process that is amazingly adaptable and organic. From any arbitrary starting point, you can move one step in any direction that would enhance knowledge in a way that is adjacent to what you already know. If your step is small enough and "adjacent enough" (we will have to define these terms more rigorously soon), you will acquire a bit of new knowledge that you never had before.

And then you're in a new place. Very close to your old spot, but you've moved incrementally forward. And now, the process simply repeats.

Sounds great, doesn't it? Learning new things must be easy!

Well, I lied. I know, it's a terrible thing to do. I blatantly lied to you, the reader, who has picked up this book and trusted me to help you get better at learning things. And there I go, lying to your face, right off the bat!

Now in my defense, lie is perhaps too strong a word. Everything I said in the previous chapter was true. But I am guilty of lies of omission. But of course!! I'm in a bit of a paradox here, because the lesson in the last chapter was that we can only learn one thing at a time. We can't learn everything there is to learn about a complicated subject all at once. I had to start somewhere, and the best place to begin was to establish the concept of contextual meaning. (We'll explore the value of lying even further in the chapter, Big Rocks First).

So now, it's time to for us to learn the next most important ingredient for efficient learning: curiosity. In any field of endeavor —scientific, artistic, personal— the thing that drives real progress is a question.

Some questions are bold (What is electricity?), sometimes humble (why makes bread rise?), but always, it's a signal: the learner is active. Something in the world has caught their attention and they genuinely want to understand it. A moment of real curiosity, driven intrinsically from within the mind of the learner, is the playground where true learning thrives.

Curiosity isn’t just a pleasant side-effect of learning. It is the heart and soul of learning. It is the engine. It is the core. Without curiosity, we just go through the motions, like on that Zoom call. Try learning how a steam engine works sometime when you really don't care anything at all about steam engines. Good luck with that!

But with curiosity we can devour books, code for hours while time stands still, rewind videos a dozen times to figure out a guitar chord, or peer through a telescope in wonder and lose all sense of time.

School: The Enemy of Joyful Learning

I grew up in the United States. The educational system in the United States from the 1940s onward was mostly driven by a need for accommodating an ever-growing number of students in the public school system. And that need to "scale", if you will, has unfortunately been a root of evil in our school system, in my opinion.

To be clear: of course our school system is not completely evil! Thousands of wonderful teachers, administrators, and volunteers try to provide the best environment they can for kids to learn the essentials needed to be successful in our society.

But the compromises we have made to accommodate such large numbers of students in each school and in each classroom has spawned all kinds of unintended consequences. School slowly became the antidote to joyful learning and curiosity.

Let me illustrate by starting with Albert Einstein. He was famous for performing so-called "thought experiments". He often had to go test his theories in physics without the luxury of a physical lab, because the concepts his brain was generating simply could not be tested in a 19th-century laboratory. Instead, he had to use foce his own brain to conceive and role-play entirely through his experiments.

As you might imagine, this is an extraordinarily difficult thing for most people to do. It's a lot to hold in one's mind over an extended period of time. But he was able to do this because of his tremendous curiosity and his phenomenal drive to get to the bottom of mysteries that he found fascinating.

The quote I want to share with you is the following: "Curiosity has its own reason for existing".

This statement hides a very, very deep idea. It's deeper than I thought it was when I first came across it. I originally assumed he was just saying,that curiosity can be useful as we try to figure things out. But I think he meant something even more radical than that. He meant that curiosity is a thing unto itself. Almost independent from our thoughts, it provides the engine that drives the learning process in our brain.

I think I can illustrate through counterexample. I'm sure you've had the experience of sitting through a class, seminar, webinar, or Zoom call recently. After that class was over, after the webinar ended, after you hung up on the Zoom call, you honestly couldn't say what you've learned during that time. And this is a common experience when we are faced with information that we were not curious about. Even if the subject matter is interesting, unless we are a priori curious about that topic, we will not formulate questions in our brain ahead of time. And formulating questions is the key to receiving answers.

Clayton Christensen once famously said, "Questions are places in your mind where answers can fit".

