"Hmmm, very interesting . . ."

Some years ago I had a colleague who was a trove of American political trivia. He once asked me where I was from, and when I named my hometown in New Jersey, he proceeded to rattle off my home county’s population, ethnic makeup, economic base, recent election history, and the names and party affiliations of the region’s current power brokers. He knew way more than I knew about my own stamping ground.

That was the point. He was showing off. But even so it was dizzying how much detail he had stored in his head, about pretty much any county in the country. How did he do it? I mean, you couldn’t pay someone to memorize that volume of trivia. Well, the short answer is that what I’m calling trivia was anything but trivial to him. To the contrary, every red, blue and purple detail of the American political landscape was important, dynamic, and endlessly interesting to him.

But what does that mean exactly, that it was interesting to him? Is interest a universal emotion like fear or pride or bemusement? How does one person come to be fascinated by politics while others are equally entranced by baseball statistics or the early poems of Lord Byron? And if it’s possible to find such esoterica absorbing, why not trigonometry and irregular verbs? Can interest be nurtured and channeled in the classroom?

Scientists have shown surprisingly little interest in interest, given its obvious and fundamental connection to learning and education. That’s starting to change. In the past few years a handful of psychologists have started exploring interest in the laboratory, and they are starting to piece together a theory about this curious emotion.

One of the most striking features of interest is that it’s all over the map: One person’s passion for butterflies is another’s huge yawn, according to psychologist Paul Silvia, who has been exploring interest in his lab at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Interest also comes and goes; a book you found mesmerizing just a few years ago might leave you bored to tears if you tried to reread it today. Silvia has been trying to dissect this unpredictable mental state.

Much of his work involves exposing people to things in the real world that may or may not be interesting: contemporary poetry, abstract and classical artwork, and so forth. In one experiment, for example, he had people read an abstract poem, but some were given a small hint about the poem’s meaning while the others were left on their own. When asked later to rate the poem, those who had been given the hint found the work much more interesting. In a similar experiment, students who had studied a little about art history found a modern art gallery much more engaging than did students with no exposure to art.

Silvia thinks he knows what’s going on in these simple experiments. All of the people in these studies are appraising their experience, trying to make sense of it; that’s basic human nature, we make such appraisals all the time. But as he describes in the February issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science, they are sizing up the same experience very differently depending on the knowledge they bring to the event. All of them probably find the poem or artwork to be fresh, complex, mysterious—so they are at least curious enough to look more. That’s the first requirement for interest. But only some find the experience also to be comprehensible. That is, they have just enough knowledge that they believe they can “cope” intellectually with this complex and unexpected event; it’s not totally beyond their ken. The combination of complexity and comprehensibility adds up to genuine interest, and genuine interest cannot exist without both.

At its best, genuine interest becomes fascination becomes absorption becomes enrapture. Psychologists call such intensity "being in the flow,” a state of mind so focused that not even time can intrude on the experience. This sounds awfully like bliss to me, but Silvia is careful to distinguish even intense interest from happiness. Interest motivates people to explore, to seek out novelty, where happiness serves to firm up existing attachments—whether to a favorite restaurant or a favorite person.

Interest and happiness also have different sources, as Silvia showed in another experiment. He had people look at a variety of paintings, including serene landscapes by Claude Monet and the
rather disturbing images of Francis Bacon. The subjects rated both their interest in the paintings and their enjoyment, and then Silvia surveyed the range of their emotional reactions to the different works. The paintings that made people happy were simple, positive and calm. But they were consistently more intrigued by the works that they perceived as complicated, strange and upsetting. Interest, in short, requires emotional and mental challenge.

So how do we stay challenged once we have begun to master a topic? Why not just move on to something else and learn a little bit about a lot of things? Well, it appears that interest in self-propelling. Think of it this way: My former colleague has the entire American political landscape burned into his neurons, so he can now perceive subtleties and nuances and contrasts that are completely lost on the rest of us. So intellectual challenge motivates people to become experts, and expertise in turn allows them to stay interested in every new bit of knowledge, even if it’s just a meaningless election in some political backwater somewhere.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit “We’re Only Human . . .” at www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman.

