For many writers, the logical followup to a successful book is a sequel. For Alex Hutchinson, it was his reluctance to go down that path that led to his new book, The Explorer’s Gene: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map. In it, he examines the ways in which humans’ need to explore is expressed in all areas of our lives.
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When Alex’s last book, Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance, became a bestseller, the standard advice he received was to write more on the same topic. But he had been passionate about writing Endure, and the idea of a sequel didn’t hold the same appeal. “I started to kind of wonder why,” he says. “Why can’t I just settle that this is what I wanted? This is what I was dreaming for. Why is it that I want to try something different? And that grew into a sort of investigation of trying to understand how these motivations work, but it turned out to be a big topic and one that took more years than I expected to get any sort of insights about.” Those insights ultimately led him to write The Explorer’s Gene.
He initially thought that the book would be “a case for exploring why we should explore more, what’s so wonderful about exploring,” but he came to realize that the topic was more complex. “You can think of it in terms of this dichotomy between exploring and exploiting. If you’re exploiting, it’s like, ‘I’m a company that makes widgets. I’m going to invest more money in making the widgets slightly better and marketing the widgets and trying to sell more widgets.’ Or are you going to explore and say, ‘Maybe we can invent something completely different that will make our widgets obsolete and make us even more money, but it’s going to take time and resources and it’s uncertain whether we’ll be able to invent something.’
“The other way of thinking about exploring and exploiting is you go to your favorite restaurant. Do you order the same dish that you always order? ‘Cause you know it’s good and you know you like it. Or do you order the special, which you don’t know? Maybe it’s going to blow your mind or maybe it’s going to be just not interesting to you. Do you take the known good outcome or the uncertain outcome, which might be better, but might be worse?
“This is a situation that recurs on every scale throughout our lives, from the minute decisions to the big tactical decisions of do I marry this person or do we break up or whatever? And so what I realized is just saying, ‘You need to explore more,’ that’s on its own. That advice is like, ‘Never get married because who knows, maybe you’ll meet someone even better next week.’ So it’s not about ‘Exploring is the best thing in the world.’ It’s about a balance between exploring and exploiting.”
As we age though, the balance shifts. “As you get older, you explore less. And so there’s a couple of questions here. The first question is, ‘Is it smart?’ Yes, to some extent, because we know a lot more about the world. And so I don’t need to explore as much because I can exploit the knowledge I already have. And this is a sort of universal pattern of exploring and exploiting that the longer you have, the more it makes sense to keep exploring.
“Music is an example. People tend to be most active in seeking new music when they’re 18, 19, 20, 21. Part of this is social, like you’re out there experiencing the world. But part of it is if you find good music, you’ve got 50 years to enjoy that amazing music. Now, I turned 50 this year and it’s like, if I discover a new band, I’m only going to just enjoy it for another 20 years, right? Or I don’t know, like whatever. Hopefully I’ve got many more years. But the point is you have a shorter horizon to enjoy new things. So the value of exploring gets lower and lower.
“So it makes sense to explore less as you get older, but the question is, do we overcompensate? In one study, about 20 % of older people really overcompensated and stopped exploring. And that’s a problem. If you’re someone who never takes a risk or tries something new, then you’re probably missing out on some opportunities to discover new and valuable things.”
You’re also potentially putting your health at risk. As Alex explains, “We store memories in our hippocampus. We store spatial knowledge in our hippocampus. And so one of the hallmarks of this trajectory towards less exploring is that our hippocampuses get smaller. But the problem is smaller hippocampuses are associated with a lot of bad things. It’s associated with risk of Alzheimer’s, risk of depression, vulnerability to PTSD.”
Additionally, active, rather than passive, exploration is what keeps the brain active and healthy. “If you choose to follow your interests, follow your curiosity to go somewhere, do something, or read about something, if you take that information you’re exposed to in your exploration and you share it with somebody else, they’re just being shown it passively. They didn’t choose. They’re just being given what you chose to explore, and the two of you will have very different experiences. Your brains will assimilate that information differently. The brain being fed information passively is not rewiring itself in the same way. This is not a call for everyone to go sign up for a hike to the North Pole or whatever. It’s a call to follow your curiosity and to actively choose to pursue the things that interest you, as opposed to just kind of floating along on the stream of what society is throwing at you.”
It’s important to follow your own interests, but in the end, what truly matters is the journey itself. “Alfred Hitchcock famously talked about MacGuffins. In all of his movies, there’d be something that everyone was pursuing. In reality, in his view at least, the something that they were pursuing, the Maltese Falcon or whatever it is that they’re trying to figure out, it’s irrelevant. What people want to watch is the pursuit. As long as the characters behave in a way as though this goal, this Holy Grail, is worth achieving, it doesn’t really matter what the Grail is. What matters is the adventures we have en route.”
Resources
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