Suppose you find yourself in a room where a lecture on astronomy is going on. You find the presentation interesting, as you've always enjoyed the night sky and occasionally wondered about the stars. But without having a specific question in mind, as interesting as the lecture may have seemed at the time, the new information doesn't have a prepared place to land in your brain. Information will probably skip off and not be retained.

But if you had a specific question, for example, how big is our star compared to other stars in the universe? Then the information on star classification would not only be infinitely more interesting, but that information will now land in a spot that your brain was prepared to receive. And you are much more likely to retain it and to learn something from it.

But how do we come up with questions in the first place? That's where curiosity comes in. This is why curiosity is so important. It is unlikely that a gnat has any curiosity about the trees that it flies between. But we have a notion of curiosity. We actually want to know something new. It is that curiosity that can lead to the questions that can prepare our minds for answers. Without any curiosity, questions cannot really exist. And learning, while possible, becomes either a chore to be endured or is reduced down to the rote learning or of impersonal facts that must be memorized.

Curiosity, tragically, is usually squashed early. Individual teachers can be amazing, individual class experiences can so rewarding as to be life-changing. But if we step back and look at the overall US public school system, we have to admit that in the aggregate, curiosity is tends to be driven out as an unintended consequence of the need to scale up the educational process to serve millions of kids each year.

Step into any first grade classroom, and chances are you if you remain for just a few hours, you'll see some kids having fun in their activities, and at times really focused on learning something new. Maybe it's learning how to add single-digit numbers, or maybe it's the fascination of a hanging solar system display, or maybe it's using fingerpaint to create a scene drawn entirely from one's imagination. Stay long enough - a few days, a few weeks - and you'll find curiosity and questions float around the room as easily as oxygen molecules randomly bounce in the air.

Now step into a 10th grade algebra class. Maybe you'll find some curiosity and questions, but most likely you'll find a teacher lecturing to rows of silent students. A system of rewards that's based on providing fast answers, and punishment (even if it's only "let's talk about that after class") for tangential questions driven by a mind curious enough to go beyond the hard-and-fast boundaries of the day's agenda.

School rewards right answers, not good questions. Fill-in-the-blank, multiple choice, and standardized tests condition us to think that the goal of learning is "correctness" - the ability to reproduce the work of others. Curiosity for off-the-track ideas, questions that probe beyond the discussion of the moment, or softly - or harshly - rooted out.

As a result, students begin to internalize a dangerous belief: that knowledge is to be given from someone else, not discovered on one's own. The classroom becomes a place of silent compliance rather than creative inquiry.

Yet somehow, the moment we leave school and enter the real world, we’re suddenly expected to solve open-ended problems that have never been solved before, debug unstructured systems that don't conform to known rules, and to innovate new solutions that have never been imagined by anyone else. And then, finally, curiosity becomes our best friend. Again.

Curiosity in Action: Accidental Discoveries

Some of the most profound advances in human history began not with intent, but with exploration and wonder.

Infrared Light – William Herschel

In 1800, astronomer William Herschel wanted to measure the temperature of visible colors of sunlight using a prism and thermometers. Out of idle interest, he placed a thermometer just beyond the red end of the visible spectrum—and was shocked to find the temperature rose even higher. He had discovered infrared light, an entire spectrum previously invisible to the human eye.

Penicillin – Alexander Fleming

In 1928, Fleming returned from vacation to find a mold contaminating one of his petri dishes. Rather than toss it out, he became curious. Why weren’t the bacteria growing near the mold? The result was penicillin—ushering in the age of antibiotics.

Cosmic Microwave Background – Penzias and Wilson

In the 1960s, two Bell Labs scientists were trying to eliminate background noise from a radio antenna. They tried everything—even removing pigeon droppings—but the hum remained. They didn’t ignore it. They got curious. What they found was the afterglow of the Big Bang, confirming the dominant theory of the universe’s origin.

Velcro, X-rays, Microwave Ovens, Post-it Notes

Serendipity combined with curiosity led to entire industries. The common denominator? Someone noticed something odd—and decided to follow the thread instead of discarding it.