Got An Original Idea? Not Likely.

In the 2006 movie The Devil Wears Prada, Meryl Streep plays Miranda Priestly, the workaholic editor of a fashion magazine called Runway, and Anne Hathaway plays her deliberately unfashionable assistant Andy. Miranda senses Andy’s disdain for her world of designer skirts and belts and shoes, and at one point she icily confronts her assistant for her arrogance: “You see that droopy sweater you’re wearing?” she asks. “That blue was on a dress Cameron Diaz wore on the cover of Runway—shredded chiffon by James Holt. The same blue quickly appeared in eight other designers’ collections and eventually made its way to the secondary designers, the department store labels, and then to some lovely Gap Outlet, where you no doubt found it. That color is worth millions of dollars and many jobs.”

Miranda is an intuitive social psychologist. The fact is that whether you favor droopy sweaters or Manolo Blahnik shoes, very few people are original thinkers when it comes to what they wear. There are a few true innovators, of course, but unless you spin and dye the fabric and design your own wardrobe, you are cribbing from someone else’s mind. And what’s true of sweaters is also true of less trivial ideas, which move through the ether in unpredictable ways. If you think you coined a clever phrase or “discovered” a new talent, you almost certainly did not.

That’s because we don’t really operate as free agents in the world. We are all entangled in complex patterns of collective behavior, many spontaneously organized and most entirely outside our understanding or awareness. Psychologists are very interested in these circles of ideas, how they grow and how people navigate them. Is there an ideal social arrangement for creating and sharing ideas, for mixing innovation and imitation? Are there perils in “borrowing” from others’ minds, or in being too much of a rogue explorer?

A team of psychologists at Indiana University has been exploring these questions in the laboratory, and they’re gaining some insights into the collective mind. Robert Goldstone and his colleagues created a virtual environment, an Internet-based “world” in which groups of people—from 20 to about 200-- simultaneously “forage” for ideas. They use the word “forage” to make the point that ideas are really just abstract resources, food for the brain. As we solve life’s various problems, we observe others’ ideas in action, invent a few of our own, trade off ours against theirs—and succeed or fail. The psychologists have been studying these virtual successes and failures to see what lessons they can draw.

Here’s an example of how the experiment works. Participants, interconnected via the Internet, were asked to guess numbers from zero to 100, and they received feedback in the form of points, depending on whether their guesses were more or less correct. Think of this as the first day on the job in a big corporation where you know none of the cultural rules; all you can do is guess and see if you guessed right. But while you’re guessing and getting feedback, you’re also watching all your colleagues to see what choices they make and how well they do. If they do better than you, maybe imitation makes more sense than guessing? Or maybe you’ll try another guess?

And so forth. Trial and error, borrowing, compromise—until you figure it out. Meanwhile, all the other participants are doing the same thing, including watching you. The scientists ran this experiment several different ways, each approximating a different kind of real-life social group. For example, in “local” networks, participants were connected only to a few immediate neighbors, while in global networks everyone was connected to everyone in a rich web. In “small world” networks, participants were connected locally but also had a few long distance connections, so they might pick up an idea or two from, say, a distant relative.

The findings, reported in the February issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science, were intriguing. When the problems were easy, the global networks did best. This makes sense because such richly connected groups can spread information rapidly, and basically speed is all that’s needed to spread a simple notion efficiently. But as the problems became trickier, the small-world networks tended to perform better. In other words, the truism that more information is always better proved untrue when life got a little messy. And as the problems became even more complex, the small local networks proved most clever.

No one of us can navigate this complicated world by ourselves. It’s too arduous and time-consuming, like designing all your own clothes instead of trusting the Gap. But there is also a hazard in connectivity. If everyone ends up knowing exactly the same thing, you have a world of like-minded people, and this homogenous group ends up acting like a single explorer rather than a federation of ideas. People pile on to the well-known “bandwagon,” even if it’s a really bad idea. It happens in politics, in musical taste and, yes, in the world of fashion. How else can you explain the popularity of crocs?

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit “We’re Only Human . . .” at www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman.