Welcome to Joy Lab!: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Joy Lab podcast, where we help you uncover and foster your most joyful self. Your hosts, Dr. Henry Emmons and Dr. Aimee Prasek, bring you the ideal mix of soulful and scientifically sound tools to spark your joy, even when it feels dark. When you're ready to experiment with more joy, combine this podcast with the full Joy Lab program over at JoyLab.coach
Henry: Hello, I'm Henry Emmons and welcome back to Joy Lab.
Aimee Prasek: And I am Aimee Prasek. So this month we have been exploring our Element of Curiosity, and next month, very soon we will get into our Element of Awe. And I love how these Elements work together. Curiosity is inherent in awe, so you'll get like little hints of awe throughout today's episode, and then next month you'll get lots of it.
Aimee Prasek: But today I wanna get into something a little bit more specific about an [00:01:00] aspect of curiosity that has to do with our motivations. And to start, I want to anchor us with some wisdom from Albert Einstein. This comes from one of Einstein's essays, The World As I See It. Here it is.
Aimee Prasek: " The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel is as good as dead and their eyes are dimmed."
Aimee Prasek: So it's kind of a big statement, right? The ability to approach and hold mystery, curiosity and awe. That without those things, Einstein says that we are as good as dead, and I think he's right. So I don't think he was being too big with that statement. [00:02:00] But I do think perhaps that by dead, he mostly means depressed, just going through the motions, disconnected, cut off from who we are and the world around us.
Aimee Prasek: The research absolutely supports this. Lower levels of curiosity are associated with higher levels of depression and practicing awe can reduce depressive symptoms and improve wellbeing. But even more literally, we are wired for curiosity and awe, like as survival tools. So to adapt and change with our environment, we need curiosity. To build bonds that promote our survival,
Aimee Prasek: we need curiosity and awe. So we need those elements to do those things. Henry, do you have more to add here, maybe from that Einstein quote or these elements?
Henry: Yeah. You know, the, the part of a quote that jumped out at me is what comes after he says [00:03:00] that he's as good as dead. He goes on to say, and their eyes are dimmed. And that line reminds me of a book that really had a big impact on me when I was young, even though at that age and even still, I barely understand what it meant.
Henry: When I was in my early twenties during medical school, I used to go on retreats periodically at a Trappist monastery in Iowa of all places. I wasn't Catholic, but I was just really drawn to the contemplative lifestyle. We talked about this in a recent episode, Aimee and it was really fun to make that connection that, that both of us in our youth, we were kind of taken with the idea of going and living in a
Aimee Prasek: Wild. Yeah.
Henry: It's kind of wild.
Aimee Prasek: Yeah.
Henry: But [00:04:00] anyway, they had a book in their library that just caught my eye, was called The Cloud of Unknowing. The Cloud of Unknowing. Which was written way back in the 14th century. I think it's considered a spiritual classic, but I don't believe it's known who actually wrote it. So, as I recall, through the mist of 40 years, the cloud is kind of like Einstein's description, that the eyes are dimmed. And it's, it's as if there is a veil between us and the infinite, the great mystery, and this veil keeps us from seeing what's true at a deeper level, what's real. And the gist of the book, as I recall, is that we cannot see through this veil with our rational minds. We can only [00:05:00] see through it by unknowing. By not thinking too much, but just being open to presence. The great presence, if you will. And I think that's what's so amazing about Einstein's quote, you know, because he is the very symbol of a strong scientific mind, and yet here he is talking about the mysterious as the most beautiful experience we can have.
Henry: Yeah, The Cloud of Unknowing. I'm adding that to my book list. Tell me what it means.
Aimee Prasek: Oh God. Yeah. Well, just maybe from your description here, like, I just love being reminded too that stepping back from so many of our assumptions and expectations is not only one of the most courageous things I [00:06:00] think we can do on a daily basis, but that it opens us up to
Aimee Prasek: well this, this space of knowing that we can't describe that like that isn't necessarily in the realm of logic or what we can research and sort of grab onto with our, our hands or teeth. There's something bigger about it and I just, that feels good when we're sort of bombarded by information constantly.
Aimee Prasek: We feel like we have to like take it all in all the time and have a opinion about every piece of it. And that's not to this, I mean, God, the critical thinking Einstein was a critical thinker, right? These things can happen together. That feels really good.
Henry: Yeah.
Aimee Prasek: I love that. So I think also our motivations can actually help us here, like checking in with them.
