It can include curiosity about such things as what objects are composed of, the underlying mechanisms of systems, mathematical relationships, languages, social norms, and history.
Apparently, it was not the sweetness of their voices or the novelty and diversity of their songs, but their professions of knowledge that used to attract the passing voyagers; it was the passion for learning that kept men rooted to the Sirens' rocky shores.
In 1738, the Scottish philosopher David Hume differentiated intellectual curiosity from a more primitive form of curiosity: The same theory, that accounts for the love of truth in mathematics and algebra, may be extended to morals, politics, natural philosophy, and other studies, where we consider not the other abstract relations of ideas, but their real connexions and existence.
Some people have an insatiable desire of knowing the actions and circumstances of their neighbors, though their interest be no way concerned in them, and they must entirely depend on others for their information; in which case, there is no room for study or application.
[11] Keeping that in mind, measures of intellectual curiosity, NFC and TIE were found to be correlated (on average with a coefficient of .57), substantiating the supposition of their similarity.