• Posted May 13, 2025

Curious? Healthy Brain Aging Might Depend On It

TUESDAY, May 13, 2025 (HealthDay News) — Curiosity might have killed the cat, but maintaining such inquisitiveness could be key to preserving brain health as we grow older, a new study says.

Some forms of curiosity increase well into old age, and seniors who keep wanting to learn new things might be able to offset or even prevent Alzheimer’s disease, researchers reported in the journal PLOS One.

As they age, people do experience a decline in what’s known as “trait curiosity,” an aspect of their fundamental personality that prompts them to seek out new information, researchers found.

But researchers also found that people’s “state curiosity” — the momentary feeling of curiosity everyone experiences when they’re asked about specific topics – tends to increase sharply after middle age and well into old age.

“Our findings fit with some of my work on selectivity theory, which is that as we get older, we don’t want to stop learning, we’re just more selective about what we want to learn,” senior researcher Alan Castel, a psychologist at UCLA, said in a news release.

“You see this in the context of lifelong learning: A lot of older adults will go back to take classes or pick up hobbies or engage in bird watching,” he said. “I think it shows that this level of curiosity, if maintained, can really keep us sharp as we age.”

Prior research has shown that, in general, curiosity declines as people grow older, researchers noted.

“The psychology literature shows that oftentimes what's known as trait curiosity, or a person’s general level of curiosity, tends to decline with age,” Castel said.

“But we thought that … went against some of the things we saw in some of the older adult participants in our experiments, who would often be very engaged and interested in learning about memory, specifically, but even other forms of trivia,” he continued.

Researchers wondered if the prior findings might be explained by the different types of curiosity, trait versus state.

For example, while some people might not be very inquisitive by nature and are content to accept things at face value — placing them low in trait curiosity — they still have a passionate thirst for knowledge regarding specific topics or hobbies, which involves state curiosity, researchers said.

To tease this apart, researchers recruited more than 1,400 participants between 20 and 84, asking them to complete an online assessment of their curiosity.

Participants had to guess the answers to hard trivia questions that most people were unlikely to know, such as “What was the first country to give women the right to vote?”

After they guessed the answer, participants then were asked whether they wanted to know the correct one.

(If you’re curious yourself, the correct answer is New Zealand.)

Results showed that people who had more state curiosity also had more trait curiosity, and vice versa.

In general, trait curiosity did decline throughout the adult lifespan, researchers found.

But state curiosity declined in early adulthood, then increased sharply after middle age and continued its upward trajectory into old age.

Until middle age, people tend to focus on acquiring the knowledge and skills they need to succeed at school and their jobs, which will help them raise families and become financially successful, researchers said.

This spurs on their early curiosity, but also can stress them out and cost them happiness, researchers said. Thus, as people acquire the information they need to thrive, they tend to allocate fewer resources to trait curiosity.

But after their children leave home and they reach retirement age, these same folks begin indulging their personal interests – resulting in a boost to their state curiosity, researchers said.

“As we get older, maybe we want to be focused on the things that are important, and we forget the things that are less relevant,” Castel said. “Anecdotally, a lot of older adults I speak to say that it's important to stay curious. That fits with some of the research that shows that people who have early stages of dementia might show disinterest in things that they once enjoyed.”

More information

The Mayo Clinic has more on healthy brain aging.

SOURCE: UCLA, news release, May 7, 2025