Why You Should Get Lost More Often

The benefits of exploration for joy, health, and work — a Q&A with Alex Hutchinson.

Is the drive to explore new places and ideas embedded in human biology? In a rapidly changing work world, should we all be exploring a little more? Can trying new things actually be good for your health?

These are the kinds of questions at the heart of a new book, The Explorer’s Gene: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map, out today.

The author, Alex Hutchinson, is one of the best science writers working today. In past lives Alex has been a physicist and a miler on the Canadian national team. (Given my recent posts on hobbies, I also feel obliged to mention that he’s a jazz saxophonist.) As a writer, I think the highest compliment I can give is this: Alex previously wrote a book about the role of the brain in endurance — a topic I had also been thinking about taking on. But I read his version and thought: Well, that’s covered.

I invited Alex to chat about the new book. Below is a shortened version of our conversation.

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David Epstein: There’s a part in the introduction of this book that resonated with me in a way that few things ever have. You describe your own winding path — competitive runner, then physicist, then journalist, then bestselling author (of Endure), and then rather than brand yourself with that bestseller you go explore something different in this book. Having been a competitive runner, and having also moved from doing science to writing about it, and having also then written a bestseller (The Sports Gene), and then — rather than branding myself as The Sports Gene guy — immediately taken a left turn to do something else, man did I feel like I was reading about myself. I’ve never seen my own experience written about that exactly by someone else. And given that I agonized over all these trajectory changes, I’m wondering how you decided even to take on this book, given how different it is from the last one.

Alex Hutchinson: There are a few things to say here. One is that I don't know that I would have had the courage to do it if you hadn't done it. Maybe this is too much buttering you up to go in your newsletter —

DE: Wait really? I had no idea! I’m honored. So butter away…

AH: I've watched your career trajectory closely and I’ve been impressed at some of the risks you took, and I've been pleased to see them play out well. And so seeing what you did after The Sports Gene, I know enough about the journalism world to know the pressures both internal and external that would have been pressing on you to do more of the same. I felt them too, after Endure. It's nice to see other people break the mold in the way that you're considering breaking it. So why did I want to break the mold? I think the simplest explanation I can give is that I thought about writing Endure Two or something, and it just didn't seem fun to me. [A project] is about making a living, and it's about finding fulfillment, but it's also about having fun. And I realized that that's essentially why I left physics too. I found physics really intellectually stimulating and interesting, but it didn't seem as fun to me anymore, and I decided to see if I could find something that's fun.

DE: Not to belabor the buttering, but I didn’t expect to show up in your answer, but we have had conversations about changing direction over the years.

AH: And those have played a big role in me trying to think about what's possible, what's feasible, and what's worthwhile.

DE: Possible, feasible, worthwhile, I like it. Aside from us navel-gazing about the writing life, what we’re talking about here is the so-called “explore-exploit dilemma.” This idea is at the core of The Explorer’s Gene, and, I think, arguably the fundamental challenge for individuals in a fast-changing world. So can you explain what that is?

AH: The classic illustration is: you're sitting in a restaurant that you've been to before. You know you like the burger. It's a reliable, good meal. But a server walks by with the special, and you're like, “Oh, man, I've never had that before. I wonder if that's going to be better than the burger.” You have to weigh a reliable outcome against the possibility of something that might be better or might be worse, but it's unknown. So that’s a simple example. If you're a company, it’s: do you invest in marketing what you have, or do you increase your R&D budget to try and come up with a new product? The explore-exploit dilemma recurs at micro and macro scales. Once you start thinking in those terms, you see it everywhere.

DE: This idea that permeates the book, how we think about the benefits of learning new stuff versus doubling down on stuff we already know. And the early part of the book goes through research showing that humans are really wired for exploration, or driven to learn new stuff in a pretty unique way. You have this amazing story early in the book where scientists are trying to settle a debate over whether humans could have possibly gotten to Tahiti on purpose, because it’s so remote, or whether it had to have been an accidental shipwreck or something. So the scientists enlist this Micronesian guy who knows traditional navigational skills, and they have him try making it to Tahiti with no navigational equipment. And he does it! And this story leads into research showing how embedded exploration is in our bodies and brains, and genomes. Speaking of genetics, you write about the DRD4 gene, a certain version of which appears to predispose people to ADHD. And so one might think of it as maladaptive, and yet, it has hung around in our genomes. Why?

AH: It’s not that there's one gene that explains it all, right, so let me just get that out of the way. But there's some really interesting stuff about this DRD4. It’s linked to ancient migration patterns, but also behaviors like ADHD, and risk seeking, and so why is it still around? I think one way to think of it is that in any group it's useful to have people who are pushing at the boundaries, trying new things, and it's useful to have people who are conserving knowledge.

