If you could peer inside the mind of a questioning child, you’d get a hint as to why kids seem to enjoy asking “Why?”. Neurological research shows that merely wondering about an interesting question6 activates regions of the brain linked to reward-processing. Curiosity—the act of wondering—feels good in and of itself, and thus, questions beget more questions. Think of curiosity as a condition—“like an itch,” says the neuroscientist Charan Ranganath.7 And that condition often leads to the action known as questioning, which is how we scratch the itch.
