The Brain Battle for Adventure - Novelty versus Safety

Now that I've been back from India for a couple weeks, I have slipped back into California life - eating salad, drinking tap water, not worrying about mosquitos. 

It's peaceful. It's comforting. It's less adventurous.

My daily life in California is more familiar than tromping around the Indian jungle, and that has positives and negatives. The positives are ample and easy to quantify - friends and family, safety, access to health services, ease of communicating with people of my own culture, comforts of home, fantastic restaurants steps from my door, 75 degree weather...the list goes on. I love them, appreciate them and don't take them for granted.

But with all of these positive things also comes a negative - I know these things - they are pleasant but they are not new. Experiencing them does not obviously increase my knowledge of the world to the same level that going to an unexplored place does. Coming up with notable material for my blog is harder. Life lacks that feeling of Indiana Jones, seat-of-your-pants adventure that only comes when you are actually dealing with a situation that is adventurous and...slightly dangerous.

So what is this? Why, when I don't actually enjoy danger in the moment, does it feel like something is missing in my routine experiences when I'm not getting hassled by election police or being threatened by elephants? 

The power of novelty

There is, in fact, a real scientific explanation - there is something missing. Not from the experience itself, but from the memory. Scientists have found that novelty actually causes your brain to retain details in long-term memory that would otherwise be ignored (full article from Huff Post here). To quote from the article:

"When our daily routine is suddenly disrupted by an experience that is truly novel, the mind "perks up." It makes good sense to activate the long-term memory mechanism in this case, because a new experience is likely to provide important new information that will be useful to an individual in the future, and so the experience should be added to the long-term memory store. In the brain, novelty is signaled by neurons that use the neurotransmitter dopamine. Dopamine circuits do not code sensory perceptions; instead they rev up the level of activity broadly across neural networks in the brain."

Now think about the novelty of being in a place that is drastically foreign to your own experience, in which people and animals are constantly doing things that you don't expect. That's some extreme mind perkiness.

Perhaps travel is primarily an activity urged by our brains to capture more context from which we can understand the world. You thought you wanted to sit on the beach and relax in the Bahamas, but guess what - your brain had another idea! Do you remember the details of your last vacation better than what you ate for dinner last week? Very likely you do. If you don't, you should take more exotic vacations.

I often recount when discussing my six months living in India in 2007 that just "being" was much more tiring than in the US. The heat, danger, and health consciousness were always the factors that I attributed to causing that feeling, but perhaps they were just drivers of this larger, more tiring experience - my brain was constantly "perked up."

So could this be a magic solution to remember more of your life? Could you constantly surround yourself with novelty and therefore actually remember more of your life when you're 100? 

The downside of novelty

Firstly, I will acknowledge that it's not a given that surrounding yourself with novelty for your entire life is even possible. Humans are adaptive creatures, and it's possible that a constant state of novelty in itself may become a "norm," thus defeating the purpose of the exercise.

But, assuming that living a life of constant novelty is possible, let's take a moment to contemplate a related and more important question- if you lived a life of pure novelty, could you make it to 100?

Living in a constant state of novelty is probably bad for you. There's ample scientific evidence that standard daily stress can have a range of negative health effects. Add to that the rush of "fight or flight" that your brain has to deal with when you get an adrenaline rush. Not knowing what's going on around you (novelty) can trigger adrenaline, causing potential on-going health problems.

Yet, if we lack any novelty or adrenaline over time many of us feel restless. Our feelings settle into boredom, which comes with its own negative health effects. Some people feel this wanderlust more than others, and some people take it to such an extreme that it's no longer wanderlust and becomes something dangerous. There are discussions of the negative effects of adrenaline addiction covering activities ranging from general corporate executive life to extreme sports like base jumping. 

Finding the balance

So if tapping away at corporate emails late into the night and tight-rope walking between sky-scrapers are both mentioned in discussions about "adrenaline addiction," then where should the line be drawn? How can we balance the memory-keeping novelty of adventure against adrenaline-junky daredevilism that will kill us before we can enjoy our extra memories? 

Additionally, what about the social and economic impact of adventure and exploration? What world would we live in if Neil Armstrong had decided to stay at home where it was safer?

While it seems like there should be a clear answer (perhaps you're thinking "when your activity becomes dangerous, idiot?"), cultural and personal definitions of danger and novelty vary drastically.

Where that line is drawn certainly depends on whose company you're in. On Indian standards I'm as tame as a kitten, on British standards I'm about average, and on American standards I'm a reckless daredevil. 

Measuring myself in the continuum

As a case study, I'm going to evaluate where I fit into this novelty v. safety debate.

