#Book collector connect how to

#Book collector connect how to

“I viscerally remember Dani and I crawling in there on our hands and knees and getting lost in these mazes upon mazes of old things,” Zurn says – once, Bassett burst into tears when they realised they couldn’t remember how to get out. Bassett describes her as an “ultra-collector” – she had a basement and crawlspace full of antique paraphernalia such as chairs, books, crystal glasses, silverware, paintings and buttons. “It works by linking ideas, facts, perceptions, sensations and data points together,” they write in the book, “Yet it also works within human grids of friendship, society and culture.”Īrguably it all started with their grandmother, a modern Ole Worm. What exactly is curiosity? Where does it come from and how does it work? In a manuscript peppered with questions, the academics explore everything from Plutarch to Google algorithms, to argue that curiosity is networked. These are questions asked in Zurn and Bassett’s latest work, Curious Minds: The Power of Connection, in which they investigate the neurological, historical, philosophical, and linguistic foundations of curiosity. What provoked Worm to collect? Which electrical signals were firing in his brain? How would the Enlightenment eccentric have behaved given access to Wikipedia? Four hundred years later, this quintessential cabinet of curiosities still inspires philosophy professor Perry Zurn and bioengineering professor Dani S Bassett, identical twins. This was the Museum Wormianum, collected and curated by the Danish physician and philosopher Olaus Wormius, or Ole Worm to most. I n the early 17th century, there was a room in a house in Copenhagen bursting with hundreds of objects: bones and shells and taxidermised birds, not to mention weapons and rocks and a stuffed polar bear cub hanging from the ceiling.