(+++) ABSTRUSIFYING THE MUNDANE

Curious Minds: The Power of Connection. By Perry Zurn and Dani S. Bassett. MIT Press. $27.95.

     Curiously, there does not have to be a real in-the-dictionary word “abstrusify” for a reader to be able to figure out what the word means, or what it would mean if it were a real in-the-dictionary word. If you are curious as to why this is so and would like to bring both science and philosophy to bear on figuring out that “why,” then you are in the potential audience for Curious Minds, a book that does contain a mention of Lewis Carroll’s Alice but manages not to include what would seem an obvious quotation: “‘Curiouser and curiouser!’ cried Alice (she was so much surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English).” Perhaps it is the obviousness of the potential inclusion, and its admonition regarding the use of language, to which Perry Zurn and Dani S. Bassett object, so determined are they to abstrusify at every opportunity.

     Consider a typical sentence in Curious Minds: “The process of inductive inference can certainly help us to supersede the uncertainties caused by our imperfect senses and biased perceptions.” Readers who go trippingly on their way through prose of this sort will find much that is thoughtful, even engaging, in the book. Those who are tripped up by the verbiage will learn a good deal less and may be forgiven for wondering whether whatever learning may be offered is worthwhile.

     Zurn and Bassett are quite tenacious in trying not to let their prose, and by inference their thinking, stray too far to one of their specialty areas (philosophy) or the other (bioengineering). Everything is combinatorial: “As connective architectures, inherently defined by pinpoints and interstices, networks are nothing if not nodes and edges, units and relations, at once.” What the authors are putatively trying to do is to figure out what curiosity is and how it functions – whether it is one thing or many and, if more than one, what that means. Within this wide-ranging exploration, the authors cannot resist parading their erudition in matters both relevant and not: “Scientist and writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe offers a thoughtful account in his 1810 Theory of Colours, which composer Ludwig van Beethoven kindly admits to be ‘important,’ unlike his other ‘insipid’ writings.” Beethoven’s literary thinking appears nowhere else in Curious Minds, and the authors had best beware of the potential ambiguity of “his other ‘insipid’ writings,” a phrase that could refer to Beethoven’s authorial pursuit rather than Goethe’s – indeed, if clarity were the point here, the phrase would need to be, “unlike Goethe’s other ‘insipid’ writings.”

     So determined are Zurn and Bassett to twist and spin an answer to their own question – “What are the kinesthetics of curiosity?” – that they self-entangle at times into expressive inaccuracy: “The convoluted shape of your wrinkly brain tissue, like the borders of a country, are unique.” The subject is “shape,” so the correct verb form would be “is unique.”

     No matter. Zurn and Bassett meander merrily along through their contemplative byways, determining that curiosity has three stylistic presentations. One is the busybody, “busy making it their [sic] business to know anything and everything.” A second is the hunter, who “explores, traces, and tracks with a singularity of purpose.” And a third is the dancer, whose mind “moves by leaps of creative imagination.” A good summation of their analysis of curiosity types, and one of the more straightforwardly expressed notions in the book, is: “If the busybody arranges bits of information into loose knowledge webs, while the hunter organizes specific tracts of information into tight networks, the dancer may rupture those networks by either jumping to a new idea or throwing existing ideas into a new frame.”

     What is one to do with this formulation? Well, outside academia – where, unsurprisingly, both authors are employed – there is no particular applicability to the analysis, especially since any individual assumes the mantle of all three forms of curiosity at different times, and the three types tend to shade into each other at the margins rather than be clearly defined and differentiated. Curious Minds is foundationally an academic exercise, an intellectual meandering through contemplative regions explorable by those who are employed at least in part because of their, well, curious minds. When perusing projects such as this, one must be especially wary of quoting snippets of W.S. Gilbert’s dialogue:

“Patience: ‘Well, it seems to me to be nonsense.’

Saphir: ‘Nonsense, yes, perhaps – but oh, what precious nonsense!’”

     As things turn out, more than the analytical intensity of the main section of the book, the appendix called “A Curious Bestiary” can be fun to peruse in a somewhat lighter vein. This is a section discussing curiosity in the context of Animalia, using as exemplars, for example, the snake: “Might snakelike curiosity further embody slipperiness in the thin antennae-like lines of inquiry that strike out from oneself in filamentous questions or filamentary questioning?” The 17 short sections of this appendix, while obviously intended to be as recondite as the remainder of the book, are at least more-or-less self-contained and besprinkled with references to a wide variety of literary material, from Archilochus to Curious George, as well as with commentary on ascesis, decolonial imagination, and “the pulp of woody words” and “the glue of spiny sentences” – glue that, in the case of Curious Minds, is more like an epoxy admixture of the trivial with the insubstantial, plus a dash of the nugatory.