There's research on the Ariaal tribe in Kenya that compares traditional hunter-gatherers to settled agriculturalists, and among the hunter-gatherers, having this ADHD-linked gene is associated with being better nourished, whereas among the agriculturalists it's associated with being less well nourished. You can kind of extrapolate that to the traits that make a nine-year-old boy a real pain in the neck in a classroom, but might actually be really useful in groups — certainly in hunter-gatherers — to have people who are always pushing around the next corner, never sitting still, trying to figure out what opportunities might be out there. I do think it's an illustration of the fact that different propensities for seeking out novelty can be useful in different contexts, and that there's not one right way to be.

DE: Some behaviors we think of as maladaptive are only maladaptive if, say, you want that nine-year-old boy to sit still for 10 hours in a row. It also makes me think of the work of professor Abbie Griffin on “serial innovators,” people who make repeated creative contributions to their organizations. One of the descriptors she gives of them is: “they appear to flit among ideas.” That doesn't usually sound like a compliment, but these are people who are coming up with novel solutions all the time. And maybe at times it’s annoying that they flit among ideas, but they’re probably just more attracted to novelty, and it’s really useful to have those explorer types in the mix.

AH: I think there are some serial innovators who are such serial innovators that they're really only interested in the discovery. And so if you were optimizing over a single person, you might say once you have a good idea you need to buckle down and carry that idea forward. But we don't have to do that in the context of a society. You can have one person who is continually exploring, generating ideas, and you can have other people who are really good at exploiting those ideas. And that's what any good organization has, I think.

DE: I want to go back to the DRD4 gene for a second, because that first “D” stands for dopamine. The gene plays a role in dopamine signalling. And we think of dopamine as the chemical messenger that gives you a sense of pleasure when you eat sugar, or do drugs, or scroll social media or whatever. But in the book you give a more complex picture of dopamine. Can you explain that?

AH: One thing I finally accepted is that dopamine has a lot of roles and scientists don't agree on exactly what it’s doing. The picture of dopamine that I think is useful in this context is that dopamine is a marker of prediction error. You don't get a hit of dopamine when something is good; you get a hit of dopamine when something is better than expected. And you can think about this in the context of addiction: the first time you take a drug, you're like, “Wow. This is way better than I expected. I need more.” The tenth time you take it, you're like, “Oh, this is exactly what I expected, therefore I need a bigger dose.” You can't do the same thing over and over and continue to get a dopamine hit. And that's why social media algorithms are very good at continually giving us something unexpected. They're trying to make sure that you're surprised. But this aspect of dopamine also translates into a fundamental drive for novelty. What's the best way of finding something that's better than you expected? It's to go in the direction where you don't have any expectations, where you don't know what to expect.

DE: So aside from utility, is that an argument for exploring, or pursuing the unknown just for pleasure?

AH: In terms of why we should explore, there are two ways to answer that question. One is because it gets you good things in the long run. If you have a healthy amount of exploring in your life, you're going to discover newer and better things. But the other is that it feels good, it’s forcing you to discover new things, and it’s fun. And those two reasons, they were originally the same. The reason exploring feels good to us is because it was evolutionarily adaptive. It brought us good things. In modern life, sometimes those things diverge, in the same way that sugar tastes good to us because it's a marker of calories, but now we can choose to eat sugar when we don't need calories, so it's not always a good sign. So I think we can make a parallel to exploring: we should want to explore because it feels good, and in the long run it's going to produce good outcomes. But these days those don’t always lead to the same answers. Social media algorithms are optimized to tap into that circuitry that makes surprising things feel good, but those social media things generally don't lead to better outcomes in the long term. They don't lead to great discoveries and creating knowledge. So we've dissociated the feel-good from the better outcomes.

DE: So sometimes the good feeling of novelty and the utility of it are now decoupled. But you also cover persuasive research arguing not just that exploration still increases the chance of good outcomes in the long term, but that this is especially important in a world of rapidly changing work. Exploration is important just to keep up, and most of us should probably be exploring a bit more. You go through some of Northwestern professor Dashun Wang’s work, and I love his stuff because where some researchers will have 26 subjects in a study he’ll have 26,000 or something.

AH: It's crazy. So Dashun Wang started by looking at hot streaks in careers, and he came up with this way of analyzing the career trajectories of huge numbers of people by using machine learning. You plug in all the data and you say: okay, if you're a scientist, for example, when did you produce your papers that had the biggest impact on the field? And he found that most people have hot streaks. You will produce a higher-than-expected proportion of your really good work in a streak, but it’s very hard to determine when in a career that will happen. It’s not just a certain age. And so you want to know, how do we bring on these hot streaks? And the pattern he noticed goes back to this explore-exploit dilemma. It's not that you need to always explore more, and it's not that you just need to do 10,000 hours and exploit more. You need a mix of both, and you need them in the right order. In this vast data set of thousands of artists, film directors, and scientists, the chance of a hot streak was highest if you had a period of exploration first, followed by a period of exploitation. So you spend a bunch of time casting widely, looking around for new ideas, and then when you find a good one, you say, “Okay, now this idea I’m going to chew on for a little while.”

