IF you could spend a few minutes watching a gang of monkeys play, you’d soon identify the cautious “neophobes,” fearful of all things new, who peek at you from behind a barrier.

And you’d easily distinguish them from the outgoing “neophiles” and “neophiliacs,” who approach you in hopes of a treat, when the latter aren’t too busy showing off or fighting.

For that matter, if you’ve been acquainted with some skittish, extroverted and feisty cats or dogs, you’ve experienced firsthand what the nascent fields of animal emotion and personality have documented: The tendency to either approach or avoid novelty is the most important, stable behavioral difference among individuals in the same species, period.

We humans, too, show big personal differences in certain enduring attitudes toward newness and change. Even infants express preferences for familiar or unfamiliar objects.

Whether your own tendency is to approach or avoid novelty, or to think it over first, that temperamental inclination, which is about 50 percent inheritable, will be manifest in the things you do and the way you do them, from learning a skill to walking into a party of strangers.

Through the ages, scientists have proposed many theories to explain our varying reactions to the new and different. In the fifth century B.C., Hippocrates identified three categories: Optimistic, energetic neophiles who crave novelty he called “sanguine.” Fretful, moody neophobes were “melancholic.” Irritable, impulsive neophiliacs were “choleric.”

Modern psychologists assert that we vary quantitatively in our approach to the new. If you’re among the majority in the moderate middle, you express your affinity for novelty in countless everyday ways. Maybe you delight everyone at your office by figuring out how to do a boring job in a more interesting, efficient fashion. Perhaps you sign up for exotic vacations, or just choose a film from Bollywood instead of Hollywood.

Largely thanks to technological advances, biologically informed research on temperament is providing the best insights into neophilia. In his classic research on boldness and shyness, Jerome Kagan, a psychologist at Harvard University, exposed infants and small children to mildly stressful forms of novelty—noise, sour tastes, unfamiliar objects or people—while he monitored their behavioral and physiological responses. He found that certain fearless tots, most of them boys, clearly warranted the label of “bold.” Their physiological markers are a very low heart rate and a more active left brain. Their active, spontaneous behavior and zestful, bring-it-on attitude toward new things bespeaks the instinctive energy and drive that Freud called “libido.”

STORY Musgrave, best known as the astronaut who repaired the Hubble telescope while floating in space some 370 miles above Earth, expressed the neophiliac’s strong bold streak as a child on his family’s thousand-acre New England farm. Describing himself as a “born explorer,” he told me, “I was in the forests alone at night at the age of 3 and on the rivers in my home-built rafts at 5.” Musgrave would put in nearly 18,000 hours in civilian and military aircraft as pilot, instructor and acrobatics specialist. He would also make some 600 parachute jumps, including free falls to study human aerodynamics.

Supplying insight into the born thrill-seeker’s low-idling temperamental sangfroid, he said, “I’m a restless wanderer, but in a calm, serene and mindful way—certainly not agitated or frenetic.” Now retired from NASA, Musgrave said his personal goal has never been money or fame, but simply “to live on the high ground of ultimate performance just for the sake of it, with no other gain.”

An astronaut’s uninhibited approach to novelty exemplifies fearlessness, but a neophiliac’s behavior stems from more than just a lack of anxiety. Very bold individuals also respond more to reward than to punishment, and even react less strongly to what anyone else would consider agony.

In addition to boldness, neophiliacs are apt to have a strong streak of Hippocrates’s choleric disposition. This tendency to act first and ask questions later, which modern psychologists call “irritability” or “impulsivity,” comes in handy in the kind of high-octane situations that are familiar to Navy Seals and others of that feisty ilk. In primate populations, the trait overlaps substantially with a readiness to explore new environments, both physical and intellectual.

The legendary bongo-playing physicist Richard Feynman, who had a fine, if unremarkable, IQ of 125, exemplified the creative neophiliac’s flexible, open attitude toward new experiences and ways of thinking. In addition to his Nobel Prize-winning contributions to quantum physics, he was a passionate traveler, joker, artist and samba aficionado. He married three times, experimented with psychedelic drugs and sometimes saw the numerals in black-printed equations in living color.

Great innovators like Feynman often have a rugged, uncensored, warts-and-all view of life, which causes them to notice many things, including negative ones, that others gloss over. Colleagues of Feynman’s, after releasing some bit of labor-intensive research, often found that he had reached the same conclusions long before they did, but, unimpressed, he hadn’t bothered to publish his results. “These people set their own goals,” creativity researcher Dean Simonton said.