As a quick summary, during my recent trip to India I: 

1) Saw wild elephants (on the side of the road!) and left the scene when they turned aggressive.

2) Ran out of petrol within the first 5 minutes of the road trip, then had to carry petrol in water bottles back to the car.

3) Hiked in Rudyard Kipling's jungle and watched an ROUS eat a jackfruit (technically an endangered Malabar giant flying squirrel).

4) Interviewed workers at tea and coffee plantations (because that's what I do for fun - I really should have been a journalist). 

5) Discovered how pepper grows (as a creeper/vine up trees!).

6) Fell in a river while hiking to see elephants (noting that grandmas and babies managed to cross this river without falling), and captured it on video for posterity.

7) Avoided a bombing in the neighborhood in Bangalore where I was staying (same week as the Boston Marathon bombing).

8) Had the car searched by election police (several times), and had to convince them that there was a reason a white woman had three sarees (for my bridesmaids!).

9) Had monkeys try to break into my room at night (and had a sleepless night after that!).

10) Contracted Lyme disease which, in a stroke of nearly unbelievable irony, is not an Indian disease but is very common in North America. It happened to have an unusual outbreak in the exact jungle where I stayed in India (don't worry, already got treatment)! 

Let's consider some comparisons from my chart (at top). I'm quite sure that I'm more out-going than the famous agoraphobics who were so terrified of going outside (and one could argue - novelty) that they were debilitated. Additionally, I think it's pretty clear that I seek travel and adventure more than a typical housewife, at least if we use June Cleaver and Marge Simpson as archetypes.

So then where do I stand in comparison to other adventurers and daredevils?

Let's take a look at some samples.

Adventurers:

1. Nellie Bly - Nellie was a pioneering female journalist in the 1880's who went undercover in a mental asylum and (prompted by Jules Verne's book) traveled around the world in 72 days.
2. Gertrude Bell - Gertrude was an English writer, traveller, political officer, administrator, archaeologist, spy and explorer in the Middle East in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She hung out with Lawrence of Arabia and played an instrumental role in the politics of the British colonial rule of the areas.
3. Isabella Bird - Isabella was an explorer, writer and naturalist who travelled by herself through North America, Hawaii, East Asia, India, the Middle East and North Africa  between the 1850's and 1880's.
4. Amelia Earhart - The most famous of this group, Amelia was the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic. She borders on "daredevil" since her attempt to circumnavigate the globe resulted in her death, but wait until you read the daredevil list!
5. Winston Churchill - Better known as the obese, cigar-smoking leader who led Britain through the triumph of WW2, Winston spent time in his earlier years fighting wars and reporting from the military actions in the far corners of India and Africa.

 Gertrude Bell, explorer and friend of Lawrence of Arabia

Famous daredevils:

1. Evel Knievel - a modern daredevil, Evel was famous for his ramp-to-ramp motorcycle jumps (including one with a rocket), and made the Guinness book of world records for the most bones broken in a lifetime. Not surprisingly, he died during a stunt.
2. Maria Spelterini - In 1876, Maria crossed the Niagara Gorge on a tightrope multiple times with increasing levels of difficulty including blindfolded and with her feet in baskets.
3. Ethel Dare - In the early 20th century, Ethel was a "wing-walker" - walking along the wings of airplanes while they flew, and was the first woman to ever jump from plane to plane while they were in the air.
4. Phillipe Petit - Philippe was famous in the 1970s for walking a tightrope stretched between the tops of the twin towers of the World Trade Center at a height of 1,368 ft. He was arrested, since this was illegal, but eventually let go due to the publicity.

Philippe Petit between the twin towers.

Conclusions

Clearly driving around in air-conditioned cars and staying in hotels doesn't qualify me for the adventurer list, no matter where in the world those experiences take place. Similarly, I don't live with a reckless disregard for my own life, as seems to be the case with the daredevil group. 

I do sincerely enjoy the novelty of new experiences, particularly as it relates to travel. With travel, all I have to do is get on a plane and arrive somewhere crazy to be entirely surrounded by novelty - it's easier than seeking novelty in a place that I know. And, as I've traveled the world to 38 countries now, my threshold for what I consider to be novel has certainly moved in the direction of more exotic locales and especially more exotic cultures. 

Yet, I get something else from these experiences that isn't covered in the scientific literature, perhaps because it needs to be covered by a discipline outside of the scope of the scientific method. 

From these experiences I not only get more vivid memories, I get context. With every novel experience, whether in my own backyard or on the other side of the world, I gain more information that helps me understand and appreciate the world that I live in, even the less-adventurous part.

And with that, I will set forth back into daily life as I always do after an adventure, with a renewed vigor for noticing and appreciating the extraordinary of the ordinary.