The human urge to explore has taken us to every corner of the planet. From the highest peaks to far-flung islands to even the deepest dimensions of an idea, our species has an innate drive to venture into the unknown.
But what exactly drives this need to explore? Is it genetic, cognitive, or something else entirely?
Here to unpack this question is Alex Hutchinson, author of The Explorers Gene: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map. Today on the show, Alex shares the fascinating science behind our exploratory tendencies, from the dopamine-driven “explorer’s gene” that varies across populations to the universal cognitive frameworks that govern how we navigate both physical and mental landscapes. He explains the delicate balance between exploring new possibilities and exploiting what we already know, and why we sometimes find meaning in difficult challenges. We also discuss why younger people explore more than older people do, how this decline in exploration doesn’t have to be inevitable, and how to keep exploring throughout your entire life.
Resources Related to the Podcast
- Alex’s previous appearances on the AoM podcast:
- AoM Podcast #534: How Navigation Makes Us Human
- The Wundt Curve
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Read the Transcript
Brett McKay: Brett McKay here. And welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. The human urge to explore has taken us to every corner of the planet. From the highest peaks to far flung islands to even the deepest dimensions of an idea. Our species has an innate drive to venture into the unknown. What’s behind this need to explore? Is it genetic, cognitive or something else entirely? Here to unpack this question is Alex Hutchinson, author of The Explorer’s Gene: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map. Today on the show, Alex shares the fascinating science behind our exploratory tendencies. From the dopamine driven explorer’s gene that varies across populations to the universal cognitive frameworks that govern how we navigate both physical and mental landscapes. He explains the delicate balance between exploring new possibilities and exploiting what we already know and why we sometimes find meaning in difficult challenges. We also discuss why younger people explore more than older people do, how this decline in exploration doesn’t have to be an inevitability, and how to keep exploring throughout your entire life. After the show’s over, check out our shownotes at aom.is/explore. All right, Alex Hutchinson, welcome back to the show.
Alex Hutchinson: Thanks Brad. It’s great to be back.
Brett McKay: So you got a new book out called The Explorer’s Gene: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map. I’ve known you and I’m sure a lot of our listeners know you as the endurance and running guy. But something I didn’t know about you is that you also enjoy backpacking, but you like to backpack in really, really remote places. What’s been the most remote trip you’ve been on?
Alex Hutchinson: That’s a good question. And I should clarify that. I’m not a real exploring guy. I don’t go like parasailing to the South Pole or anything like that. But I definitely like to go places where I can imagine that I’m in the middle of nowhere. I did a trip with my wife on the south coast of Tasmania. The whole southern part of Tasmania is basically like empty. And there’s a route called the South Coast Track. It was originally blazed in the begin… Early 1900s as a way for shipwrecked sailors. ‘Cause the ocean’s really crazy down there and so people would sometimes wash up on the south shore of Tasmania and then they’d have no way of getting back to civilization. So there’s a track that just basically follows the whole south coast of Tasmania to get back to the the one road that leads down there. So you drive down to the south east east corner. Then you take a little two seater plane out to the southwest corner and land on a little patch of gravel and then you hike back for a week. So that was a trip where it was like, yeah, if something goes wrong, there’s no way of hiking out. You need to be rescued, basically.
Brett McKay: And then some of these trips you’ve taken your kids on as well.
Alex Hutchinson: Yeah, I don’t know if anyone from Children’s aid is listening to this podcast please press mute now so I don’t get in trouble. Yeah, we definitely dial it down for the kids. But both my wife and I love, we just love being out in the backcountry. And so we didn’t want to just like turn that off for 10 years while our kids were young. So we tried to find ways of having adventures that have become steadily, frankly, steadily a little more crazy as the kids have gotten older. But at the very beginning, I remember like when our youngest kids were still like, I don’t know, six months old, we did a camping trip, for example, where it was a 400 meter walk in or 400 yard walk in to camp. And so 400, it’s not a long way to travel, but it’s still enough that instead of camping where you’re 10ft from the next tent and 10ft from the one after that. We were just trying to find ways of feeling like we’re in the forest. And yeah, we’ve started to push it a little farther and we go on hiking trips and camping trips with them.
Brett McKay: So how did your backpacking hobby get you thinking about what causes humans to explore?
Alex Hutchinson: Yeah, it’s funny. So for a while I was writing adventure travel articles for the New York Times. And so basically every time my wife and I would go for a crazy vacation, I’d then write about it for The Times. And I started to notice a pattern. Like you don’t want to write the same article over and over again. But in every article I was like, we’re in whatever, Nepal or we’re in Papua New guinea or we’re in Australia and there’s this beautiful hike that everyone does. And so we decided not to do that hike. We decided to go to this miserable place that’s covered in leeches and is hard to get to and do this hard thing to get away from everybody. And I started to wonder like, what is it that’s driving me, like, the reason people go to the popular places is because they’re really nice. Why am I going to the less nice places just to get away from people? Because I’m not, I’m generally like, I actually quite like people. I’m not like a people hater or anything like that. But somehow on these trips, I was really drawn to the idea of getting out into the unknown.
