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The recent trend in all things Agile in business also brings with it an increase in importance of curiosity as a behaviour and as a personality trait. I reported on new research out that had discovered a brain network for curiosity a few weeks ago. A physical network suggests a biological predisposition towards curiosity — this has also been my criticism of many agile processes who expect the workforce to become spontaneously curious overnight — they won’t.
This is also reinforced by some more recent research recently published that looks at curious babies. Yup, you can measure curiosity in babies by how much they are attracted to novel stimuli — in babies that can’t talk or walk you can measure their gaze, how long they look at things. In this particular research they used “magic” to measure this.
The question these researchers wanted to know was do these curious babies keep this curious behaviour as they age and so measured this at 11 months, 6 months later, and at three-years old. And the answer is yes, curious babies become curious toddlers.
“Babies are affected by these magical events in different ways, and these ways appear to be stable across a six-month period during infancy.” — Jasmin Perez
