What happens in your brain when you are curious

Curiosity isn’t just an emotion, it is an inborn human ability that creates several positive states in the brain. When something new and exciting triggers our curiosity, we get a dose of dopamine, which spurs our motivation. Combined with noradrenaline, it heightens our awareness and our focus on searching for information.

“Our curiosity is linked to our need for information. Dopamine also triggers the frontal lobe, which means that we become cognitively alert and can better take in, register, sort and process information when we are curious. It also allows us to use more parts of our brain, see things from new perspectives and think about things with more nuance", Eva Hamboldt explains. 

“Our working memory activates, which is crucial for storing information in short-term memory and in our brain’s various memory banks,” Hamboldt continues. 

From an evolutionary perspective, curiosity has helped us survive when we needed to find new food and new places to live. It has also provided motivation, causing us to forge ahead and want to understand and find things out.

“You could say that the dopamine rush makes us children again—we become playful and learn things easily,” Hamboldt says.

Because the dopamine pathways are closely linked to pathways that manage motor skills in the body, we are also triggered to physical action when we are curious; we become more efficient and involved, and also feel more empathy and sympathy. A number of studies show that curiosity enhances our social abilities and serves as a kind of social glue.

“It’s easier for us to bond with others if we are genuinely interested in how they see the world and what is important, and all the emotions that person has about a given situation,” Hamboldt says.

When you’re curious, you’re also better at reading other people’s verbal and nonverbal cues.

It becomes easier for us to appreciate how others perceive their interaction with us, we get better at processing subtle communication signals. This makes it easier for us to relax in interactions with other people. This makes curiosity a driver for relationship building.

It’s easier to open up to someone who is curious and asks follow-up questions. It creates a give-and-take and an intimacy, says Hamboldt

But this requires that we have also adopted an open attitude—otherwise our curiosity may be geared towards uncertainty or suspicion. That can lead us to become defensive, asking terse questions designed to avoid unpleasant surprises, trying to see if the person has a hidden agenda. This in turn leads to an excess of stress hormones like adrenaine, cortisol and noradrenaline.

“What’s good is that when we take an interest in others, they also find us more interesting and become curious about us as well. It’s a good idea for managers to cultivate your employees’ curiosity, and to be curious about them. That will make you seem like a more hands-on leader.” Hamboldt says.

“It’s a good idea for managers to cultivate your employees’ curiosity, and to be curious about them. That will make you seem like a more hands-on leader.”

Hamboldt says we need to build up our ability to choose curiosity, because our brains are sensitive to potential threats and automatically choose to focus on problems and negative aspects.

“We need to practice actively choosing joy and curiosity in different situations and relationships,” she says.

“Threats and danger trigger powerful processes in the brain’s systems, but if we have a strong ‘curiosity muscle,’ it can counterbalance them. We can get curious about why it happened and how it felt. We can seek out and explore what happened in the relationship and that way we aren’t as threatened by it.”

When you stop and think, “why is it this way?” it reduces your stress levels, because it slows the production of stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline and starts up the production of feelgood hormones instead. But we have to work to keep our curiosity alive.