Aimee Prasek: Um, our motivations for curiosity [00:07:00] can help us step into that, that space of unknowning. That takes a lot of courage. So checking in with our motivations, understanding, why are we curious, really, what is fueling our curiosity? And in the research, this is sometimes called motivations for information seeking behavior.
Aimee Prasek: So what are we motivated by? And a lot of the research here is a little bit more sort of evolutionary. So they're looking at why are we curious, the drivers of curiosity that may have evolved to support our survival. But I think it's really important for us to consider, when it comes to our mental health, what is driving our curiosity and to realize that we have a say here.
Aimee Prasek: If we don't think the motivation is helpful, then we can shift it. And I think this can be really simple to kind of check in on this. We can determine if our curiosity is motivated by curiosity to learn or a [00:08:00] curiosity to confirm.
Henry: Mm.
Aimee Prasek: It's kind of a you know, a fixed versus open mindset. So I think this is important because it is super easy to approach curiosity with the motivation of confirmation. We can go through some of the motions of curiosity, researching on the internet, asking a few people in our circle, maybe with the motivation of confirming something we already believe. And that motivation for curiosity, I think that's what Einstein would say, dims our eyes.
Aimee Prasek: We can come away saying, oh, I did my research, but we really didn't do it with curiosity. We did it with the end already settled, and we just kind of like put some mush in the middle to make ourselves feel better. I'm not coming at folks with this. I lean towards this. I'm very good at it. I can give you a lot of mush for [00:09:00] something that I've already believed.
Aimee Prasek: It's, I, I mean it's, it's part of what we talked about with uncertainty. So sometimes when we feel that uncertainty, and maybe we're a little low on the tolerance at a given point, it can feel really good to just kind of stuff some mush in there. So, you know, we, we might find ourselves being super externally curious, just like a lot of frenetic outward activity that feels like curiosity. But again, just actually working to confirm an original belief that we've already had, to make something just kind of feel a little bit better if it's felt uncomfortable. which I think is a tangible method of worrying, like it's like worrying with receipts, with a paper trail if you just do some sort of frenetic internet research and such.
Aimee Prasek: So go back to the worrying episode. I'll link it in the show notes. It can kind of trick ourselves into thinking that type of worrying or curiosity might be beneficial. So I [00:10:00] have to check myself with this, and I think this is where awe can come in, in a big way. We can back off of some of our desire for getting certainty, or, you know, trying to find an answer, a concrete answer, and we can instead let awe fuel some of that curiosity.
Aimee Prasek: And so just so that we have a handle here, I'm gonna describe awe, define it, awe is this feeling, the experience that we have when we might witness something that kind of feels bigger than ourselves and something that might feel mysterious or it might even challenge our usual understanding of the world.
Aimee Prasek: So that kind of motivation, that kind of awe can really open up our curiosity in a way that can shift us out of confirmation bias, and then it can help us get through some of the discomfort of uncertainty as well [00:11:00] when we're kind of tapped into that sense of awe, and then it actually supports our growth and our wellbeing.
Henry: Hmm, I, I'm intrigued by, by something you said earlier this notion that we can somehow satisfy our curiosity by researching on the internet.
Aimee Prasek: I don't know if I said that. I've tried that. I mean, sometimes... it's a slippery slope.
Henry: Well, since we're talking about motivation,
Aimee Prasek: Yeah.
Henry: think it's fair to bring in the topic of the brain's motivation system of which dopamine is a big part.
Aimee Prasek: Oh, you're gonna tell us more about researching on the internet and how that hap, how that works in our brain, Henry, I'm guessing.
Henry: Think, I don't think I really need to, 'cause I think we know.
Aimee Prasek: What WebMD does to us.
Henry: Oh well, just what clickbait does to us.
Aimee Prasek: Oh, there you go. Yeah, yeah. Let's hear it.
Henry: The, [00:12:00] the two most addicting things I can think of, aside from hard drugs are things that impact dopamine immediately. And one of those is nicotine. I think the other one is clicking on and, and really it is kind of about that confirmation, bias
Aimee Prasek: Absolutely.
Henry: You know, the, it's that need to get, and, and also it's just quick gratification. You know, it's, it's wanting to know immediately.
Henry: And I think the people who write these articles with such catchy titles absolutely know this. And so you know, we are trained, we have trained ourselves, and we've been entrained by others to, to kinda need that next hit.
Henry: And we get it every time we do this. It seems like it's something new and fresh, but it's really not.
Aimee Prasek: Yeah.
Henry: I do wonder what this is doing to our curiosity. I, I think it diminishes it.
Aimee Prasek: Hmm.
