Curiosity, Cognition & Creativity with Neuroscientist DR. JACQUELINE GOTTLIEB

EDUCATION - The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast

What ignites curiosity in humans? How does our brain select things we need to know and ignore what isn’t essential? How does our perception shape what we know about the world?

Dr. Jacqueline Gottlieb is a Professor of Neuroscience and Principal Investigator at Columbia University’s Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute. Dr. Gottlieb studies the mechanisms that underlie the brain's higher cognitive functions, including decision making, memory, and attention. Her interest is in how the brain gathers the evidence it needs—and ignores what it doesn’t—during everyday tasks and during special states such as curiosity.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

Tell us about your journey. What drew you to neuroscience? As you learned more about the complexities of the human mind and how thoughts shape our actions, what led you to focus on the neural mechanisms of attention and curiosity?

JACQUELINE GOTTLIEB

I came to neuroscience from a humanistic perspective. I was very interested to find out who we are. What do we know? What do we think we know? Why do we think we know certain things? How do we see things? How do we perceive them?

Then I discovered that I was amazed by the precise way that cognitive neuroscience can measure these elusive mental functions, such as attention or memory. You know, it's something that happens in our heads, and it's very fleeting, yet there are experimental methods to really pinpoint them. And slowly I zeroed in on eye movements as this incredible marker of internal cognition. So, if you want to know what somebody is interested in or thinking about or what information they're processing? Eye movements are by no means a perfect marker. It's a very noisy marker, but it's one of the closest ones we have as an index. So why do eye movements tell us about what we think and what we find interesting? Ultimately, the question behind curiosity is what things we find interesting in our environment. The way I think about eye movements is that they really are trained in some largely subconscious process.

I liken eye movements to how we learn to control our skeletal movements. So, how do you learn? How do you stand up right now? How do you sit? How does your body maintain its posture? It's an enormously complicated process. The tens of muscles are controlled in very precise balance, but you're entirely unaware of this. So–and I think that we see similar things–when people do tasks like if you prepare tea or if when you drive, people have very, very consistent patterns of eye movements that are very exquisitely coordinated with what they do with their body. Very reproducible, very consistent. You can also see that they are learned.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

One thing that I really loved hearing from you is that curiosity is the most important thing about our behavior and our brain function. And I love hearing that because sometimes I feel my mind is like a butterfly, too curious about everything, and there's just so much to learn and not enough time. So it's nice to hear that curiosity is valorized, although as you identify, it may sometimes seem like general curiosity does not have a direct purpose. Why do you think this is, and why do you feel curiosity has been often neglected by neuroscience?

GOTTLIEB

That's a very interesting question, and I think there are good reasons for it. As scientists, we like to be reductionists, right? Brain and behavior are hugely complicated questions, and so we simplify them to study them in the lab. Our field has pursued two major traditions: one is the Cognitivist tradition, so people like William James and many others are really fascinated by mental operations. Things like attention, memory, mental imagery, or language. People study the capacities. What is it that we can do? What are the limits? How many items can we memorize? How, for how long? And so on and so forth.

The other half of our field studies decision-making and motivated behavior. That is, what do we like? What do we want? How hard are we willing to work for something we want? And those two fields have really split. So the, so the decision making, half of our field was dominated by behaviorism, founded by B. F. Skinner, and their feeling was, well, all this mental stuff is a bit elusive, and I don't know how to measure it, and it feels like magic and hocus pocus.

But here's what I can do. I can take a rat and put it in a simple cage, and I can make the rat very hungry and give it a lever that delivers food and another that delivers nothing. With this, I will tell you precisely how many times the rat will press the food lever as a function of time. It's just a stimulus-response agent, and it's all about motivation and rewards. That field has gotten very far and has described a number of phenomena, but what happens is that these traditions have continued each one on its track. They have become separate from each other. We have a big social divide among the researchers who pursue these questions. We're now at a point where each field is developed enough that there is nowhere else to go unless you combine the two. Curiosity is precisely the intersection of those things. It has to do with the desire for information.

I need to know how I process information, what it is, and whether I want it. That's precisely curiosity. The time has come to unify these, and it's a huge undertaking because we're talking on each side of the cognitivist and behaviorist traditions. You have hundreds of scientists working on each side; they each have their ideas, and they each have been educated in their traditions. And linking them is going to take several decades, I think, to have a good integration. It's just starting.