MOST people at the extreme ends of the cautious-bold continuum are born with a strong genetic push in one direction or the other. Yet given the right experiences, some who begin life as shy neophobes develop into bold neophiles. The new field of epigenetics, which examines how genes are expressed in the real world, increasingly reveals the ways in which nurture sculpts a person’s inborn disposition into “second nature.” It’s hard to imagine a better illustration of this than Eleanor Roosevelt.

As a child, she would have fit right in with the most inhibited of Kagan’s young research subjects—temperamentally high-strung neophobes—often described as “sensitive” or “shy.” This group includes a sizable number of boys, but more are girls. These children generally have a more active right brain, which is linked to anxiety and moodiness, and their heart rates and other indicators of stress measure higher than average.

Young Eleanor was described by her biographer Joseph Lash as insecure, starved for affection and convinced of her own ugliness. But the shy girl’s life began to change when, at the age of 15, she attended a London finishing school. A feminist educator there taught her to be independent and think for herself, and Eleanor returned to New York with a notable increase in self-confidence and openness.

Despite her status as a wealthy debutante, she overcame her natural reserve well enough to serve as a social worker in New York City’s slums. Before long, she escorted her distant cousin and future husband, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a dashing and bold young Harvard student, on a tour of the pestilent tenements, which moved him.

After Franklin Roosevelt became president, and after Eleanor discovered his first affair, she turned mostly to women for friendship and probably romance. In addition, Eleanor had a very close relationship with her handsome, athletic male bodyguard, who may also have been a lover.

The once timid little “Granny” mastered many roles, including politician, social activist, world traveler, author, speaker and delegate to the United Nations General Assembly. A famous New Yorker cartoon shows a stunned coal miner deep in a tunnel watching a shining flashlight beam headed his way. The caption reads, “For gosh sakes, here comes Mrs. Roosevelt!”

Even for born neophobes, change is obviously possible.

NEOPHILIA, our genius for dealing with all things new, enabled early humans to adapt to droughts and floods, experiment with new technologies and venture into unknown territory in search of resources. By 10,000 years ago, however, many of our ancestors had become farmers in settlements. Living in large groups increased intellectual stimulation as well as safety, and our early agrarian forebears could devote more of their explorative energy to creative achievements, both cerebral and practical.

About 8,000 years ago, they invented written symbols to represent words, for example, and 3,000 years after that, sanitary drains and public baths. On the other hand, big populations also required more rules and regulations for keeping order, which gave rise to what we’ve come to think of as “the establishment.” Then, as now, the powers that be imposed limits on novelty seeking and cast unauthorized questions and quests as crude, subversive or even heretical.

The history of curiosity testifies to society’s strong influence in determining whether neophilia is a virtue or a vice. Even the philosophical Greeks and Romans were wary of inquiring too deeply into the way things are. Christianity only intensified this wariness.

“The desire to search for something hidden by God for good reason was a deliberate violation of the order of things,” says literary scholar Barbara Benedict. In an era of rigidly stratified classes, asking too many questions was regarded as insubordinate in the social as well as religious sphere. “To uncover what is hidden was associated with ambition,” Benedict says. “By wanting to know more and be more than other people, you were overstepping your status.”

Like individual rights, the concept of curiosity as a laudable urge is an innovation from the Age of Reason. By the early 18th century, John Locke generated a tidal wave of intellectual neophilia. His theory of empiricism stated that true knowledge is based not on faith or revelation but on experience, ideally supported by evidence or experimentation. This bold assertion was a giant step toward establishing science’s primacy in determining truth and our modern ideas about the self’s uniqueness and importance.

“Almost like a little god,” explains Benedict, “you had the ability to make your own identity by experiencing the world around you.”

The accelerating Industrial Revolution also encouraged neophilia by swelling the ranks of a prosperous, independent-minded middle class. Europe’s booming imperialistic economies expanded people’s worldviews by flooding the market with exotic foreign commodities as well as the first cheap books, which circulated the latest incendiary ideas and adventure stories. It’s no accident that Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), which chronicled the protagonist’s New World encounters with the new and different, became a best-seller.

The West’s new open-mindedness transformed even wealthy grandees who took up shockingly novel pursuits, such as assembling the first scientific collections of rocks, fossils and other things previously thought worthless. The Enlightenment had an even more galvanizing effect on society’s lower and middle strata. Increased literacy helped to advance the idea that anyone of any station could choose what to buy, read or think—even women. Suddenly, to be inquisitive no longer meant overstepping your place.

