"Modelling" Curiosity

  One of the most interesting skills I have tried to teach myself recently, as a student in particular, is how to intentionally model curiosity or a curious learner. I say this with the knowledge that I am not "by nature" a curious person. In fact, when I was in Kindergarten, I distinctly recall being a child who had no questions whatsoever about the workings of a piano, even when the insides of the piano were being exposed for the children to see and touch. Curiosity depends to a certain extent on cathexis, or a sense of emotional bonding to something, and I have found that it was never so easy to get me interested in things like the inside of pianos. Could I ever, as an adult, deliberately or intentionally direct my emotions to curiosity about anything?
   One crucial aspect of curiosity is a kind of meta-awareness. If I am coming to a place with an awareness of how, in what context, from what background(s) I approach the new place, I am probably more likely to be curious about how the situation unfolds, and what it adds to my existing experiences or mindsets. That's a mouthful of abstract, "educational psychology" language, but for me it points to being able to "interview" myself as though my brain were the interviewee. Well, brain, seeing as you are in this situation, what makes you want to learn about it? What disengages you? What are you having difficulties grasping, and why do you think it might be so? Engaging the mind in this mock interview is one way for the brain to be tricked into thinking it's learning process is  interesting to someone else.
  This also brings me to a point about social learning, or the way learning is a "social" activity.  People rarely make a whole lot of sense of things if they feel they are in isolation, without a "someone" standing in front of them/beside them and showing a real sense of interest in what the other is learning. Learning itself is quite often precisely this kind of interchange, where there is a difference between two viewpoints. I think the trick is how to induce a sense of social learning in all situations, even when one is entirely alone to learn. In the latter case, we still need to mimic the conditions of an "interested other" who is a little bit behind and needs catching up on what you are doing and thinking. Knowing that the other has a genuine interest drives our compassion to want to fill that person in on what we are thinking at the moment. The other (real or imagined) essentially motivates learning and reflection on learning.