Have you ever been bombarded by a young child between ages 4 and 7 with an incessant succession of questions beginning with “why?” Children at this age have an irrepressible curiosity that stimulates their learning. It is an evolved characteristic of most higher order species that enables the young to learn what they need to survive.
During your first two years on the planet, the neurons in your brain connected, in what are called synapses, at the rate of about 2 million per second, so that by age 2, your brain had about 100 trillion synapses–twice the number you have now.
Neural Pruning during the “Why?” Stage
Unable to sustain the biochemical reactions across all these synapses, your brain entered a stage known as neural pruning, removing the synapses for which there was little use. Your brain was fine-tuning itself to function effectively in the environment into which you were born. So much in this early stage of your brain development determined who you are today.
In the years following infancy, your brain continued to restructure itself in accordance with environmental stimuli. Early demands for certain types of cognitive tasks such as, learning a language or counting, played a role in determining which cognitive capacities would become most highly developed. Stanford University neurologist David Eagleman observes:
In a sense, the process of becoming who you are is defined by carving back the possibilities that were already present. You become who you are not because of what grows in your brain, but because of what is removed
Transition from the “Why?” Stage into the “Why Not?” Stage
At some point after the obsession with “why” the curiosity tends to wane, and most people gradually become less curious, reaching teenage and transitioning into “the why not?” stage. (Why can’t I go with my friends to X?”) Since we have no formal means of measuring curiosity, we cannot assert a strong correlation between IQ and curiosity, but when we look at those who have been highly inventive, we almost always discover that these are the people of high IQ. People like Newton, Edison, Tesla, Einstein and Feynman continued to maintain a high level of curiosity into adulthood and they were all people of high intelligence. So our evidence linking curiosity, IQ and asking questions is mainly anecdotal, but perhaps strong enough to assert that those of higher IQ are more likely to ask lots of questions than those who passively accept what is.
