Hunger is the Best Sauce

We spent our holiday weekend in a nearby mountain village with a group of friends. On Friday evening we met at one person's home for food and drink. We then met the following morning for the charming local parade where we likewise gathered around food and drink. Later that evening, we met again for a grill feast. And on Sunday morning, we wrapped up the festivities with a group brunch.

Russian author Leo Tolstoy is among those philosophers who considered it to be a kind of secular sin to eat without appetite, which is what I've been doing for the past few day. I mean, the food was amazing all around, but there were moments when I found myself chewing for reasons that had nothing to do with hunger. For instance, I finished my hamburger out of a misguided sense of courtesy toward my host. I had a second desert because, well, two people had brought special desserts. I didn't drink that Bloody Mary because of thirst.

And the wages of my "sins" is an overstuffed, bleary-headed lethargy which will last until I once more feel the pangs hunger. Indeed, this morning as I write this, I'm, for the first time in days, feeling the beginnings of appetite. It's a feeling that I'm going to allow to grow for a bit. I might even wait until I'm ravenous because I know that a corollary to Tolstoy's framework is that hunger is the best sauce.

We talk a lot about curiosity in the world of play-based learning. I've often described it as a manifestation of our drive to educate ourselves. There is survival, which causes us to find food, procreate, and avoid danger, but beyond that, curiosity is what motivates us to bridge the gap between what we know and what we'd like to know. Psychologist George Loewenstein sees curiosity as an unpleasant state that compels us to take action, in the same way that thirst and hunger drive us. And like with thirst and hunger, once our curiosity is satisfied, we feel, however briefly, sated.

"Everything is explained now," said musician Tom Waits in an interview. "We live in an age when you say casually to somebody, 'What's the story on that?' and they can run to the computer and tell you within five seconds. That's fine, but sometimes I'd just as soon continue wondering. We have a deficit of wonder right now." 

It's one of the greatest challenges of our information age. Just as most of us can instantly satisfy our barest inklings of hunger, we can now do the same with our curiosity. From an evolutionary perspective, thirst and hunger are about the motivation to take action to seek out food and water. When it's always at the tip of our tongue, however, we lose our motivation. We then find ourselves eating and drinking for reasons that have nothing to do with, you know, eating and drinking. The same goes for curiosity: it's the motivation to get our questions answered.

Normal schools are set up as correct answer factories, serving children endless information with no regard for the natural process of curiosity and wonder. Since our internal drive to learn, our curiosity, is sidelined, our schools must then devise complex systems of external motivations (grades, competition, punishments, rewards, and pleased adult) to get incurious children to do the work. And that's what learning becomes in this context: work. 

No where in modern schooling do we allow the time and space for curiosity to grow. Indeed, children who display actual curiosity, who actually wonder, are generally shushed and re-directed. Research consistently finds that rewards, punishments, and other external motivators, reduce instrinsic motivation: they replace the joy of learning with the work of learning.

We've heard a lot about the neuromodulator dopamine over the last decade or so, often within the context of what's popularly called a "dopamine hit." We wring our hands over the "easy" dopamine of, say, social media scrolling, but that's at least in part a misunderstanding of the function of dopamine. Dopamine is central to the hunger that is curiosity. As neuroscientist Charan Ranganath puts it, "(I)f dopamine motivates us to learn, then maybe the boost we get from curiosity isn't from getting the answer to the question we're interested in, but rather from the question itself." In studies, dopamine circuits seem to be triggered by the questions that make the participants curious, rather than by learning the answer.

In other words, curiosity is about what we often call thinking. This is what early childhood education pioneer Eleanor Duckworth was talking about when she said that correct answers are far less important to education than the thinking that leads to answers, even objectively wrong answers. 

"Chasing information to satisfy our curiosity," writes Ranganath, "can sometimes have bigger effects on memory than learning in order to get an external reward . . . curiosity improves memory for both the mundane and the interesting, whether you're eight years old or eighty-eight. In contrast, external rewards seem only to enhance memory for information that we re not curious about . . . Our findings suggest that the people who show the biggest learning benefits from curiosity also score high on a personality trait called openness to experience."

And openness to experience, wonder, is a far better predictor of learning even than simply being interested in something. 

Play-based learning puts curiosity at the center where it belongs. Unlike the standard school approach of stuffing children whether they're hungry or not, play-based learning provides the time and space for the "thirst" for knowledge and the "hunger" for learning to naturally emerge. It's what motivates us to bridge that gap between what we know and don't know. Curiosity, like hunger, is the best sauce.

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Books have a way of transforming us unlike any other media out there. Be it fiction or non-fiction, a books has the power to fully immerse us into a world in way that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, click here.

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