Travel: Brain Booster or Time Waster?
My recent post on five antidotes to job burnout unleashed a torrent of responses, many of them offering further suggestions on how to recharge your batteries. Among the commenters was darije.djokic who asserted, "The only true antidote is proper vacation (meaning distracting enough, long enough -- those lasting less than a week are useless, two to three are a must -- and frequent enough)." As a big fan of travel, I won't disagree, but perhaps this reader has only part of the story about vacations.
Travel helps boost our brain power and increases mental flexibility, according to a thought-provoking piece by Jonah Lehrer in the San Francisco Panorama (Hat tip to Ben Casnocha):
Several new science papers suggest that getting away--and it doesn't even matter where you're going--is an essential habit of effective thinking. It's not about vacation, or relaxation, or sipping daiquiris on an unspoiled tropical beach: it's about the tedious act itself, putting some miles between home and wherever you happen to spend the night....
The larger lesson, though, is that our thoughts are shackled by the familiar. The brain is a neural tangle of near infinite possibility, which means that it spends a lot of time and energy choosing what not to notice. As a result, creativity is traded away for efficiency; we think in literal prose, not symbolist poetry. A bit of distance, however, helps loosen the chains of cognition, making it easier to see something new in the old; the mundane is grasped from a slightly more abstract perspective.But not everyone agrees about the benefits of travel. Blogger Penelope Trunk has laid out four reasons travel is a waste of time, including that "you don't necessarily learn from people in other cultures." Trunk goes on to relay an anecdote about how she once went to stay on a French farm but found it too different and hated it, so she ran off to stay with big city cousins who were just like her. Perhaps then, not learning from different cultures has more to do with how Trunk in particular travels than anything inherent in travel generally. Still, her point is worth pondering -- is all travel beneficial for our brains, only particular types of travel that challenge us, or is getting away usually really just running away from our problems?
(Image of man in Jeep by bongo vongo, CC 2.0)