This truly has been an explosion of research. When I started thinking about this question, I could barely find anybody who was interested in it. We didn't even know how to begin to ask the question. How do you even formulate that? That is precisely the gap between those two fields because we need to understand how we process information, understand the task, and cognitively represent the situation. Then, we need to understand what you are motivated to do about that situation, in this case, with your eyes.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

So what have you learned? I know that you've mainly studied humans and non-human primates, but what have you learned then from general animal communication?

GOTTLIEB

The way I tend to think about eye movements in general is in terms of a question and answer. I think about the act of making an eye movement like a question that you pose to the world, and you answer that question for yourself by looking at someone.

For example, when you look at a weather forecast, you have partial reliability of information. And then, you combine how uncertain you were to begin with the new information and weigh them by the reliability. If you think the reliability of your source is low, then you're not going to listen to it that much. But if you think the reliability is high, you should listen to it more. And then you update your beliefs. The problem is that knowing these probabilities while making decisions is extremely difficult. What the probabilities are that we're talking about and what our questions are are extremely difficult. And mathematical theory doesn't tell you that. So, to really understand the questions that an individual has at a moment in time, you have to understand the entire individual, what they know, and what they care about. And I wanted to say that because you talked about social communication, I think that eye movements, in particular, really have two functions. One is answering our questions, like I said, gathering visual information, but the other question is in social signaling. In a social context, eye movements can signal your intentions and, in a sense, act on other social beings.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

I want to go back to this element of focus and attention. We're talking about AI, and it's been on a lot of our mindset relation to focus when we're bombarded by so much information, devices, distractions, and sleeplessness. It's affecting our ability to do our jobs, be reflective, and be present in the moment. How do you feel we can protect ourselves and our children from the distractions of having their brains rewired by their devices, apps, and technology? Is our brain equipped to deal with our modern world? How do we better fortify it for this kind of onslaught, which wasn't around even ten years ago?

GOTTLIEB

Those are very important questions. I think that our brain is equipped to deal with the onslaught because we have an onslaught of information the moment we open our eyes. We evolved to deal with an onslaught of information, and we are masters at focusing and ignoring vast amounts of information. Now, AI in this digital age is a relatively new stream of information, which is man-made, so we make it more salient. So, yes, it's harder to ignore it, but people can learn to ignore it, and indeed, it's a learning process. I think it will also require learning how to teach our children. I mean, we're raising generations of kids who will take AI and the digital world as a given. To them, it will be no different than a chair and a table were to us. So they will learn to not be so distracted by chairs and tables.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

You're in New York City, so what do you feel about the effects of urbanization on people living in close proximity to cities with its added distractions, and how that may affect their curiosity, attention, imagination, memory, and focus?

GOTTLIEB

People adapt; our brains are very hierarchically organized. At the highest level of the hierarchy are our wants and values. What do I need? We all need to eat, have social contact, and be safe. That's the highest level of the hierarchy. Then you have your values, right? What are your social values and moral values? And then you have your long-term knowledge. What do you know about the world? That determines how you interpret everything around you. So, what do you know about the world? What more do you want to know? What are your competencies? What do you know how to do? So those levels really control what information you're seeking at the moment by moment.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

You've spoken about the misperception that many people have about scientists. In contrast with artists, people feel that scientists are very rigid people who are not very creative, and in truth, creativity is crucial, as crucial in science as it is in art. So, how do you personally tap into your creativity and curiosity to imagine while still adhering to the rules of science?

GOTTLIEB

This is my favorite thing about science–that you can be creative. I absolutely think that science has to be just as a creative art. It's just that we have different ways of generating and answering questions.

If you ask somebody, what is curiosity? The answer you'll probably get most frequently would be the desire to know. But I think that a much better answer is the desire to ask questions. And these are very different. If you've just mapped out your living room, you've got to say, okay, now I need something new. I need some uncertainty. I need to go outside, even though it might be scary. I need to expose myself to that uncertainty in order to learn. And then once you learn, once you've gone out to your yard and you've learned that yard, you say, okay, well, now I know my backyard. Now, I need to expose myself to uncertainty again to learn something new. So, curiosity is the desire to ask the question in order to learn.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

How much do you feel that memory influences our imagination? I know you also study memory, and I'm interested in intergenerational trauma and how this affects our decision-making processes. I ask because I just came out of a conversation with a journalist and foreign correspondent for the New York Times, Nicholas Kristof. He's written about 170 countries, and he was telling me about having mild PTSD from all the things he's witnessed. So, how do you feel that being born in Israel and its collective memory has influenced your curiosity, memory, and the way you view the world?