DE: Van Gogh, as you know, is in the dataset for that particular paper, and I wrote about Van Gogh’s fascinating career arc in Range. And he was sort of emblematic of this in the extreme. He would go through these very targeted, intense experiments — like painting only in black, and then no black at all — and then he takes from the experiments and forges a new style, and then focuses in and explodes. And basically every painting of his that most people would recognize is from just a two- or three-year period — his hot streak — after that exploration. For some of the scientists in Dashun’s work, in the explore phase they work with smaller teams, and switch teams, and only when they shift to exploit does the team grow. All that said, if you don’t have this exploration phase, your chance of having a hot streak isn’t zero, right?

AH: Yes, it’s not zero. Things can happen a million different ways, but we’re talking about the optimal way of getting it. And there's this broader body of research suggesting that science is getting less disruptive, less innovative, less creative, and that this is actually happening across fields, and that it corresponds to a drop in interdisciplinarity, in working with different people, in working across different fields. And so I think this ties into the incentive structure — and I think not just in science — which is to become more specialized, to choose your focus, to narrow in and pick your specialty maybe before you've done the exploration that might tell you what that best specialty is.

DE: Premature optimization, as the software engineers might say…Maybe this is a good time to say that, as an advocate of broadening one’s horizons, I suffered from a severe bout of confirmation bias while reading certain parts of your book. And what you just said reminded me of a paper showing that Nobel laureate scientists progressed more slowly early in their careers than their peers in part because they were more interdisciplinary.

But back to this issue of creativity. One of the stunning facts in the book is that, even while IQ scores rose steadily and dramatically for about a century, scores on the most widely used creativity test have declined. That’s wild. What are we to make of this?

AH: It’s hard to measure creativity, so there's understandable debate about these tests. But you can look and see we’ve had to make the scoring a little easier. Starting in the 1990s, scores started to drop. And the most recent check was, I think, between 2008 and 2017, and the rate of decline actually got steeper. I think it's hard not to look at the time scale and think about not just the decline of free play in kids but also the rise of algorithm-driven entertainment. That’s all speculative…

DE: A lot of algorithm-driven stuff is extremely passive consumption.

AH: Back when you and I were walking uphill both ways to school, we were doing a lot of creative play. We were making up characters, we were making up rules, playing different games every day. It’s much more passive now, and it's much more sort of everyone playing the same thing because it's being fed from the same master spoon. And again, this is not proof or anything like that, but it's not surprising to think that scores on tests of creativity have been dropping.

DE: There’s a fascinating anecdote in the book where you give the physical childhood ranges of a family lineage — how far each member could roam as a child.

AH: This was comparing each generation when they were eight years old. It goes from six miles for the great-grandfather, to one mile to a local forest for the grandfather, then half a mile for the mother, and then today the kid is allowed to walk 300 yards to the end of his block. That's a big constriction. No wonder he wants to play on his iPad. Going outside sucks. He can go 300 yards and none of his friends are there because they're all inside.

DE: Youch. Well, that definitely dovetails with the Q&A I did with Jonathan Haidt [the most popular post so far on Range Widely].

There’s so much in The Explorer’s Gene that we’ve only just scratched the surface, but I want to end on another benefit of exploration. We talked about utility — finding better stuff and having work hot streaks — and we talked about the pleasure of novelty. But what about health? I saw a talk by a neuroscientist recently, about healthy brain aging, and he cited the usual things — sleep, nutrition, exercise — but then he said that doing new things is like “power washing” for your brain because it clears metabolic waste.

AH: I heard that from a few people I interviewed. And there were some studies with people taking up digital photography, or quilting, or stuff like that. And it's not that learning to click the camera makes you healthier, it's struggling with something new. I would draw a direct analogy to switching off the turn-by-turn directions on your navigation system. It’s like being a beginner at finding your way from A to B. You're paying attention; you're cognitively mapping the landscape. And I think the same thing is true when you're learning something new, you're having to map new ideas, and it uses the same structures in the brain. We can go into autopilot in so many things in our lives. We learn efficient ways of doing things, and we stay in those efficient ways of doing things, and so we stop using the parts of our brain that allow us to assimilate new things. And those parts of the brain are, for example, the hippocampus, and a smaller hippocampus is associated with cognitive decline and a lot of other cognitive ills associated with aging. So, yeah, I think it's a good idea to be lost occasionally, whether it's in your neighborhood or — as I have been — lost at the climbing gym trying to figure out how on earth am I supposed to get up this wall? I don't know how; I'm terrible at climbing, but I think it's good for me to be terrible and lost at things sometimes.

Thanks for reading, and The Explorer’s Gene is out today. If you enjoyed this post, please share it.

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Until next time…
David