The information gained when practicing curiosity promotes well-being over extended timescales. The open-ended and internally driven nature of curiosity, however, makes characterizing the diverse styles of information seeking that accompany it a daunting endeavor. A recently developed historicophilosophical taxonomy of curious practice distinguishes between the collection of disparate, loosely connected pieces of information and the seeking of related, tightly connected pieces of information. With this taxonomy, we use a novel knowledge network building framework of curiosity to capture styles of curious information seeking in 149 participants as they explore Wikipedia for over 5 hours spanning 21 days. We create knowledge networks in which nodes consist of distinct concepts (unique Wikipedia pages) and edges represent the similarity between the content of Wikipedia pages. We quantify the tightness of each participants' knowledge networks using graph theoretical indices and use a generative model of network growth to explore mechanisms underlying the observed information seeking. We find that participants create knowledge networks with small-world and modular structure. Deprivation sensitivity, the tendency to seek information that eliminates knowledge gaps, is associated with the creation of relatively tight networks and a relatively greater tendency to return to previously-visited concepts. We further show that there is substantial within-person variability in knowledge network building over time and that building looser networks than usual is linked with higher than usual sensation seeking. With this framework in hand, future research can quantify the information collected during curious practice and examine its association with well-being.

Curiosity promotes focused engagement in novel and challenging situations and the accruement of resources that promote well-being. A critical open question is the extent to which curiosity lability, the degree to which curiosity fluctuates over short timescales, impacts well-being. We use data from a 21-day daily diary protocol as well as trait measures collected prior to the daily diary in 167 participants (mean age = 25.37 years, SD = 7.34) to test (i) the importance of curiosity lability for depression, flourishing, and life satisfaction, (ii) day-to-day associations among curiosity and happiness, depressed mood, anxiety, and physical activity, and (iii) the extent to which day’s mood acts as a mediator between day’s physical activity and day’s curiosity. Regression analyses indicate positive associations among curiosity lability and depression, as well as negative associations among curiosity lability and life satisfaction, above and beyond trait curiosity. No evidence for an association between curiosity lability and flourishing emerge when controlling for trait curiosity. Multilevel model results indicate that curiosity is higher on days of greater happiness and physical activity, and that curiosity is lower on days of greater depressed mood. We observe no association between curiosity and anxiety. Multilevel mediation models indicate evidence consistent with day’s depressed mood and happiness as mediators between physical activity and curiosity. In sum, we find that greater consistency in curiosity is associated with well-being, identify several sources of augmentation and blunting of curiosity in daily life, and provide support for purported mechanisms linking physical activity to curiosity via mood.

Most theories of curiosity emphasize the acquisition of information. Such conceptualizations focus on the actions of the knower in seeking units of knowledge. Each unit is valued as an unknown and appropriated in becoming known. Yet, recent advances across a range of disciplines from philosophy to cognitive science suggest that it may be time to complement the acquisitional theory of curiosity with a connectional theory of curiosity. This alternative perspective focuses on the actions of the knower in seeking relations among informational units, laying down lines of intersection, and thereby building a scaffold or network of knowledge. Intuitively, curiosity becomes edgework. In this chapter, we dwell on the notion of edgework, wrestle with its relation to prior accounts, and exercise its unique features to craft alternative reasons for curiosity's value to humanity. To begin, we engage in a philosophical discussion of the evidence for connectional curiosity across the last two millennia in the Western intellectual tradition. We then move to a contemporary operationalization of connectional curiosity in the mathematical language of network science. To make our discussion more concrete, we walk through a case study of humans browsing Wikipedia. The groundwork laid, we turn to the practical question of how (if at all) the paradigm of curiosity as edgework manifests in the contemporary lives of humans today. Does such a conceptualization help us to better understand the relations between curiosity and mental health? Might the edgework paradigm explain the drive to build specific structures of knowledge? Would the account help us to encode, test, and validate existing theories of curiosity, or propose new ones? Could it clarify why and how our culture values curiosity, in its multiple manifestations, plethora of practices, and kindred kinds in many bodies? In considering interdisciplinary answers to these questions, we find that the notion of edgework offers a fresh, flexible, and explanatory account of curiosity. More broadly, it uncovers new opportunities to use the lens of science to examine, probe, and interrogate this important dimension of the human experience.

Understanding the relationship between the brain’s structural anatomy and neural activity is essential in identifying the structural therapeutic targets linked to the functional changes seen in neurological diseases. An implicit challenge is that the varying maps of the brain, or atlases, used across the neuroscience literature to describe the different regions of the brain alters the hypotheses and predictions we make about the brain’s function of those regions. Here we demonstrate how parcellation scale, shape, and anatomical coverage of these atlases impact network topology, structure-function correlation (SFC), and the hypotheses we make about epilepsy disease biology. Through the lens of our disease system, we propose a general framework to evaluate the validity of an atlas used in an experimental system. This framework aims to maximize the descriptive, explanatory, and predictive validity of these atlases. Broadly, our framework strives to augment neuroscience research utilizing the various atlases published over the last century.

All epilepsies are defined by a propensity for recurrent seizures, characterized by hypersynchronous electrographic activity. Understanding this overarching property would be advanced by a thorough quantification of how the global synchrony of the epileptic brain responds to small perturbations that do not trigger seizures. Here, we leverage analysis of transient focal bursts of epileptiform activity, termed interictal epileptiform discharges (IEDs), to characterize this response. Specifically, we use a group of 145 participants implanted with intracranial EEG (iEEG) electrodes to quantify changes in 5 functional connectivity measures associated with three properties of IEDs: their presence, spread, and number. We perform this analysis in 5 frequency bands in order to contextualize our findings in relation to ongoing neural processes at different spatial and temporal scales. We find that, across frequency bands, both the presence and spread of IEDs tend to lead to independent increases of functional connectivity, but only in functional connectivity measures influenced by the amplitude, rather than the phase, of a signal. We find that these increases are not explained by simple subgroups of connections, such as the weakest connections in the brain, or only connections within the seizure onset zone. Evaluating patterns of similarity across different bands and measure combinations, we find that the presence of IEDs impacts high frequencies (gamma and high gamma)and low frequencies (theta, alpha, and beta) differently, although responses within each group are similar. Using grouped LASSO regression, we identify which individual-level features explain differences in functional connectivity changes associated with IEDs. While no single feature robustly explains observed differences, the most consistently included predictor across bands and measures is the anatomical locus of IEDs. Overall, this work provides compelling evidence for increases in global synchrony associated with IEDs, and delivers a thorough exploration of different functional connectivity measures, frequency bands, and IED properties. These observations show a disruption of several types of ongoing neural dynamics associated with IEDs. Additionally, we provide a starting point for future models of how small perturbations affect neural systems and how those systems support the hypersynchrony seen in epilepsy.