Jim Kwik explains why humans are wired to explore. Early explorers who found new food and survival strategies passed on their genes. Our brains constantly seek novelty and unknown information to predict danger and stay alive.
As human beings, what drives us to explore? What do we seek to gain from it? You can answer that on a couple different levels. Like, as a species, we've been rewarded for exploring by discovering new territory, new ways of catching food, new ways of thriving. And so we've evolved in a way such that people who explored and discovered new things passed on their genes, and we still carry that legacy. You can even go a level deeper and say that to be alive, to be an organism that is existing in the world, you have to have a drive for novelty. You mentioned predictive processing at the top, this idea of how brains are wired. You want to be discovering new things because that's how you ensure that, you know, a monster doesn't jump out from behind the next corner. You need to be learning about the world. And so we're wired in a very fundamental way to pursue the things we know least about in some ways.
The Library of Minds: Brain Coach: How to Stay Sharp When AI Does the Thinking | Jim Kwik
