“Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination circles the world.” ~ Albert Einstein

Richard Feynman (1918-1988) was another eminent scientist who lived for imagination – in his case, a lifetime of curiosity piqued by the beauty and mysteries of the universe. In a wonderful collection of anecdotes from his life, Feynman gives a classic example of the fun in doing research. Some students in the cafeteria In Cornell University were tossing around a dinner plate like a frisbee. It was wobbling, and the red Cornell medallion on the plate seemed to be revolving faster than the wobble. Most of us will probably just shrug off at something as banal as this. But not Feynman, who set out to calculate the relation between the two rates of wobbling and found a remarkably simple two-to-one ratio. He then showed his work to a senior colleague, Hans Bethe who said: Feynman, that’s interesting, but what’s the importance of it? Why are you doing it? Feynman: There’s no importance, whatsoever. I’m just doing it for the fun of it. “… before I knew it … I was “playing – working really … It was effortless.” Feynman continued by saying that, “There was no important to what I was doing (at the time), but ultimately, there was. The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate.” Feynman’s sentiment is shared by none other than Albert Einstein who gave the header quote and also once said that “all research is imagination, (and) if you look deep into nature, you will understand everything better.”

We don’t have to be an Einstein or a Feynman to benefit from nurturing a curious mind. Strong curiosity is a sign of mental health, and it is something pleasurable. There is something magical about walking through a path in the woods looking at the shapes and color of the leaves, or finding a book or a song that so resonate with you that you want to do your own research to understand why the artist wrote that song or book. This enchantment is the kind of everyday curiosity that anybody can nurture; it will do our brains a lot of good [see below for a sample of scientific studies that back this claim).

Notes:

Gruber, M. J., & Ranganath, C. (2019). How curiosity enhances hippocampus-dependent memory: The prediction, appraisal, curiosity, and exploration (PACE) framework. Trends in cognitive sciences, 23(12), 1014-1025.

Proctor, C., Maltby, J., & Linley, P. A. (2011). Strengths use as a predictor of well-being and health-related quality of life. Journal of Happiness Studies, 12, 153-169.

Sakaki, M., Yagi, A., & Murayama, K. (2018). Curiosity in old age: A possible key to achieving adaptive aging. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 88, 106-116.