Curiosity boosts people's ability to learn and retain new information, thanks to key reward and memory centres in the brain.

Matthias Gruber and his colleagues at the University of California, Davis asked volunteers to rate their level of curiosity for a series of trivia questions, and then scanned their brains as they saw the questions and waited for the answers.

For questions that they were curious about, participants remembered answers better than for questions in which they were less interested. Brain scans showed increased activity during this learning in regions that respond to reward and regulate memory formation, and revealed heightened connectivity between the two regions.

The volunteers were shown unrelated faces while they waited for the trivia answers, and were better at learning those faces when their curiosity was aroused. This suggests that curiosity also helps with the learning of incidental information.

Neuron http://doi.org/v6m (2014)