The Explorer's Gene
Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map
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4.2 • 5 Ratings
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
New York Times-bestselling author of Endure Alex Hutchinson returns with a fresh, provocative investigation into how exploration, uncertainty, and risk shape our behavior and help us find meaning.
Off the beaten path, following unmarked trails, we are wired to explore. More than just a need to get outside, the search for the unknown is a primal urge that has shaped the history of our species and continues to mold our behavior in ways we are only beginning to understand. In fact, the latest neuroscience suggests that exploration in any form—whether it’s trying a new restaurant, changing careers, or deciding to run a marathon—is an essential ingredient of human life. Exploration, it turns out, isn’t merely a hobby—it’s our story.
In this much-anticipated follow-up to his New York Times bestseller Endure, Alex Hutchinson refutes the myth that, in our fully mapped digital world, the age of exploration is dead. Instead, the itch to discover new things persists in all of us, expressed not just on the slopes of Everest but in the ways we work, play, and live. From paddling the lost rivers of the northern Canadian wilderness to the ocean-spanning voyages of the Polynesians to the search for next-generation quantum computers, The Explorer’s Gene combines riveting stories of exploration with cutting-edge insights from behavioral psychology and neuroscience, making a powerful case that our lives are better—more productive, more meaningful, and more fun—when we break our habits and chart a new path.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Outside columnist Hutchinson (Endure) offers an enlightening if overstuffed examination of why humans are "drawn to the unknown." Unpacking the anthropological origins of the urge to explore, he explains how early humans' "adaptive flexibility" drove them across oceans and helped them to survive in new and challenging environments, while the evolution of more complex planning skills and language enabled longer voyages. Such adventuring aided the evolution of the so-called "explorer's gene," a variant of dopamine receptor DRD4 that motivates people to seek out "unexpected rewards" and is especially prevalent in populations whose ancestors crossed vast distances, like the Cheyenne and the Mayans. Yet despite its many benefits—including providing personal growth and meaning—exploring has become increasingly difficult in a world rendered safer and less mysterious by technology, Hutchinson argues. His guidelines for finding rewarding sites of exploration include "choosing optimistically" in order to reduce regret and tackling challenges that meet an "intermediate level of novelty and complexity." Hutchinson's research fascinates, though the sheer volume of studies he cites—including a 2011 experiment in which preschoolers who weren't taught how to use a toy played with it longer and were more likely to discover its different features than those who were given instructions—can obscure the book's argumentative through line. Still, this is an intriguing argument for taking the road less traveled.
