17 Reasons to Explore More Now

An antidote to malaise, boredom, and the modern condition.

Post summary

• We’re speaking with Alex Hutchinson about his new book The Explorer’s Gene: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map.

• I asked Alex 17 questions about exploration—why humans are driven to explore, the benefits of exploration, how exploration is changing, and how we can explore more today.

• I gained so much insight into my own life from Alex’s book and our exchange below, and I hope you will, too.

Housekeeping

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• Thanks to our partners, who make exploring your home a little less toxic:

  • Jaspr air purifiers. You might recognize their name from our coverage of the easiest ways to avoid microplastics and our Holiday Gear Not Stuff Gift Guide. I’m psyched because I think using a Jaspr is arguably the easiest thing you can do to improve your health—all you have to do is plug it in and remember to breathe. Having a Jaspr in my room definitely improved my sleep, and I love watching the Jaspr in our kitchen kick on and filter our air after my frequent cooking disasters.

Audio/podcast version

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The post

Alex Hutchinson has a new book: The Explorer’s Gene: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map.

For those of you who don’t know, Alex is someone I’ve followed and admired for a long time. Alex got his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Cambridge and then pivoted into writing about human performance.

He’s my favorite writer on the topic. His Sweat Science column at Outside is a go-to, and his last book—Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance—is arguably the best read on the topic of endurance.

That’s why I was thrilled when Alex emailed me a few years ago and said he was beginning to write a book about exploration.

Exploration is a topic near and dear to my heart. I covered the topic lightly in my book, Scarcity Brain. But having a journalist of Alex’s caliber write a book entirely about exploration is a dream come true. I read The Explorer’s Gene—and Alex delivered. It’s a fascinating read.

I wanted you all to get a sense of Alex’s new book, so he agreed to answer a few questions for Two Percent.

You’ll learn:

• Why exploration is critical to being a human.

• Why humans are hardwired to seek the unknown.

• The truth about dopamine and how it factors into exploration.

• Whether humans are unique in our ability to explore.

• Another (surprising) animal that is a badass explorer.

• How a wild occurrence 50,000 years ago allowed humans to conquer the globe.

• Why living well requires pushing yourself into new experiences.

• How exploration is changing, and why that’s not necessarily a good thing.

• The downsides of technology and how it’s altering the rewards we get from exploration.

• Why Alex thinks I should change “Burn The Ships” to “Eat The Camels.”

• How endurance and exploration are related (overlaps between Alex’s books).

• How writing the book changed Alex’s everyday behaviors (and why those changes led his children to complain about his driving).

• How we can explore cities for better experiences.

• How you can explore every single day.

Let’s roll …

Michael: What got you interested in exploration?

Alex: When I was 15, a friend suggested we go on a “canoe trip” in Algonquin Park. I didn’t even know what that was, but we went and spent a week of incredible adventure and—since we were pretty incompetent—brutal hardship deep in the woods. I’ve been hooked ever since, and I don’t think a year has passed where I don’t take at least one trip that involves making huge efforts to get to places where I can pretend no one has ever been before. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, but I love it.

When we think of exploration, we tend to think of Columbus or George Mallory—i.e., we imagine big outdoor jaunts into uncharted territories. But exploration, you argue, can be much simpler. What else qualifies as exploration?

The classic example that scientists who study exploring always use is ordering food in a restaurant. Do you stick with the pad thai, or do you try some of the funky stuff on the last page of the menu? We’re always facing decisions like that, where you either stick with what you know or venture off into the unknown.

For me, it was thinking about a tough career dilemma—and the fact that I always seem to be pulled toward whatever’s new and different—that got me thinking about the topic and eventually led to writing a book about it.

You argue that humans are sort of “wired” to seek the unknown. Why?

Well, that’s the only way I can explain some of the dumb things I do ...

But actually, it’s not just me. There’s evidence from neuroscience and evolutionary biology that our brains are wired with an “uncertainty bonus” that makes things we don’t know much about seem more attractive and interesting to us.

This shows up in real life, for example, when scientists analyze millions of orders from food delivery companies: all else being equal, we tend to prefer ordering from restaurants we know less about.

How does our neurochemistry factor into exploration?

The easy answer is dopamine, although the dopamine story gets oversimplified. The key thing to understand is that you don’t get a hit of dopamine when something is “good”; you get it when something is “better than expected.”

That’s called reward prediction error, and it plays a role in behaviors like addiction, because to keep surprising yourself you need a bigger and bigger dose.

But it also drives you to explore, because you’re more likely to encounter something that’s better than expected when you don’t already know what to expect.

Are humans unique among mammals in our desire and ability to explore? How so?

It’s a difference of degree. We have the same basic exploring circuitry as other mammals, but we push it to extremes.

We seem to be the only ones who explore even when we have plenty of resources and aren’t overcrowded where we are. On the other hand, that might be more about ability than desire: maybe bonobos would send missions to the South Pole if they had boats and Gore-Tex.

What other animals are impressive with exploration?

Maybe not a popular choice for your Australian readers, but cane toads are pretty badass. They’ve been sweeping across the continent since 1935, and what’s cool is that they’ve been evolving to become more and more exploratory.

Initially, they were spreading into about six miles of new territory per year; these days, it’s 40 miles a year. The toads on the “frontier” are way more curious than the average toad, and they also have longer legs and a better sense of direction. Bad for the local ecosystem, but impressive.

Break down the story of humans and exploration. How did different Homo explore, and how does Homosapien exploration compare?

