Think about the last time you were genuinely curious about something. Not mildly interested. Truly curious, the kind where you lost track of time and leaned forward without noticing.
Can you remember it?
I read something recently that I could not stop thinking about. A developmental psychologist at Williams College, Susan Engel, spent years tracking how many questions children ask per hour. At age five, the average child asks 107 questions every single hour (Engel, 2011; Diamandis, 2025). They are relentless, magnificent question machines. Then school starts. By fifth grade, the entire classroom produces fewer than one question every two hours (Engel, 2011).
Engel watched a teacher shut down a group of children who were experimenting with a balance scale, genuinely doing what science is. The teacher’s words were almost hard to believe: there is no time for experiments now, we are doing science.
No time for experiments. During science class.
Engel concluded that if you lose your curiosity before the age of eleven, you probably do not get it back. I want to sit with that. And then I want to push back on it, because the work I do every day tells a different story.
Curiosity is not gone. In most people, it is buried.
What Curiosity Actually Does Inside Your Brain
Curiosity is not a personality trait. It is a neurochemical event. In 2014, neuroscientist Matthias Gruber and his team at UC Davis put participants in a brain scanner and asked them trivia questions designed to trigger either high or low curiosity. During high curiosity states, the brain’s reward circuitry lit up, the same regions activated by food, connection, and deep satisfaction (Gruber et al., 2014). Dopamine flooded the system.
Here is the part that stopped me cold. When participants were then shown random, unrelated faces, they remembered those incidental faces significantly better during high curiosity states than low ones. Curiosity did not just enhance learning about the thing they were curious about. It elevated everything the brain was absorbing in that moment (Gruber et al., 2014).
Your curious brain is a better brain. Full stop.
And the stakes are higher than you might think. Researchers following over a thousand older adults for five years found that the highly curious participants had significantly better survival rates, even after controlling for age, health conditions and lifestyle (Swan & Carmelli, 1996). Curious brains keep building. Brains that stop asking questions begin to atrophy.
Why Curiosity Goes Quiet
Here is what I see in the room with my clients, and it is something no research paper has quite captured in the way I want to say it.
Curiosity does not just fade. It gets buried under protection.
At some point, most of us asked a question and the answer was painful. We reached toward the world with that wide-open five-year-old wonder and were shut down, shamed, ignored, or simply overwhelmed by what we found. The nervous system drew a conclusion: not knowing is dangerous. Questions lead to hurt. It is safer to conclude than to wonder.
And so we concluded. And we have been concluding ever since.
The people who come to me most stuck are not people who lack intelligence or effort. They are people who have stopped being curious about themselves. They have traded wondering for knowing. They already know why they are the way they are. They already know nothing will change. The enquiry has closed, and when the enquiry closes, so does the possibility of something different.
Where Hypnotherapy Comes In
This is what the clinical work actually does, and I want you to understand it not as a technique but as a process.
When someone enters a therapeutic trance, the part of the mind that defends, explains and concludes becomes quiet. Not absent. Just quiet. And in that quietness, the subconscious, which is still very much awake and listening, becomes available for a different kind of conversation (Erickson & Rossi, 1979). Milton Erickson, one of the most remarkable psychiatrists of the twentieth century, built his entire approach around this. He would weave language deliberately designed to open his clients into a state of not-knowing. Phrases like “I wonder what this has to teach you” were not gentle platitudes. They were precise invitations for the brain to do what it was built to do: explore, update and learn without the interference of its own defences.
Research confirms that hypnotherapy induces measurable changes in brain connectivity, influencing the neural networks involved in attention, emotion regulation and self-awareness (Elkins et al., 2015). The trance state is, in neurological terms, a heightened learning state. And curiosity is its doorway.
What I am doing in that space is not fixing someone. I am helping their nervous system remember that not knowing is safe. That questions are not dangerous. That the gap between where they are and where they could be is not a threat. It is an invitation.
Something to Carry With You
Before you move on, I want to offer you one question to sit with. Not to analyse. Just to notice.
When was the last time you were genuinely curious about yourself rather than critical of yourself?
Notice whether the question feels open or whether something in you immediately rushes to close it. That instinct to already know is not your wisdom. It is your protection. And protection served you once. But curiosity will take you further.
If you would like to explore what becomes possible when that curiosity comes back online, with the right support, I would love to be in that conversation with you.
References
Diamandis, P. H. (2025, May 1). Your brain’s learning rate: Why curiosity is the most powerful upgrade for your 100 billion neurons. Substack. https://www.diamandis.com
Elkins, G. R., Barabasz, A. F., Council, J. R., & Spiegel, D. (2015). Advancing research and practice: The revised APA Division 30 definition of hypnosis. International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, 63(1), 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1080/00207144.2014.961870
Engel, S. (2011). Children’s need to know: Curiosity in schools. Harvard Educational Review, 81(4), 625–645. https://doi.org/10.17763/haer.81.4.h054131316473115
Erickson, M. H., & Rossi, E. L. (1979). Hypnotherapy: An exploratory casebook. Irvington.
Gruber, M. J., Gelman, B. D., & Ranganath, C. (2014). States of curiosity modulate hippocampus-dependent learning via the dopaminergic circuit. Neuron, 84(2), 486–496. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2014.08.060
Swan, G. E., & Carmelli, D. (1996). Curiosity and mortality in aging adults: A 5-year follow-up of the Western Collaborative Group Study. Psychology and Aging, 11(3), 449–453. https://doi.org/10.1037/0882-7974.11.3.449