THE English language began to reflect these major social and psychological changes. The word “curiosity” had previously referred to a rare, foreign or artfully made object. But now it was also applied to an inquiring state of mind, and “curious” to the person who cultivated it. “Interesting” underwent a similar evolution. The word had traditionally meant “important” and was also applied to objects, such as artwork. By 1800, however, it also referred to one’s subjective evaluation of a thing’s capacity to draw and hold one’s attention—an increasingly important concern.

The very different state of boredom—the unpleasant sense that nothing interests you—is largely a modern condition. The word itself has no derivation; “boredom” stems from no other word but was specially created, and not until the late 18th century. Before then, a feeling of disinterest was considered to be a moral and intellectual failure. By declaring that “when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life,” Samuel Johnson (1709-84) asserted that it’s your own fault if you can’t find things to interest you. Upper-class women of Johnson’s day agreed. Despite the strictures imposed upon them, they took responsibility for the quality of their lives, arranged to spend a lot of time enjoying one another’s company, and weren’t bored.

Ultimately, the conviction that boredom was your own damned fault began to weaken. Tedium was increasingly blamed on social and physical environments that failed to engage. Charles Dickens first referred to boredom in an 1836 pamphlet, in which he attributed workingmen’s drunkenness on Sundays to the Sabbath’s lack of structure. By 1852, he used the term six times in Bleak House.

In the 21st century, few would agree with Oscar Wilde’s old-fashioned assertion that ennui is “the one sin for which there is no forgiveness.” Our increasingly fidgety behavior in queues and other public settings suggests that the whole culture’s threshold for tedium lowers by the day. Forced to withstand more than a few minutes in one of the shrinking number of places not wired for perpetual TV, we fiddle with our smart gadgets, hoping for a headline, text or ball-game score to check, and engage in the old-fashioned pastime of daydreaming only as a last resort.

NO matter what specific chores they perform, all of our smart electronic tools produce novelty. From its beginnings, the Information Age has been about better, easier access to new data, more and more kinds all day long and wherever we go.

According to the University of California at San Diego’s appropriately named How Much Information project, we now consume about 100,000 words each day from various media. That’s a whopping 350-percent increase, measured in bytes, over what we crunched back in 1980.

There’s a lot of griping about TMI and ADD, but anthropologist Robert Kozinets suspects that most of it pertains to the workplace, where a person might indeed feel overwhelmed by unwelcome rings, pings and flashing lights.

“It’s almost as if we live in two worlds,” he says, “because in our leisure time, we’re more and more focused.” His favorite example is the expansion of fandom. These days, using the Internet, sports and celebrity fanatics can revel in almost instantaneous information.

Internet access, coupled with eminently portable laptops and smartphones, also liberates us in certain ways from traditional categories. The old boundaries between the home and the workplace or school grow fuzzier by the day. Thanks to blogs and web sites like YouTube and Amazon, the lines between “amateur” and “professional” have also blurred: Anyone can consume culture and develop expertise, or hone their latent talents. About 15 percent of Americans now engage in serious photography, videography or filmmaking.

But now that the Internet provides so much art for free, many creative people worry about survival, as do the flagging industries that formerly supported them. Rather than seeing artists as an endangered species, however, marketing guru Seth Godin says, “They’re the only people who are going to make money 10 years from now, because the way you make money is from your ideas.”

SHEPERD Fairey earns millions each year, even though his art is free—unless you want a signed, limited-edition piece or an image to put on a corporate T-shirt. Those cost a lot, says Godin, “but the only reason people pay is because his free ideas are everywhere.” Similarly, although the music business is ailing, there is more music than ever being made and listened to. “The digital thing took away the requirement that you need an orchestra to write a symphony,” Godin says.

Eric von Hippel, an innovation expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management, conducted research in England showing that individual consumers, often aided by the Internet, spent twice as much money over a three-year period as UK companies did on inventing new products and tweaking existing ones, particularly scientific tools and sports equipment. In a creative response to their generation’s disastrously high unemployment rate, an eclectic group of millionaires in their 20s who founded their own Internet businesses recently formed the nonprofit Young Entrepreneur Council, which advises others on how to start companies rather than wait around for traditional jobs.

That’s only the beginning. Information technology has given us an immediate, you-are-there way to see everything from revolutions to oil spills, and to react negatively or offer a helping hand. Our smart tools also pull us together in new communities oriented around important issues. The notion of “collective intelligence” first surfaced in the early 20th century, when American entomologist William Morton Wheeler observed that a colony of ants could cooperatively act as a “superorganism.” The term has gone through many iterations, but now mostly refers to the cognitive surge that occurs when people and their computers are connected to one another. Instead of just thinking singly, we cogitate as a hive.

