This Is Why Humans Ask Why, And Why Some Never Lost Their Inner Child
By: Boris Crevin
Tags: Inspiration, Life Lessons, Science, Personal Development, Life

And this is what makes a great thinker

Why do children always ask “why” ?

The other day, I was told that it was really my thing to question everything permanently. So I wondered why this word, “why,” came back so much in the mouth of my inner voice. Why had I never let go of this reflex of the child who marvels at every moment of the world? Why was I an obsessed of the why?

At the beginning, there is the child who discovers the world that will welcome him for this life. Eyes illuminated with curiosity and discovery, he looks, he touches, he questions. “Dad, why this? Mom, why that?”. His parents answer him, and : “Woaah!”

The child is a human being in the basic state. This time of life is one in which all the basic instincts are the most salient, and this mania that children have to harass adults with questions actually reveals our need for knowledge. Yes, our need.

In 1981, researchers made an astonishing discovery. We have in our body what are called opioid receptors. Opioids are the soothing substances that discharge when we hurt ourselves, but also simply when we experience pleasure. Not surprisingly, most of these receptors are located in parts of our nervous system that are involved in our responses to pain and reward, but what these researchers discovered was that we also have such receptors in the part of our brain that deals with visual processing; with the things we see, recognize and associate with them.

This means that the parts of your brain responsible for treating what you see and recognize have “pleasure molecule” receptors. And when you see something beautiful, you literally feel pleasure and relaxation. But that’s not all.

They discovered that these receptors were the most numerous in the area that’s involved in associating what we see with what we know, with our memories. And this means that you also feel pleasure when you recognize something, and by extension you understand it.

From the concrete world to the world of ideas: the birth of the curious and artists

When the child asks “why” and finds an answer, new concepts are created and he feels a lot of fun. But if this pleasure comes first from understanding, it also comes from the novelty.

Novelty modulates the reaction of pleasure to information: if someone tells you a joke for the first time, it will be hilarious. Less the second time, then no more the third. It’s because you have integrated the concept, reducing the reaction of pleasure to novelty.

At the beginning, there is therefore the child who feels pleasure every time he understands because we are “infovores”; the information that is useful to us is literally like food — the search for information and the pleasure derived from it take the same cerebral circuits that those used for food. And the more relevant information we have, the more we reduce uncertainty and worry, just as if we had tons of dried meat in a bunker during a war. But then, great individual differences will develop between those who will transmute this hunt for information in the world of ideas, and those who maintain this hunt for information in the concrete world, as in social relations.

Here is my theory.

Every human being is in essence an infovorous. But it is a gradiant, and some remain more like a child than others on this aspect. In those who remain the most, there are those who will maintain hunting in the concrete world, that is to say, in what is happening concretely around them: social life, the news of their city, of their job. They will be able to make good politicians, officials, policemen, or craftsmen who will chase away the most useful information from their field to continually improve. These people are the majority, simply because in our evolutionary history it was from them that the tribe needed the most. It required a majority of down-to-earth people focused on their immediate environment.

But there was also a minority of “artists”. Shamans. Druids. These artists are those who transmute this hunt for information in the world of ideas, in abstraction, in the imagination. These are the thinkers. The creatives. And these are the so-called “hyperdopaminergic” minds.

The big children of the world of ideas

When we go into abstraction, we start our dopamine system.

Dopamine is the neurotransmitter responsible for exploratory behavior but also our motor activity. When we have a lot of dopamine, this translates into more energy, but also a thinking ability that impels: this is what coffee is used for, and this is also reflected by the fact that we look up when we think: this is the sign that dopamine is released, because dopamine is what drives us in the projection towards the future literally as well as figuratively: the future of our life, but also the future before us, in front of our body as well than infinity above. This is why heaven is above. It’s the promised land.

The child is a hyperdopaminergic mind. He runs everywhere, is full of energy and asks lots of questions. He needs to externalize.

In children, this hyperdopaminergic activity remains confined to its concrete and immediate environment because it does not yet have the capacity for abstraction, and he can not yet transfer this exploratory behavior into the imagination — the world of ideas. Of course a child is extremely imaginative — think of their monsters under the beds or their love for stories — but he can not yet fully play in this terrain of fantasy and go hunting information.

When by 8–10 years old children begin to fully develop this abstraction however, the big individual differences in information hunting in the concrete world or the world of ideas are taking place.

These differences depend on the personality, and between those who will not wonder about the mysteries of the life, those moderately and those still who will be obsessed, there will be variations for example in the personality traits “novelty seeking”, “openess” or “self-transcendance”, that all depends by a mix of genetics and life experience.

In some people, this interest in finding answers will be channeled in a special area, such as mathematics or physics. But in others it will extend to an infinite range of subjects, to a global view that will seek to understand everything that surround him and make big syntheses.

At the end, society will end up with super-infovorous people (super curious) and others little, but also infovores of the world of ideas and others rather in the concrete.

And there will finally be those, rarer, who will be at the limit of the two worlds, neither too high nor too low, able to go very high in the abstraction but at the same time able to bring the information hunted to the concrete world, and look at how to practically apply it.

They philosophize but draw conclusions and useful knowledge. They observe the world around them and come to conclusions by analogy about what they do not see, about the metaphysical aspects of this world. Or conversely, delve into metaphysics and draw conclusions about things they experience without understanding the reason at first.

They are the ones called the great thinkers. They are the great chamans of our time.

Boris Laurent