Henry: You know, I'm, [00:13:00] I'm thinking about every Saturday morning, I, I sit with a group of friends over coffee there's, there can be up to 10 or 12 of us there.
Henry: And we have this, these wide ranging, often kind of heady discussions and, then invariably we come up against a question that no one actually knows the answer to. Some of us might attempt to give an answer or think that we know.
Aimee Prasek: Yeah.
Henry: But after a few of these feeble attempts, invariably someone will say something like, if only there is a way to find out, then laughs and somebody pulls out their phone or iPad and looks it up. It's just classic.
Aimee Prasek: Yeah.
Henry: You know, there, there are a couple things about curiosity that I think this conversation is getting at that [00:14:00] I just really believe are important. One of them has to do with why curiosity is so good for the brain, and I believe that that requires just a little bit of discomfort, know, a genuine effort to resolve whatever it is that you're curious about. Whatever has really got you going. That's very motivating that, I mean, part of it is you're motivated because it bothers you or you're, you're somehow compelled by, not knowing. But, but also there is something almost magical that happens in the brain once you do resolve it, which is so good for making those neural connections and helping these new brain cells to grow.
Henry: I mean, it's absolutely, this is the sort of the miracle grow moment for the brain. We create a [00:15:00] little bit of distress and then through some hard won effort, we resolve it, we find an answer, we solve the puzzle, whatever it is, and it is so gratifying. It's, and that gratification means that there's a, it's a big reward experience.
Henry: That's what gives us a deeper, more lasting motivation, I think. And I do think it's that motivation to learn that you talked about, not just to confirm or, or try to get a quick and and easy answer. But the other thing I wanted to say about curiosity, it goes back to that Einstein quote that you started with. It seems to me that there is a common theme in many of the wisdom traditions that says something to the effect of, of most of us human beings, basically being asleep. You know, that we're, we're basically living in a dream world [00:16:00] of our own creation. And the goal then of a spiritual path is, is really to wake up from that dream. To see through the mist or the cloud of unknowing, so to speak. And when we do that, what do we see? Well, it's a mystery, isn't it? Einstein believed that the ultimate mystery was not meant to be understood intellectually. And personally i'm okay with that. You know, we can know something without intellectually understanding it,
Aimee Prasek: Yeah.
Henry: And to me that's the essence of deep curiosity and and genuine awe. I think that's where they meet.
Aimee Prasek: Your story about coffee, made me think as well, and, and just on this note too with, with this, [00:17:00] how, how curiosity isn't meant to bring us to a concrete answer, but our phones do. We have a, in some of my circles, we have a rule that if you can't remember it, nobody can look it up.
Aimee Prasek: And
Henry: I'm gonna try that.
Henry: It
Aimee Prasek: is very uncomfortable at first. You know, like a song. This happened recently. We could not remember a, a name of a song or something and inevitably somebody pulls out the phone, we're like, Nope, nope, nope. We're gonna work on this. And so as a group we kind of go through this process of curiosity.
Aimee Prasek: Ultimately, we came to a story when these are friends from long ago in middle school where one of our friends used to pretend to be Alanis Morissette. It was this whole big thing and she'd sing Jagged Little Pill, and we were like obsessed with it. We were just cracking up together, just [00:18:00] laughing, imagining, you know, now her singing Alanis Morissette and then she broke into song.
Aimee Prasek: It's like this whole thing. It was so beautiful and it was awe like we were together, we were building connection and we were in joy together. We were in laughter. It was so beautiful. We never figured out the name of that song that we started with, but by that point we had created sort of this, this journey together that was really beautiful.
Aimee Prasek: And I think just kind of what you described there with, the, the understanding that there might not be a concrete answer and maybe that's the point. That feels really good when you can explore it with people too, I think. So this is such a fun practice.
Aimee Prasek: Maybe try it with your friends to step into a little bit of discomfort as a group, and then get curious together and see kind of where that takes you.
Henry: I love that.
Aimee Prasek: She's gonna kill me. I'm not gonna say her name. She's gonna kill me if I say her name. [00:19:00] So nobody's gonna bother her to sing Alanis Morissette.So, yeah, we'll be moving into awe next month for our podcast and our program. So join us at the program if you're not already. Stay tuned with us here at the podcast as well as we explore Awe, these connections, this Element of Joy that I think just feels really good and that we can experience every day, just like curiosity.
Aimee Prasek: So I wanna close us with more Einstein. Here it is. the important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.
Aimee Prasek: One cannot help but be in awe when they contemplate the mysteries of eternity of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day, never lose a holy curiosity."
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