Comment
A student idly thinking as robots try to give him the answer, as imagined by ChatGPT
AI is killing curiosity
More than 60% of Google searches in America now end without a single click, says Anne-Laure Le Cunff in The New York Times. We type a question, skim an AI-generated summary and leave. ChatGPT, Claude and the others work the same way, collapsing the old habit of wandering through links into instant gratification. This is obviously a troubling development for anyone who publishes anything online, but really it’s bad news for everyone. What these quick-answer AI tools are doing is “undermining curiosity” – and in the process, paradoxically, “threatening our ability to understand the world”.
This isn’t just airy fairy moaning. I’m a neuroscientist, and the research shows that curiosity is a biological mechanism for learning that requires a “specific condition”: a space between asking a question and discovering the answer. People waiting for the answer to an intriguing question, researchers have found, remember unrelated information far better; brain scans show reward circuits firing and the hippocampus primed for memory. Curiosity effectively “opens a window”, and while it’s open the whole brain learns more readily. An AI answer in three seconds slams that window shut: no adjacent article, no tangent, no connection between two unrelated ideas. Such “incidental learning” drives genuine breakthroughs. When physicists Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson heard a stubborn hiss coming from their antenna in 1964, they could have written it off as equipment noise. Instead, they looked into it and ended up discovering the afterglow of the Big Bang. The danger with AI isn’t that people will stop asking questions; it’s that “questions will become endpoints”. Build a world that delivers only what is asked for, and we lose “the capacity to discover what we didn’t know to ask”.
Advertisement
Beyond the Chindwin
Second World War Tour in Burma with Dr Robert Lyman
3-14 February 2027
Follow in the footsteps of General Slim’s Fourteenth Army as they return to Burma in WWII. This journey, incorporating expert local guides and private film screenings, honours the men that fought and explores how WWII led to where Myanmar is today. Our tour explores the build-up to war in Burma, the retreat of the British in 1942, and then, in particular detail, the return of Slim in 1945. Sampan has been based in Yangon since 2013. We have been working with Dr Lyman since 2020. We hope you can join us.
Contact Bertie for more details: [email protected].
Property
THE BARN This 17th-century threshing barn in the Montgomeryshire village of Guilsfield has been converted into a smart three-bedroom home, says The Guardian. The open-plan living and dining space has vaulted ceilings, a log burner and floor-to-ceiling windows framing panoramic views across the Powys hills. Upstairs are three bedrooms, all en suite, and a fourth bedroom is in a detached annexe, currently arranged as a gym and yoga space. Outside, the four acres of grounds contain a terrace, lawned gardens and two paddocks. Welshpool station is five miles away, with trains to Birmingham in 1hr 30mins. £850,000.
Heroes and villains
Villain
An angry bison in America’s Yellowstone National Park, which used its horns to toss a grandfather about 8ft into the air. Carl Isom-McDaniel, 65, was taking pictures about 100 yards from the bull when it got angry and charged him and his 13-year-old grandson. He successfully drew the 900kg beast away from the boy, but couldn’t escape himself, suffering multiple broken bones.
Villain
The Today programme, according to the Today programme’s longest-serving presenter, John Humphrys, who says the show has become “really annoying” since he left seven years ago. In a curmudgeonly column in The Guardian, the broadcaster complained about Amol Rajan emphasising the definite and indefinite articles (“A bomb has exploded in THE palace of Westminster”); the presenters having “a little chat” with each other about the significance of an interview that’s just concluded; and the overuse of “y’know” and “I mean…”
Villains
Contemporary novelists, after author Wendy Jones noted that nine out of the 10 bestselling fiction paperbacks in the UK this week all have the same grisly plot point in common: the murder of a woman. Six of the nine were written by women; the only book to break the female homicide pattern is The Correspondent, by Virginia Evans, a novel about the art of letter writing.