The whole “out of Africa” thing happened over and over again, starting a few million years ago. Our ancestors made it to Europe and Asia, and so did other Homo species like Neanderthals.

But that’s as far as they made it, even though the Neanderthals were hanging around Europe for hundreds of thousands of years.

Then, around 50,000 years ago, two things happened. There was a random mutation that changed one of our dopamine receptors, making some people more attracted to novelty. And our ancestors started spreading like kudzu until they settled literally every habitable spot on the globe, from Easter Island to Alaska.

Are some people and groups more prone to exploration than others?

I mentioned the mutation that changed dopamine receptors. It’s more common in populations that migrated far away from Africa than in those that hung around Europe.

The highest levels—like 80 percent—are in South America. And there are almost certainly other gene variants that tip the scales in one direction or the other.

Still, it’s really important to understand that we all have the same basic reward and novelty-seeking circuitry. Nobody is wired to never explore. It’s just that some people have the volume turned up a little higher.

Why does living well today require pushing ourselves into new places and experiences?

There are two ways to answer that.

One is that exploring works by getting out of your comfort zone—you discover new and better things. You may not find a new continent, but you’ll end up with better restaurant meals, a faster route to work, a more successful career, and so on.

The other is that exploring feels good. Heading into the unknown, facing challenges, and overcoming them gives you a sense of meaning. Both reasons are good, but personally it’s the second one that moves the needle for me.

Is exploration changing today? How so, and is that good or bad?

Hang on, let me just grab my Grumpy Old Man hat ...

Okay, there’s a lot to say about stuff like social media, which hijacks your reward system to give you the illusion of exploring without giving you any of the payoff, and GPS, which robs you of the necessity of ever having to look around and figure out where you are.

But the biggest change I’d highlight is the transition from active to passive exploration.

Our world is now so carefully curated that it’s possible to float through life without ever stopping to decide where you really want to go.

What’s your favorite story of exploration you stumbled upon while you researched the book?

Not to keep picking on the Australians, but the Burke and Wills expedition has it all: epic deeds, incredible setting, hilarious misadventures, and—well, I won’t spoil the ending, but it’s a doozy.

It was the first expedition to make it across the interior of Australia, in 1861, but making it back turned out to be one of the great adventure stories of all time, up there with Shackleton and the Endurance.

Personally, I think you should honor it by changing the name of your “Burn the Ships” feature to “Eat the Camels.”

Your last book, Endure, looked at the topic of endurance. How do some of the topics from Endure play into exploration?

The way I think about it, Endure was about how we push our limits. This book is fundamentally about why we push them.

What drives us to exit our comfort zone and take on the risks and struggles that are inevitable in exploring?

There’s a great line from Chris Brasher, who helped pace Roger Bannister to the first sub-four-minute mile and went on to found the London Marathon, about how running a marathon has become “the great suburban Everest.”

I think taking on endurance challenges and exploring new ideas or places are all scratching the same basic itch.

What’s your favorite sentence or paragraph from the book?

I love the line from the philosopher Bernard Suits about what he called “the Alexandrian condition,” after Alexander the Great: “When there are no more worlds to conquer we are filled not with satisfaction but despair.”

But if you’re talking about words I wrote myself, I’ll go with the passage from intro, about the crazy Newfoundland hike I did with my family, where my kids were being driven nuts by rain and swarms of black flies: “But there were no exits from this hike. No roads traverse this part of Newfoundland. The boat was gone, and so was our cell signal. The only way out was onward.”

How did writing this book compare to writing Endure?

Oof, it was way harder.

I’d spent a decade reporting on the science of endurance before I started writing a book about it, so I knew the territory really well.

In contrast, writing about exploring was a leap into new territory for me—not to get too meta about it, but it really felt like exploring.

Even just simple things like getting people to return my calls was harder, because no one in the field knew me.

In keeping with the thesis of my book, it ended up being really rewarding—but my god, it was hard.

How did writing The Explorer’s Gene change your everyday behaviors?

Probably the most concrete thing is that I’ve really cut back on my use of turn-by-turn navigation when I’m walking or driving around.

I try to figure out where I’m going, form a mental map of the route, then follow it.

That’s based on some of the research I encountered on how our brains respond to the ways we navigate through the world.

It’s been fun, but I’m also getting used to my kids chirping me from the back seat: “Mommy wouldn’t have missed that turn. Mommy uses Waze. Why don’t you use Waze?”

How can we apply the ideas from your book to a city?

I live in Toronto, which is a city of three million people. It’s not exactly a wilderness. But there’s a river a block from my house, so I recently bought some kayaks so my kids and I can walk down to the river and go paddling.

I grew up in the neighborhood, so I know the area really well, but I’m seeing it from new angles and finding new places to explore. It’s been fun.

Of course, cities also have more uniquely urban opportunities to explore. I recently went to a Nigerian restaurant for the first time, and it was awesome!

What are little ways we can explore every day?

There are so many ways of injecting a little exploration in your daily life: listen to new music, walk a different route home, take up new hobby, and so on.

You’ve heard all this advice before, and it’s all good. But the challenge I’d leave your readers with is to ask themselves whether they’re doing anything this week, or this month, or even this year, that they weren’t doing five years ago, and where they don’t already know how it’s going to turn out.

As adults, it’s very easy to get locked into a set of habits—but if habits are all you’ve got, it’s time to shake things up.

Have fun, don’t die, explore, and buy Alex’s book.

-Michael