Information is interesting when it’s relatable

What makes something interesting?. Maybe the best way to answer this question is to understand what information is not interesting. A piece of information is not interesting when it’s you have fully understood it, or it’s not relevant at all to you. If I tell you that the earth is round, you probably won’t find that interesting because it’s something that you have known. If I talk about software architecture to my 3-year-old, she probably won’t find that interesting because she wouldn’t be able to relate.

You can think about two of the examples above as an opposite extreme of a spectrum, therefore something is interesting when a piece of information is falling in the sweet spot of that spectrum. It’s something that you can relate to, but you haven’t fully grasped it yet. You may find them relevant to you because of your personal goal or to your previous experience.

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Ref

Mihaly, Flow (p. 52).

Sam liked it - the experience resonated with previous things he had enjoyed doing, with feelings he had about nature and beauty, with priorities about what was important that he had established over the years. He felt the experience was something good, something worth seeking out again. Thus he built this accidental event into a structure of goals - […]

James Marshall’s answer to What makes a thing interesting? - Quora (opens new window)

We find something interesting whenever we encounter something new that we are able to at least partially relate to our existing knowledge, experience or thoughts to give us some level of understanding of that information, without being able to fully integrate it into our existing knowledge. information that is already known and fully understood is not interesting. […]