In 1994, Carnegie Mellon economist George Loewenstein published a paper that would fundamentally reshape how we understand curiosity. His information gap theory proposed that curiosity arises not from a general love of knowledge but from a specific, uncomfortable awareness of a gap between what we know and what we want to know. Curiosity is not a positive state of intellectual pleasure but a motivating tension closer to an itch that demands scratching. The moment we become aware that we are missing a specific piece of information we care about, we experience a form of cognitive discomfort that compels us to...