Curiosity can also increase our patience. A recent, currently unpublished, study by Abigail Hsiung, a PhD student at Duke University in North Carolina, showed that heightened curiosity meant that people were more willing to wait to find out the solution to a puzzle. Less curious people, in contrast, were more impatient to get through the task quickly, and so they asked to jump straight to the answers. “High curiosity meant that people wanted to have that moment of realisation and discovery on their own,” says Hsiung.