The Explorer’s Gene: Why Our Brains Are Built for Bold Moves
Neuroscience, history, and psychology converge in Alex Hutchinson’s new book to explain our deep human need to step into the unknown.
You’re an explorer.
You might not feel like one—especially on days when you’re buried in to-do lists and stuck on autopilot. But adventure is your birthright; it’s written into your DNA. And if life’s starting to feel like a loop, it might be time to wake up the part of you that craves the unknown.
Alex Hutchinson can help you do just that.
A New York Times bestselling author, longtime Outside columnist, and National Magazine Award–winning journalist, Alex has spent years investigating the science of endurance and the psychology of pushing beyond your limits. In his new book, The Explorer’s Gene: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map, he reveals how our built-in drive to explore can make life richer, more meaningful—and a lot more fun.
1. We’re wired to explore.
About 50,000 years ago, a random genetic mutation changed one of the dopamine receptors in the brains of some of our ancestors, which in turn changed how we respond to the prospect of discovering something new. At around the same time, our ancestors started spreading rapidly outward from Africa and Europe until they’d settled literally every habitable spot on the globe. There are a lot of reasons populations move around, but it’s almost impossible to end up in places like Easter Island, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, unless you’re deliberately setting out to explore the unknown.
That same dopamine circuitry still drives our behavior today, and dopamine sometimes gets a bad rap: We’re “addicted” to the dopamine hits we get from our phones, social media, and so on. But it’s worth remembering why we have that circuitry in the first place: in the right context, it spurs us to get out of our comfort zones and discover new and better things. The challenge is figuring out how to harness that drive in a productive way.
In the modern world, “exploring” can mean a lot of different things. It could be parasailing to the South Pole, but it could also be trying a new food, swiping right on a dating app, or quitting your job to launch a business. And there are lots of reasons that you might choose to explore or not to explore in any given situation. But the evidence from anthropology, evolutionary biology, and neuroscience suggests that, if all else is equal, we’re wired to prefer the uncharted path.
2. Break your habits.
About 45 percent of the actions you take in a given day are driven by habit, so good habits are definitely important. But it’s easy to get stuck in suboptimal routines. One of the reasons exploration is so important is that it helps us break free of these ruts and find new ways of doing things, so that we’re continually building up a suite of better and better habits.
A great example of this was when workers on the London Underground system went on strike in 2014. For two days, millions of commuters had to adapt to a series of unpredictable closures and service changes. When regular service resumed, most commuters were happy to return to their usual routine. But among the most hyper-regular commuters—people who followed the same route from home to work every morning and reversed it every evening—about five percent of them adopted a totally new commuting pattern after the strike. Even though they’d been doing the same thing day after day for years, it wasn’t until circumstances forced them to explore that they discovered a better option.
“It’s easy to get stuck in suboptimal routines.”
You can see a similar pattern in the way we order food. Researchers from Harvard analyzed 1.6 million orders from a food delivery company called Deliveroo. They found that exploring has a cost. When people ordered from a new restaurant, they typically rated the meal lower than when they re-ordered from a previous favorite. But in the long term, even though they dealt with the occasional bad meal, exploring also helped them find new restaurants that they liked better than their previous favorites, so their average meal ratings crept up over time as they added the good discoveries to their rotation and discarded the duds. Sticking with your habits is comfortable in the short term, but exploring pays off in the long run.
3. Explore then exploit.
Back in 1991, a management professor at Stanford University named James March introduced the idea of the “explore/exploit dilemma.” In many situations, you have a choice between sticking with what you know has worked in the past or trying something new and different. This dilemma shows up everywhere. It’s the choice between sticking with your usual order at your favorite restaurant versus trying the special. On a much larger scale, it’s also the choice between upping your R&D budget versus spending more on advertising your current product line.
Both options are important. If you always exploit, you’ll never make any progress or discover anything new. But if you always explore, you’ll never have a chance to take advantage of what you’ve discovered. So how do you balance the two?
A scientist at Northwestern University named Dashun Wang was studying this problem when he visited the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. He noticed a curious pattern: before 1888, Van Gogh’s work was all over the map; he continually explored different styles, mediums, and subjects. After 1888, he focused on what became his most famous and distinctive style. Wang subsequently studied the career trajectories of tens of thousands of artists, scientists, and movie directors, finding that this pattern recurred: their best work tended to emerge after a period of exploration followed by a period of exploitation. Neither exploring nor exploiting is sufficient on its own; it’s the combination of both that drives success.
4. Seek the uncertainty sweet spot.
The idea that we’re wired to explore might seem to suggest that we love uncertainty. But that’s not quite right. We don’t love being lost or confused. And we don’t love uncertainty itself; we love the feeling of reducing uncertainty. If you’re in a totally predictable environment, there’s no uncertainty to reduce, and you’ll quickly get bored. But if you’re in a maximally chaotic environment, like being lost in the jungle, that’s too much uncertainty, and you won’t be able to figure out how to reduce it there, either. You want the sweet spot in the middle with enough uncertainty to be interesting but not so much that it’s unintelligible.
“Trust your sense of curiosity and fun.”
A good example of this effect is our taste in music. If you can always predict the next note in a song, you’ll find it boring. But if you can never predict it, you’ll find it frustrating. When Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring debuted in 1913, it almost caused a riot because its sounds were so unexpected. One critic’s take was: “The music always goes to the note next to the one you expect.” But over time, people got used to the sounds and became better at predicting what note would come next, and The Rite of Spring became one of the most famous and influential orchestral works of the 20th century. The music itself hadn’t changed, but people’s expectations had, so instead of being too unpredictable, it was in that sweet spot of intermediate uncertainty.
So how do you find this uncertainty sweet spot? A good approach is to follow your nose—to trust your sense of curiosity and fun. Some scientists now believe that the reason we find play enjoyable is that we’re tapping into that feeling of seeking out and then reducing uncertainty about the world around us. If you find something interesting or intriguing, that’s a good sign that it’s in your personal uncertainty sweet spot.
5. Embrace the struggle.
I recently had to assemble a complicated bunk bed from IKEA for my daughters. It was, in many ways, a horrendous ordeal. But I’m very proud of the result. And in fact, researchers have found that we tend to value furniture that we assemble ourselves higher than we’d value the identical item if it came pre-assembled. If we’re selling it, we ask for a higher price. This is called the IKEA effect, and it’s an example of a broader phenomenon that psychologists call the effort paradox. Sometimes having to struggle with something makes us value it more than if it was easy. On some level, this is why we run marathons, climb mountains, and maybe even have children.
Exploring isn’t easy. It usually involves uncertainty, risk, and the possibility of failure. Deciding to explore is what the mythologist Joseph Campbell called “a bold beginning of uncertain outcome.” But the effort paradox tells us that this struggle isn’t just the price we pay for the long-term benefits of exploring—it’s actually one of the reasons we like exploring. Psychologists have found that the more we derive a sense of meaning from doing hard things, the happier and more successful we’re likely to be.
When Joseph Campbell talked about the Hero’s Journey, he sometimes gave the advice to “follow your bliss.” But he eventually realized that this slogan gave people the wrong idea. So he updated his advice to “follow your blisters.” I think that’s a good message to keep in mind. Finding a place to explore in your life means following paths where the outcome is unclear. And if the going gets tough, that’s not a problem—it’s actually the point.
Thanks for sharing your ideas, Alex!