An exhilarating, genre-bending exploration of curiosity's powerful capacity to connect ideas and people. Curious about something? Google it. Look at it. Ask a question. But is curiosity simply information seeking? According to this exhilarating, genre-bending book, what's left out of the conventional understanding of curiosity are the wandering tracks, the weaving concepts, the knitting of ideas, and the thatching of knowledge systems--the networks, the relations between ideas and between people. Curiosity, say Perry Zurn and Dani Bassett, is a practice of connection: it connects ideas into networks of knowledge, and it connects knowers themselves, both to the knowledge they seek and to each other.
Zurn and Bassett--identical twins who write that their book "represents the thought of one mind and two bodies"--harness their respective expertise in the humanities and the sciences to get irrepressibly curious about curiosity. Traipsing across literatures of antiquity and medieval science, Victorian poetry and nature essays, as well as work by writers from a variety of marginalized communities, they trace a multitudinous curiosity. They identify three styles of curiosity--the busybody, who collects stories, creating loose knowledge networks; the hunter, who hunts down secrets or discoveries, creating tight networks; and the dancer, who takes leaps of creative imagination, creating loopy ones. Investigating what happens in a curious brain, they offer an accessible account of the network neuroscience of curiosity. And they sketch out a new kind of curiosity-centric and inclusive education that embraces
everyone's curiosity. The book performs the very curiosity that it describes, inviting readers to participate--to be curious with the book and not simply about it.
一場令人振奮、跨越類別的探索，揭示了好奇心強大連結思想與人際的能力。
對某件事感到好奇嗎？用 Google 搜尋一下。看看它。問一個問題。但好奇心是否僅僅是尋求資訊？根據這本令人振奮、跨越類別的書籍，傳統對好奇心的理解中缺少了漫遊的軌跡、交織的概念、思想的編織以及知識系統的覆蓋——即思想與思想之間、以及人與人之間的網絡和關係。Perry Zurn 和 Dani Bassett 說，好奇心是一種連結的實踐：它將思想連結成知識的網絡，並將知識的探索者彼此連結，既連結到他們所尋求的知識，也連結到彼此。
Zurn 和 Bassett——這對寫道他們的書「代表一個思想與兩個身體的思考」的同卵雙胞胎，利用他們在人文學科和科學領域的專業知識，對好奇心展開無法抑制的探索。他們穿梭於古代文學、中世紀科學、維多利亞詩歌和自然散文，以及來自各種邊緣社群作家的作品，追溯出多樣的好奇心。他們識別出三種好奇心的風格——忙碌者，收集故事，創造鬆散的知識網絡；獵人，追尋秘密或發現，創造緊密的網絡；以及舞者，進行創意想像的跳躍，創造迴圈的網絡。透過研究好奇的大腦中發生的事情，他們提供了一個易於理解的好奇心網絡神經科學的說明。他們勾勒出一種以好奇心為中心且包容的教育新模式，擁抱每個人的好奇心。這本書展現了它所描述的好奇心，邀請讀者參與其中——與書本一起好奇，而不僅僅是對它感到好奇。
Perry Zurn is Associate Professor of Philosophy at American University. He is the author of
Curiosity and Power: The Politics of Inquiry.
Dani S. Bassett is J. Peter Skirkanich Professor of Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania. They are the author of more than 300 scientific research articles in neuroscience, physics, network science, and complex systems science.
佩里·祖恩（Perry Zurn）是美國大學的哲學副教授。他是《好奇心與權力：探究的政治》（Curiosity and Power: The Politics of Inquiry）的作者。
丹尼·S·巴塞特（Dani S. Bassett）是賓夕法尼亞大學的J·彼得·斯基爾卡尼奇生物工程教授。他們在神經科學、物理學、網絡科學和複雜系統科學領域發表了超過300篇科學研究文章。
