Novelty and Surprise (1 Letter) Re "What's New? A Penchant for Novelty Has Benefits" (Findings, Feb. 14): John Tierney's article brought to mind another question: What's unexpected? Attention to anomalies seems likely to be an even more basic trait than attention to novelty, and it may well derive from behavior of evolutionary significance. Identifying anomalies plays an important role in science: Anomalies tell us that our observations do not fit the theory and that we may have come across an area for further research. Caroline Herzenberg Chicago