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seems reasonable and sound and very sciencey!"
You just got brain-mesmerized!
I can prove, with one statement, that this answer is wrong
(if you're impatient, jump to point 2 at the bottom).
So what is wrong with this explanation (he says, finally
getting to the damned point)? I'll break both of these points
down in detail later.
1. The question is phrased in such a way that it presumes
that "curiosity" is a singular thing.
2. The question presumes that a complex behavior or emotion
can be localized to a brain region or regions. There
are several philosophical pitfalls packaged into the answer,
such as the ontological commitment to the narrative
of cognitive neuroscience and the cerebral localization of
function.
To be clear, what I'm not saying is that behaviors aren't in the
brain. What I am saying is that the cerebral localization narrative
is too simplistic.
Let me break down these points.
1. is curiosity a singular thing?
When you ask "where is curiosity in the brain," you assume
that researchers can somehow isolate curiosity from other
emotions and behaviors in a lab and dissect it apart. This is
very, very difficult, if not impossible. neuroimaging (almost
always) relies on the notion of cognitive subtraction, which
is a way of comparing your behavior or emotion of interest
(curiosity) against some baseline state that is not curiosity.
or, as I say in my book chapter from The Mind and the
Frontal Lobes:
220
The underlying assumption in these studies is that activity in
brain networks alters in a task-dependent manner that becomes
evident after averaging many event-related responses and comparing
those against a baseline condition. Deviations from this
baseline reflect a change in the neuronal processing demands
required to perform the task of interest.