Dani S. Bassett, PhD. Zurn is Associate Professor of Philosophy at American University and affiliate faculty in the Department of Critical Race, Gender, and Culture Studies. He researches broadly in the fields of political philosophy, gender theory, and applied ethics. His work specifically contributes to critical prison studies and curiosity studies. Bassett is J. Peter Skirkanich Professor, Department of Bioengineering, at the University of Pennsylvania. Bassett studies biological, physical, and social systems by using developing tools from network science and complex systems theory.
They’ve written 20+ papers together on neuroscience, curiosity, and collaborating between the sciences and the humanities, and co-wrote Curious Minds: The Power of Connection (MIT Press, September 2022) which is an exhilarating, genre-bending exploration of curiosity’s powerful capacity to connect ideas and people. Identical twins, they wrote that their book “represents the thought of one mind and two bodies”—harnessing their respective expertise in the humanities and the sciences to get irrepressibly curious about curiosity. They identify three styles of curiosity—the busybody, who collects stories, creating loose knowledge networks; the hunter, who hunts down secrets or discoveries, creating tight networks; and the dancer, who takes leaps of creative imagination, creating loopy ones. Investigating what happens in a curious brain, they offer an accessible account of the network neuroscience of curiosity (https://www.barnesandnoble.com/)
They discuss how understanding each of these styles of personalities relates to how a client may choose to invest and how they deal with their finances and life events.
