A curious mind has obvious benefits. So why are warnings about its dangers so widespread?
There were other amusements in [the] camp too. As children, we were very curious to know whether the barbed wire of the electric fence was really electrified. The question gave us no rest. We would approach the fence … and compete among ourselves over who would dare to touch the barbed wire and stay alive.” So writes Otto Dov Kulka in his memoir of Auschwitz, Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death. The fear that he and other children felt of the intermittently electrified fence was great, he explains, but it was a small, conquerable fear in comparison to their overwhelming fear of the “immutable law” presented by the crematorium. Their curiosity was a way for them to try to overcome the lesser of the two fears.
The instance is extreme but it does not distort a basic truth: curiosity originates in the drive to keep living. Curiosity is typically adaptive because, while it can be risky, it also brings the possibility of greater understanding and control. And it can be unrelenting. Later in the memoir, Kulka describes a moment when, by accident, he got snared on the electrified wire. Recalling his childish mind, in which he believed himself dead, Kulka says he felt “the boundless curiosity a human being possesses from the moment he first becomes aware of his mortality; curiosity that transcends death”.
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