I’ll never forget the first time I stepped off the edge of my personal map.
I must have been five years old when I wandered away from my yard one summer with two neighbour kids. Until then, the limit of my independent world was the single block around my house.
We made our way street by street to the farthest side of my hometown, a place I’d never been to and didn’t know how to get back from. A strange sense of pleasure fluttered in my stomach as I walked, and it grew stronger the farther I went.
This drive to discover is deeply human, and as today’s guest will tell you, it might even be encoded in our genes.
Alex Hutchinson draws on the latest insights from neuroscience and behavioural psychology to show how the urge to explore shaped our species, and how it continues to direct our actions, even when we’re sitting on the sofa.
Alex is the author of The Explorer’s Gene, and Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance. He’s a National Magazine Award-winning science journalist and columnist for Outside magazine. He was also a long-distance runner for the Canadian national team.
You can read more about him on his website, and follow him on Instagram, Facebook and X.
We spoke about the explore-exploit dilemma, memorizing a route versus mapping a landscape, and how to find the sweet spot between predictability and chaos in your own exploring life.
These are the books we mentioned in the podcast:
We also mentioned:
Ghost Riders by Richard Grant
The World Beyond Your Head by Matthew Crawford
Filterworld by Kyle Chayka
You can listen to Personal Landscapes: Conversations on Books About Place on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, Podbean, Google Podcasts, Audible, PlayerFM, and TuneIn + Alexa.
Please subscribe, and rate the podcast or leave a review.
Your support is greatly appreciated.