GOTTLIEB

I mentioned the cognitivists and behaviorists–all the neuroscientists–who think of information as being given to you bottom up. Again, as if signals come from the outside. But then you realize that this is impossible, that the outside world is way too infinite. Instead, what happens is your brain sort of builds yourself: you build through all your life experiences, episodic and semantic memories: that is your knowledge bank, and that is what generates your curiosities.

You asked how growing up in Israel influenced where I am. I think that the way it influenced where I am– it's interesting– it's being in between. My dad was Jewish and my mother was a Christian, an Orthodox Romanian. So I was, in that sense, born confused. I never belonged to any group. I always felt like I was in between two camps, between two significant traditions. I was born in Romania, and I was educated in a Romanian, European way, more Christian than Jewish. Then we moved to Israel, and that was a big culture shock. I was exposed to more Judaism and the Israeli reality, which was very different from where I grew up. I think that's how it shaped me. I'm not a tribal person, for better or for worse.

One of the most fundamental values I learned from my dad is tolerance and open-mindedness. You have to take every person at face value. This is what I think has the most profound influence on me. I'm always open-minded, and I always want to look at both sides. And this is why I think I sensed this social divide coming to psychology and neuroscience. I noticed that many of my colleagues were perfectly happy to stay in their lane, stay in their tribe, and as long as their tribe agrees, you're happy, and you never need to get outside of that. But I'm someone who needs to get outside the tribe. I mean, I map out the borders of my tribe and the way I was taught to think, but then I'm like, wait a second, there's a lot more out there. I need to go out. And I don't want to see competition. I have a tendency to bring things together. That's funny. I never quite thought about this in the context of my life, but I guess that's what shaped the way that I think the most.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

What role do you believe that neuroscience can play in understanding and motivating behavioral change for a sustainable future?

GOTTLIEB

One of the most important things that neuroscientists can propose is people's reactions to uncertainty. Information is actually all about uncertainty. Some people are more willing to embrace uncertainty, especially if they can learn from it. Other people would do anything to protect themselves from uncertainty, so this is part of the echo chamber phenomenon.

It's like saying that maybe what this other person is saying has a grain of truth to it, but it's just so hard for me to think about it that I'd rather ignore it. I'd rather stay in my safe space. So, people differ. There are emotional and cognitive reactions, and I think that this is where our thinking and our emotions are very closely intertwined in how we deal with uncertainty.

So we've all experienced this sense of awe at the vastness of things in nature, and I think that is a beautiful sense. You're in awe at the vastness things that go beyond your capabilities, also capabilities of understanding and capabilities of knowledge. So I look at it as kind of a form of extreme uncertainty that is not threatening. We can relax. It's pleasurable and inspiring. So, maybe if we can remember the sense of awe that we have with certain things, we can help ourselves when, when we have uncertainties (climate change) that are threatening, maybe that's something that we can use to calm us down. About dealing with climate change, people do adjust, and I think we should enable, so far as policy comes about, a lot of policy has to be geared towards allowing people to adapt. Let's say you think that sea level will rise in a particular area. Well, you can build a bigger dam, right? Or, you can build bigger walls. So, the more resources people have, the more efficient they will be in adapting to whatever comes their way.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

What has been important to you on this journey in pursuit of knowledge and in your creative exploration of the sciences? As you reflect on education, the future, and those teachers who inspired you and made you believe in yourself, what would you like young people to know, preserve, and remember?

GOTTLIEB

I would exhort young people to keep an open mind. One thing that I try to teach my students is, for example, when you read a paper or hear somebody talk about their experiment, try to think about what is not there. Try to bring yourself in, pay a lot of attention, all your resources consumed by understanding what the person says, but see if you can take a mental step back and look at what they say from a slightly different perspective. Look for the contradictions. And don't be afraid of the contradictions because those are the fertile ground for making progress. Right? So, look for the contradictions. Contradictions are good for scientists. If you find them, the more glaring they are, the more progress you can make by trying to resolve them.

Photo credit: John Abbott

This interview was conducted by Mia Funk and Daniela Cordovez Flores with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interview Producer and Associate Text Editor on this episode was Daniela Cordovez Flores. The Creative Process is produced by Mia Funk. Additional production support by Katie Foster.

Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast (Conversations about Climate Change & Environmental Solutions).
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