The pattern is a familiar one to anyone who pays attention to how the older people in their life have aged. There are people, well into their seventies and eighties, who remain unmistakably alive in some way that is hard to put a name to. They are not necessarily the healthiest, the wealthiest, or the most socially embedded. Some of them are working through significant difficulty. What they have in common, in our observation, is that they have not lost the capacity to be caught off guard by something. They still ask follow-up questions. They still add new things to read and watch and try. They are still, in a small way, surprised.
This is not the version of successful ageing that the wellness literature tends to lead with.
The dominant framings are health, financial security, and social connection, and there is excellent research behind each of those framings. We are not suggesting they are not important. They obviously are. What we are pointing at is a quieter pattern, less reported on, that we keep noticing alongside the others.
There is a research literature that has begun, slowly, to put numbers on it. The literature is not large enough to support the claim that this is the single most important factor in ageing well. But it is large enough to support the claim that the pattern is real, and that it has been measurably associated with how people age.
What the curiosity research supports
The cleanest empirical anchor is a 1996 paper by George Swan and Dorit Carmelli, published in Psychology and Aging, drawn from the Western Collaborative Group Study. The authors followed 1,118 community-dwelling older men, mean age 70.6, over five years. They had measured both trait curiosity, meaning the disposition, and state curiosity, meaning the in-the-moment response to new information, at the start of the period. By the end, initial levels of both kinds of curiosity were higher in the men who had survived than in those who had not. After adjusting for standard mortality risk factors, the state-curiosity association with survival remained statistically significant in the Cox regression. This is not a paper that proves curiosity protects life. It is a paper that establishes that, in a 1990s American sample of older men, curiosity at 70 predicted who would still be alive at 75, with the effect surviving the obvious controls.
The Swan and Carmelli paper has, in the three decades since, attracted a small but consistent surrounding literature. The 2018 review by Michiko Sakaki, Ayano Yagi, and Kou Murayama, published in Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, consolidates the broader picture. Curiosity in older adults, the review argues, has measurable protective effects on cognitive function, emotional wellbeing, and physical health. The authors propose these effects may operate partly through the dopaminergic and noradrenergic systems that respond to novelty, though they present this as a working mechanistic hypothesis drawn from adjacent literatures rather than as a directly established causal pathway. The 2006 work by Kirk Daffner and colleagues, published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, found that older adults whose brains showed strong responsiveness to novel visual stimuli, as measured by event-related potentials, were the older adults who had cognitively aged most successfully. The same research group had earlier documented, in a 1992 paper in Neurology, that exploratory eye movements were diminished in patients with probable Alzheimer’s disease.
The cumulative picture is that the capacity to attend to and engage with the new is, at the level of brain function and at the level of behaviour, a thing that comes apart in some older people and remains intact in others. The ones in whom it remains intact tend, on the available evidence, to age better.
What it looks like in practice
The research describes the pattern at the level of variables. What the pattern looks like in someone’s life is more specific.
People who have continued to be surprised tend to ask follow-up questions in conversation. They are reading or watching at least one thing that they could not have predicted, six months ago, that they would be reading or watching. They have, somewhere in the last year, formed a new interest, picked up a new book or skill, or had their mind changed about something they had previously thought they had settled. They are willing to be wrong about small things in front of other people, because the prize for getting it right is more interesting than the cost of having been mistaken.
The opposite pattern is also recognisable. There are older people who have closed the loop on most of the questions they consider worth asking, who have a settled list of what is worth attending to, and who maintain that list against new input. This is not a moral failure on their part. It is a recognisable cognitive pattern, well-documented in the personality literature on what happens to openness-to-experience across the lifespan, which on average declines with age. Some people resist that decline. Some do not. The ones who resist it are the ones who, in later life, are still surprising the people around them.
What the research has not established
The honest qualifications are worth keeping in view.
The research has not established that curiosity is the single most important predictor of how people age. The 2017 metasynthesis by Jason Strickhouser, Ethan Zell, and Zlatan Krizan, published in Health Psychology, examined 36 meta-analyses covering over 500,000 participants and found that among the Big Five personality traits, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and agreeableness all showed stronger associations with health outcomes than openness-to-experience or extraversion did. The Harvard Study of Adult Development, now in its ninth decade, has consistently found that the quality of close relationships is one of the strongest predictors of late-life wellbeing. The pattern we are pointing at sits alongside these other findings, not in place of them.
The research has also not established the direction of the relationship. It is possible that curiosity in later life is downstream of other things: of good health, which leaves a person with energy to be curious; of secure relationships, which leave a person feeling safe enough to entertain new ideas; of cognitive reserve, which lets a person process novelty without distress. A 2025 paper in Scientific Reports on trait curiosity and cognitive reserve points in this direction. The causal arrow may run from the curiosity to the ageing, or from the ageing to the curiosity, or, most likely, in both directions at once.
What the research has established is that the association is reliable enough to keep noticing. The people who are still being surprised at 75 are, on the available evidence, also the people who are doing better at 75 in ways the research is able to measure.
What we are left with, on our reading, is a pattern that is more useful as observation than as prescription. The literature is not in a position to tell anyone how to cultivate the trait in someone who does not have it, and the interventions the wellness industry has begun to market around staying curious in later life are mostly downstream of personality dispositions that were set long before retirement.
The pattern is still worth naming. The older people who continue to be surprised by things are doing something the research does not yet fully understand, but that it has been able to measure for thirty years and counting. They are paying attention to what is in front of them as if it might be different from what they expected.
Most of the time it is not. Some of the time it is.