Hero
A pedantic Norwegian football fan who went viral for refusing to take part in the “Viking Row”, a mass celebration in which supporters pretend to row the oars of a Viking ship, because it wasn’t factually accurate. Emil Anners Lappen takes issue with the claim in a song accompanying the spectacle that Vikings rowed across the Atlantic. “They rowed up rivers,” he tells CBC Radio, “but they sailed the ocean.”
Books
Matt Damon and Zendaya in Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s epic
Even my toddler loves The Odyssey
The extraordinarily positive reviews for Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation of The Odyssey are a great excuse to go back to the original. I’ve been reading it to my three-year-old son, says Chris Moody in The Atlantic, and I thoroughly recommend it. Part of my motivation, admittedly, is high-minded – human civilisation owes a vast debt to Homer. What better preparation could there be, if you want to enjoy a vivid life of the mind, than deep familiarity with the source material? But more importantly, as my young son clearly understands, “The Odyssey is a great yarn”. Even a toddler can appreciate the thrill of bloody battles, man-eating monsters and a “side quest to hell”.
One immediate benefit of reading Homer’s epic aloud is that that is the way it was designed to be read. A brilliant 2025 translation by Daniel Mendelsohn replicates the original meter, which makes it especially enjoyable to perform. And reading to a child, you instantly realise why Homer endlessly repeats his little epithets for characters: Penelope is a “clear thinking woman”; Athena is the goddess of the “bright owl eyes”. It’s an excellent way to remember who everyone is and what role they play. I censored some of the steamier passages when Odysseus is in the respective lairs of Circe and Calypso, and left out a later scene where our hero orders the execution of a group of women his family keeps as slaves. But after we read, in Book 12, about the “horrifying death throes” of Odysseus’s weary sailors as they were plucked from the ship and devoured by the six-headed Scylla, my son had a simple request: “Read it again!”
🍿🎥 There’s something profoundly heartening about the film’s success, says Will Leitch in The Washington Post. In an age when braindead franchise remakes like the live action Moana and the new Supergirl are tanking at the box office, and a weird new breed of ultra-indie films made on the cheap by 20-something YouTubers are becoming huge hits, it’s a relief to see a massive, old school Hollywood epic with a star-packed cast succeed on a commensurately epic scale. At a confusing time for film lovers, “Nolan makes you believe in movies”.
The Knowledge Crossword
Comment
St Peter’s Church in Staunton on Arrow, Herefordshire. Getty
Has the Church of England taken leave of its senses?
Local churches in England are under immense pressure, says Bijan Omrani in The Telegraph. Most are scrabbling to raise the funds just to keep the buildings standing and heated. Historic parishes are being amalgamated so that a single vicar can be shared between 20 churches, and falling numbers of ordinations are making it harder for parishes to find clergy at all. Which is why it beggars belief that when the Church of England General Synod met this month in York, the main points of discussion seemed to be Israel-Palestine, Net Zero and, most ludicrous of all, “Project Spire”: the £100m slavery reparations fund for “Healing, Repair and Justice”.
This “meretricious” fund came about after the Church Commissioners, tasked with administering the Church’s £11bn endowments, declared that their 18th-century predecessor organisation, the Queen Anne Bounty, had invested in and profited extensively from the transatlantic slave trade. This has since been debunked – further research revealed that those supposed investments in slavery were actually in government bonds – and the fund is now facing a legal challenge. What’s more, the hefty sum isn’t being exclusively distributed to descendants of enslaved people but rather as grants to businesses and community projects that benefit black communities, including black social entrepreneurs, educators, healthcare givers, asset managers and historians – in other words, “the already well-to-do”. The insistence on pressing ahead with this ill-conceived project shows exactly what the Church is so badly suffering from today: an “obsession with matters that are not its concern while the institution rots”.
Weather
Quoted
“One of the most reliable signs that you need a holiday is the conviction that you cannot spare the time to take one.”
British philosopher Bryan Magee
That’s it. You’re done.
Let us know what you thought of today’s issue by replying to this email
To find out about advertising and partnerships, click here
Been forwarded this newsletter? Try it for free
Enjoying The Knowledge? Click to share
