Is there more than one kind of curiosity? I found myself reflecting on this after reading a recent study about different curiosity styles. An analysis of 483,000 Wikipedia users found that people pursue their curiosity in three ways. Some browse articles as ‘hunters’, targeting ‘specific answers in a projectile path’, and their interests are more likely to be in science and technology. Others are nomadic ‘busybodies’, who explore more, building broad, loose networks of knowledge; they gravitate toward arts, culture and the humanities.

A third group are the ‘dancers’ – a little harder to define, they tend to leap ‘in creative breaks with tradition across typically siloed areas of knowledge’, taking an unstructured and inventive approach to information-seeking, across radically different subjects.

This made me wonder what kind of curious I am. When I’m reporting as a science journalist, I tend to adopt the ‘hunter’ style. This helps me meet deadlines, but am I missing out on the serendipity of discovering knowledge like the busybody or the dancer? I’d like to believe I’m curious about the world, but realising that other people’s curiosity might be more nomadic or creative gives me pause.

Another downside to the hunter style is that it’s associated with what’s called ‘deprivation curiosity’. This is the desire to banish the discomforts of uncertainty and lack of knowledge. It can lead people to accept easy answers or false facts. It also correlates with overconfidence in one’s worldview, and lower wellbeing. I hope I’m not motivated by deprivation curiosity when I’m hunting knowledge, but I can’t guarantee that’s always true.

The psychologist William James described curiosity as ‘the impulse towards better cognition’. If I take his words and the Wikipedia study to heart, perhaps I ought to be more curious about my curiosity.

There is a special kind of boredom that comes from listening to people talk about their dreams, so I’ll spare you. It’s enough to relay that I was being relentlessly chased by a rather large and ornery capybara, and that the incident was extremely trying. Then, a couple days later, I came across a passage in E R Dodds’s classic The Greeks and the Irrational (1951) that really made me laugh. Homer, or the bards he represents, clearly suffered from the same anxiety-inducing nightmare of being chased as I did – as we all do – because he describes an event in the Iliad like this: ‘as in a dream one flees and another cannot pursue him – the one cannot stir to escape, nor the other to pursue him – so Achilles could not overtake Hector in running, nor Hector escape him.’

Those moments of recognition across gulfs of time and culture are always affirming. No matter our differences, we’re all afflicted by the same dreamy frustration of trying to get away. But, as usually happens with the ancients, recognition swiftly gives way to strangeness. Dodds says that the Greeks often took their dreams to be messages from the gods, in which an authoritative personage is dispatched to inform the dreamer what’s going to happen or what needs to be done. Homer himself naturally became a common emissary, telling Socrates the date of his death and giving Alexander the Great some much-needed encouragement.

Given how demented dreams seem when reviewed in the light of day, I’m glad that they aren’t likely to be missives from the higher-ups. But it’s still a comforting thought that, regardless of how we interpret our dreams, all of us take a nightly sojourn into the phantasmagoric realms – and wake up wondering what the hell it all means.

Outside work, I run. I love it, mostly – it’s my own form of mindfulness. But aching legs and bleeding toes are inevitable. So I was intrigued to hear the ultrarunner Courtney Dauwalter describe in a recent short film how she overcomes pain during a 100-mile race.

Research suggests that ultrarunners like Dauwalter have a higher pain tolerance than the general population. Perhaps their bodies are different, but it also appears to be mental. Dauwalter describes how her mind helps her push through pain. After hours on her feet, she explains, she enters her ‘pain cave’: a place where only mental grit is left.

What particularly struck me was Dauwalter’s approach when inside the cave. Initially, her instinct was to leave. Indeed, she quit her first 100-miler. But now she applies curiosity instead: she explores the cave’s walls, and expands them. ‘I put on my hard hat, I grab a chisel and I imagine going into the very back corners of that cave and just digging into the work,’ she says. ‘Each time I go in the cave, it’s getting bigger for the next visit.’

I find that helpful. Now, when running gets uncomfortable, I remind myself I’ve felt similar before, and survived. Through this, I’m reaching ever-longer distances, curious about how far I can go.

I’m reminded of an observation the novelist Haruki Murakami makes in his memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (2007) – ‘Say you’re running and you start to think, Man this hurts, I can’t take it anymore. The hurt part is an unavoidable reality, but whether or not you can stand any more is up to the runner himself.’

You don’t need to run to find insight from these runners. In life, we all spend some time in our own personal pain caves, especially when stretching ourselves. Pain is unavoidable. The good news is that our tolerance can rise.