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It's that drive, that desire to know something. It's that need to see around the bend in the road. Curiosity, to me, is the need to have the answers for the questions that just bug you, that sit in the back of your mind that just won't let you go.

I subscribe to the theories of this guy named Jaak Panksepp. He’s a neuroscientist and he really believes that curiosity is a basic human, actually, basic animal drive.  Beyond our reward-based drives, there’s a basic drive to discover things that are new and it can be separated from the need for food, or for sex, or anything else.  It’s the desire to discover new things in our environment.  And, I think that it’s connected to the joy of being alive.  Whatever comes your way, just that feeling that says, "I want to be here to find out what happens next."

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Curiosity is a number of things to me. It's really all about that drive to learn something new and to discover something that you've never discovered before. And in fact there's a thrill behind that, a real thrill, realizing that this information that you may find, this data that you analyze and discover, something brand new has never been known in the history of mankind and that it can be used in terms of building onto our future, doing the next step. So it's a fundamental emotion to me, and it's what drives me a lot actually.

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Curiosity, for me, is an innate, human need. It's the brain feeding itself. It's the mechanism by which we, as a being, enter the universe, and extract knowledge and information from it. I think it's something that's fundamental to being a human.

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Curiosity is what drives us and, probably, curiosity is what's going to save us at this particular moment in time. Through history, it's the question: "What's over the horizon?" "How does that thing work?" "How does this fit together?" I think, in many ways, that's why we're here. It's what makes our species as unique as it is.

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Curiosity, I think, is a compulsion. So if you were to create a flux field that resides between our interpretation of reality and the unknown, there'd be a tension there. That tension, that flux field, would be the foundation that creates curiosity.

The flux in there comes from our own deep-seated insecurities, so I think when people talk about curiosity, they don't really talk about curiosity, per se. They talk about the results of curiosity or the evidence of curiosity. But to have curiosity, you need some kind of sense of order in the world, your perception of reality. And you need some unknown to come up and challenge that perception. Then that challenge needs to make you uncomfortable, maybe even instill a little fear based upon your own insecurity.

It's that fear that motivates you. It's that motivation -- I think that's what curiosity is. Now you can act on that motivation or not. Acting on it -- the result of acting on that -- is evidence of curiosity but isn't the thing itself. I think that's what curiosity is.

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Curiosity is just a strategy for learning. I think we're inherently set up to learn stuff, and people who have curiosity just want to learn. And I think it's the highest level of anything you can do -- is have that mindset of "I want to learn more."

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I think curiosity is just the basic human drive and motivation to understand the world around us, whatever that means. What humans are up to, what nature's up to, how we connect with all of it.