Curiosity and Openness to New Experiences (“CONE”):
a creative and quintessential resiliency strength
Larry H Pastor, MD

Dr. Pavlov and one of his dogs.
In the taxonomy of resiliency strengths, the beliefs, habits, or practices that help us to cope with adversity arise from 5 domains of the human psyche: (1) our thinking, (2) our morals, (3) our social connectedness, (4) our inner toughness, or (5) our creative side.[1] Curiosity (along with humor, our esthetic sense, and our ability to form and maintain goals and dreams), arises from the creative and artistic dimension of our existence. Curiosity, like perseverance, sense of perspective, and cognitive flexibility, is considered a core resiliency strength.
Curiosity and Openness to New Experience (“CONE”): curiosity means that you are eager to try things out, make discoveries, ask questions, and increase your knowledge and understanding of other people and the world around you. Al Siebert, author of The Resiliency Advantage,[2] writes “an automatic openness to absorb new information epitomizes survivor resiliency. Curiosity is a valuable habit.” Seibert, a psychologist and army veteran, recalled a revelation from his military training. He expected the special forces soldiers he met to be rigid, gung-ho, and focused. But instead, he found the most successful SF troops to have a surprising open-mindedness and flexibility in their thinking. This openness and flexibility enabled the best troops to constantly re-assess their assumptions and modify plans according to new information and challenges. Flexible thinking enhanced success and survival when confronted with novel challenges, he concluded.
The curious mind, or ‘CONE-head’, is somewhat different from the motivated, intelligent but linear, non-CONE, mind. The latter will diligently memorize information; the former will observe events with interest and remain flexible and open to devising new strategies for solving complex problems and making key decisions. CONE is a component of “fluid intelligence” as described by Fernandez and colleagues in their book reviewing the elements of brain fitness and health.[3] CONE is a source of creative energy and “can help you feel a stirring of possibilities under the accustomed surface of daily experiences.”[4] When the psyche is hurting and wounded, openness to new experience is an antidote to the reflex to shut down, isolate oneself, and turn away from the world. Indeed, one path to achieving a good life is living with a spirit of adventure, and the character strength of CONE is the foundation of the adventurous spirit.
A curious mind can rescue success from the jaws of defeat, as the story of one research scientist illustrates. The researcher, a physiologist by training, wanted to understand the role of saliva in digestion. The experiment was set up to examine how food is digested after saliva begins to flow during a meal. He set up his protocol and put together a lab using dogs as experimental subjects. However, one day the assistant came to the researcher with “bad news.” The dogs were beginning to salivate before they were even served their food, upon the familiar sight of the lab assistant who fed them each day entering the room. Surely the experiment was now ruined, concluded the researcher’s assistants!
However, the researcher was undaunted. His curiosity and flexibility led him to redesign the experiment in order to study how the dogs had learned to salivate at the sight of the lab assistant, shedding revolutionary light on our theory of learning in the field of psychology. To standardize the subsequent experiments, he substituted the sound of a bell for the sight of the lab assistant, and the results became known to the world as the theory of classical, or “Pavlovian”, conditioning. The researcher was Ivan Pavlov and though we might say that his discovery of Pavlovian conditioning was – like many scientific discoveries – “accidental” – such ‘happy accidents’ are in reality the routine meeting of a curious mind with the unexpected, novel, or disappointing circumstances life offers us.
Curiosity consists more than anything else of asking novel questions. Perhaps my greatest personal gratification as a psychiatrist is when I pose a question to my patient and he or she responds, “Ah, doc, good question! I never thought of it that way before!” A good question opens up a whole new perspective on one’s situation, unfreezes a stuck thought pattern, and offers up a whole new world of possibilities. Arguably, my role is more to ask thoughtful questions more than to try to provide the patient with specific advice or answers. I’d go so far as to say that if I did nothing more than be a good listener and ask good questions, with an open-minded, curious, and nonjudgmental attitude, then my job is half-way done.
A good exercise for all of us would be to live a day committed to being curious about everything and everyone around you, invoking CONE throughout the day and see how it changes your perspective on problems and setbacks. Better yet, try living a day or a week emphasizing three closely related, core resiliency strengths, applying them to problems or challenges in your life, let’s say: curiosity, humor, and humility. I’d wager that if you pick a problem and lead with those strengths you’ll get quite far. Keep on exercising those resiliency muscles!
©Larry H Pastor, MD
January 2025
[1] See my blog post from May 2023 for a taxonomy of resiliency strengths.
[2] Al Siebert, The Resiliency Advantage: Master Change, Thrive Under Pressure, and Bounce Back from Setbacks, BK Publishers, 2005.
[3] Alvaro Fernandez et.al., The SharpBrains Guide to Brain Fitness: how to optimize brain health and performance at any age, 2nd edition 2013, p. 191.
[4] Mihail Czikszentmihalyi, Curiosity: Flow and Psychology of Discovery and Invention, 1997.
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