A student in the Cornell cafeteria threw a plate into the air, the way people fool around after lunch. Richard Feynman happened to be watching. The plate wobbled as it flew, and the Cornell medallion printed on it went round as it wobbled, and Feynman noticed that the two motions didn’t match. The medallion seemed to be turning faster than the plate was wobbling.
That plate turns up often in writing about curiosity exercises for adults, usually as proof that great minds notice things. The more useful part of the story is what Feynman had decided shortly before he sat down.
By his own account in Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, he was burned out. Physics had started to disgust him a little, and he had convinced himself he would never do anything important again. So he made a private rule. From now on he would play with physics, chase whatever looked interesting, and stop asking whether it mattered.
The plate qualified. He worked out the equations for its motion and showed them to Hans Bethe, who asked what the importance was. None, Feynman told him. He was doing it for fun.
The wobble led him to how electron orbits move in relativity, then to the Dirac equation, then to quantum electrodynamics and the diagrams that earned him a share of the 1965 Nobel Prize. He later said the whole thing came out of that “piddling around” with a plate. He even got the ratio backwards: the wobble actually runs at about twice the spin. Nobody minds.
How to develop curiosity as an adult, according to the studies
Most of us assume curiosity is a temperament. Some people have it, the rest of us have inboxes. The research is more hopeful than that.
In 2022, the psychologists Nicola Schutte and John Malouff pooled 41 randomized controlled trials of curiosity interventions covering 4,496 people. Across them, the interventions reliably raised curiosity, with an average effect size (Hedges’ g) of 0.57. In plain terms that is a medium effect, big enough to notice in yourself and well short of a personality transplant. Two details from the analysis are worth keeping. Programs aimed at curiosity in general did better than ones aimed at a single subject. And formats built around mystery or play had especially large effects, which is Feynman’s rule wearing a lab coat.
A smaller and more recent example comes from UC Santa Barbara. Madeleine Gross and Jonathan Schooler built a phone app and tested it on 91 people for three weeks, against a waitlist group. The daily challenges were almost comically small: listen to a podcast instead of the usual playlist, ask a friend what they had learned lately, cook something new. By the end, the app group scored higher on trait curiosity and reported less boredom and more meaning in life. It is a pilot study, so hold it loosely. Still, the shape matches the meta-analysis. Small and slightly playful seems to beat ambitious.
Age matters less than people fear. A 2025 study in PLOS One of 1,218 adults between 20 and 84 found that trait curiosity, the general appetite for new knowledge, was lower in older participants. Curiosity in the moment, measured by how much people wanted the answers to trivia questions, was higher. In an exploratory look at the data, the middle-aged reported the least in-the-moment curiosity of anyone. If you are 45 and feel duller than you did at 25, the numbers partly agree with you, and the 70-year-olds in the sample suggest it need not last.
Why curiosity makes things stick
In 2014, Matthias Gruber, Bernard Gelman and Charan Ranganath put people in a brain scanner and showed them trivia questions. While each person waited for an answer, a photo of a stranger’s face flashed up, unrelated to anything. The people remembered the answers they had been curious about better, which you would expect. They also remembered the irrelevant faces better when those faces arrived during a curious wait, and the effect held a day later. The scans showed extra activity in the brain’s dopamine reward circuit and the hippocampus, the region that does much of the work of laying down memories.
Gruber and Ranganath later folded this into what they call the PACE framework: prediction, appraisal, curiosity, exploration. You expect something, reality differs, and if the gap looks worth closing (rather than threatening) you get curious and go looking. The economist George Loewenstein described the same engine back in 1994 as an information gap, the slightly itchy feeling of knowing that you don’t know.
The trouble with a search engine in your pocket is that it closes the gap before the itch has done any work.
The trouble with a search engine in your pocket is that it closes the gap before the itch has done any work. Most of us have trained ourselves to answer every small question within seconds, then wonder why nothing we look up seems to stay. We wrote about that reflex, the urge to settle a question at any cost, in why most people can’t sit with an unanswered question, and about its effect on reading in how to remember what you read.
Curiosity exercises for adults that take two minutes
Everything below fits inside a coffee or a commute. None of it needs an app or an hour you don’t have. Pick one and attach it to something you already do every day, so you aren’t relying on remembering.
- Guess first. The next time you wonder something (how old that bridge is, why the moon looks bigger near the horizon), write a guess before you search. The guess creates the prediction error PACE describes, and the answer lands harder for it.
- The useless question. Once a day, follow one small thing that has no bearing on your work for two minutes. Why is the cereal box that shape? Why does the shower curtain drift inward? This is Feynman’s plate rule, scaled down.
- One swap. Borrowed from the Santa Barbara app: trade one default for something unfamiliar. A different podcast, a different street, the dish you never order. Then notice one detail you would otherwise have missed.
- A three-minute question storm. Adapted from the Question Formulation Technique that Dan Rothstein and Luz Santana developed for classrooms. Take a plain statement (“the office plant is dying”) and write down every question you can about it for three minutes. No answering, no judging, and turn any statement that sneaks in into a question. Then circle the one you most want answered.
Expect the effect to feel like nothing for a while. What changes first is small: you start catching the wobble in things, the detail that doesn’t quite add up, before you’ve decided whether it matters. That catching is the part you are training. It also helps to feed it from varied places. A question about plants tends to collide, a week later, with something you read about economics, which is the idea behind carrying one idea around for a whole day.
Questions that spark curiosity in other people
Curiosity is easier to practice on a person than on a plate, because people answer back. The trick is a question that can’t be settled in one word. “How was your day?” gets “fine.” “What surprised you today?” gets a story, or at least a pause while someone goes looking for one.
At work, the same swap turns “Is this done?” into “What was harder than you expected?” With a friend who is good at something, ask how they learned it. People rarely get asked, and the answer usually contains a detour you would never have guessed. If you want a longer list of prompts, there are 12 that hold up in our piece on thought-provoking daily ideas, and if you’re curious about the kind of curious you are, the thinker quiz takes about two minutes.
What Feynman gave himself in that cafeteria was permission to drop the demand that every question pay its way. Anyone can grant themselves the same thing on a Tuesday afternoon, between meetings, with a cold coffee.
Somewhere today, something will turn a little faster than it should. You will have about two minutes to wonder why.