Neophiliacs are particularly attuned to the sociological transformations under way in the Information Age. One example is the way we think about culture: In what some critics view as a society ever more superficial, anthropologist Grant McCracken sees a tumultuous, yet vibrant, work in progress in which the old modifiers of “high” and “low” no longer apply. “These kids are so good at media that they don’t have any of that hesitation of ‘Oh, this isn’t something I can afford to take seriously—it’s not high culture,’” McCracken says. “They gave up that ambivalence and embrace pop culture as culture, which makes a big difference in your life.”

A SURPRISING number of works from this more expansive culture not only entertain us but also offer the kind of spiritual and philosophical uplift traditionally supplied by high art and religion. Hugely successful films such as Avatar, Lord of the Rings and the Harry Potter tales are full of bits of ancient wisdom, psychology, sociology and theology. Their fans are interested not only in sex and violence, but also in existential and moral questions. Such entertainments have become myths and sagas that, like the Bible and the Bhagavad Gita, help people grapple with big issues, life’s meaning included. “From one perspective, Cain and Abel is just a story, too,” Kozinets says.

Some of our more fast-paced entertainments help us figure out our more complicated lives by providing new information on how other people cope. In the popular fascination with how the rich and famous handle marriage and adultery, obesity and anorexia, McCracken sees our desire to “audition the change” instead of trying it at home.

“By serving as vehicles of self-transformation,” he says, “the stars allow us to watch others explore life’s options almost like they were in a laboratory. They change themselves so that we don’t have to.” The Air Force puts an X before the names of its experimental aircraft, such as the X-15 fighter jet, and McCracken thinks that actress Lindsay Lohan deserves an X before her name, too. “She’s an experimental creature who becomes a kind of object lesson in transformational activity.”

Before the likes of The Bachelor and Temptation Island, says media scholar Robert Thompson of Syracuse University, our insight into what actually went on when people were romantically interested in each other was limited to personal experience and the secondhand, furtive and limited information gained from friends’ reports, overheard comments, steamy novels and scripted movies. As much as he enjoyed Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail, he says, “those films are to real relationships what a Greek temple is to a ranch house.”

Its many benefits aside, the new technology supplies information, not knowledge or meaning. Aristotle said a society should be judged on its capacity for contemplation as well as productivity and pleasure. Facts alone are not enough to establish real understanding, which requires context and reflection.

As psychologist Barry Schwartz of Swarthmore College says, “The experience that comes from thinking hard for a while about a subject is no longer available to some people, because they don’t stay on the task long enough to get to that point. Commitment has become a kind of dirty word.” The Internet’s capacity to generate superficial novelty is epitomized by the meme: a cultural tidbit, from a catchy anecdote to a joke to an image that spreads rapidly through society, now usually electronically.

Some memes are amusing, creative or informative, like the self-explanatory song called “United Breaks Guitars,” which caused a brief, but precipitous, drop in the airline’s stock. However, memes can also cause harm—as racist and misogynistic ones do—spread falsehoods and waste time.

“One thought in the mimetic community is that ideas are parasites that don’t care what they do to their host as long as it helps them to spread,” Godin says. “The Tea Party—or the Communist Party—is a political meme that doesn’t care if it destroys the country, because its only job is to reproduce.”

Technology’s way of undermining deep thinking was the focus of a much-remarked-upon front-page story in the New York Times titled “We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint.” The piece examined the consequences of the military’s increasing dependence on the Microsoft program, which magically reduces the most complicated matters to wonderfully clear talking points and charts. As Brigadier General H. R. McMaster, a veteran of the war in Iraq, put it, PowerPoint is “dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control. Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.”

Even on campus, the hope that our society can satisfy Aristotle’s criterion of contemplation seems endangered. Original thinking arises from a foundation of serious learning, but college professors complain that the concept of research has contracted to the point that really good students go to the fourth or fifth page of a Google search, while most settle for the first one or two.

Neuroscientist Jane Joseph of the University of South Carolina is struck by the way in which some young people casually resort to plagiarism without realizing that it’s a problem: “They just paste in something they got online as an answer on a test. Then they say, ‘What? That’s wrong?’” Like the proverbial kids in the candy store, we neophiles need to think about our consumption of data in much the same way we think about food. A healthy information diet requires the self-control to focus on the nutritious new things that have long-term value and ignore the junk that compromises our mental and emotional fitness.

Winifred Gallagher is the author of Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life and House Thinking. This is an excerpt from her book New: Understanding Our Need for Novelty and Change, to be published January 2, 2012, by Penguin Press.

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