And I didn’t really know why. I didn’t know what I was looking for. And I started to see connections with other parts of my life in whether it’s career choices or ordering in a restaurant or whatever, that I have this drive to find out, to try the new thing, to try the unknown thing. And I wondered what that was all about.
Brett McKay: Yeah, and you talk about this in your book. You’ve kind of explored with your own career. You started off as a physicist, and then you moved to writing about outdoor adventures, writing about sports, science. And, I mean, there’s been this constant shift in your career.
Alex Hutchinson: Yeah. And it was like, I feel like everyone gets one mulligan. Right. So I started out studying physics, and I went pretty far in that. I did a PhD and was working as a researcher. And then when I was 28, I was like, yeah, this is not for me. And I went back and did a journalism degree and became a journalist. And so, fine, okay. Well, it took me a while to find myself, but then in my mid-40s, I’d kind of gotten where I wanted to go as a journalist. I was writing about topics that really interested me, the science of endurance. And I had a book that came out in 2018 called Endure, which was really kind of bringing together all my reporting on the science of endurance. And it did actually quite a bit better than I expected. And so it set me up to kind of like, okay, my career is that I can be the science of endurance guy for the rest of my working days and kind of milk that and I should get to work on Endure II. And it all made sense, except that I just… The subtext was like, it doesn’t sound that fun to me. I don’t want to write Endear 2. I want to do something different.
And at this point, I was like, well, I had a career swerve in my 20s going from physics to journalism, but to do it again, it’s like, hang on, maybe I’ve got something wrong with my wiring that I just can’t settle down and enjoy what I’ve worked hard to achieve. And is this a good thing? Is this helping me discover the world or is it meaning that I’m going to be wandering around, never actually finding what I’m looking for? So that kind of seeded the idea of the book.
Brett McKay: Oh, let’s talk about humans and exploration. So, humans, we’re everywhere on planet Earth. Most animals, they kind of like an area where they’re at. They might expand across a continent, but then they don’t go any further. Like, humans are everywhere. Even in the most remote places where you wouldn’t expect humans to be, they’re there. Are humans the only animals that explore, or are there other animals that explore in the way that humans explore?
Alex Hutchinson: Yeah, there’s a debate on this. So on one end of the spectrum, there’s a view that humans are unique. Not that they have, like, some trait that nobody else have, but just in terms of the degree to which we explore, that we’re maybe the only species that even when things are good, when we’ve got enough resources and enough space, we’re still pushing on to find somewhere else. So you can imagine, like, how did we get from Europe to Asia? Well, maybe there was a bad weather, a famine, or it was crowded and people spread out. But when you’re looking at, like, how did we get to Easter Island? It’s like, yeah, no, nobody gets to Easter island because it was a little too crowded where they were. You only get to Easter island by being like, I want to know what’s over that horizon, and I’m going to go sail in that direction. And so to what extent are other animals like this? You know, I talked to some scientists who are like it’s same like maple trees have spread pretty far across large swaths of the planet.
They’re not exploring. They just have seeds that blow in the wind. And so I guess where I would come down on this is that humans are uniquely exploring, but it’s a matter of degree, not that they have some gene that nobody, no other animal has.
Brett McKay: Well, one thing you do in this chapter where you try to figure out if humans are unique in the way they explore, is that you look at Polynesians and how they spread and settled across islands of the Pacific. And I love this chapter because my family, we went to Hawaii for the first time last year, and I remember there, being there and thinking, man, this is kind of crazy. Like, how did humans end up on these islands way out in the Pacific? So how could understanding how Polynesians spread across thousands of miles in the Pacific help us understand how humans explore?
Alex Hutchinson: Yeah, so in this debate that I was just talking about of like, is there something different about humans? Water crossings become this crucial test of, like, okay a maple seed can blow in the wind, cross a long distance, but it’s not crossing the ocean. And so what size of water crossing tells you that it’s not just someone drifted off, but that they’re like, let’s go see how far we can get. And even getting to Australia, some people view that as the first concrete evidence of, like, modern humanity. Australia was separated. Even in ancient times, when sea levels were different, there was enough water crossings that someone had to have, like, technology and the kind of thinking ahead and planning and imagining what life might be like in a different place even to get to Australia. But if you move beyond Australia, then it’s like, okay, once you get to Polynesia, the distances are so crazy that one could argue that you can only get there if you’ve got some desire to sail off into the unknown. Because it’s not just like, hey, in the distance, I see a dot there. It’s like, no, there’s nothing there.
And you can take your boat and you can sail out three days and there’s still nothing there. And so then either you turn back because you need to fresh water or whatever, or you’re like, no, we’re going to stock up for a long voyage and we’re going to keep going. And there was a really famous academic debate in the 1950s and ’60s and ’70s between people who thought Polynesians, to get there, they must have had this voyaging culture where they could figure out where they were going without the benefit of GPS, and they could sail long distances, like more than 300 miles in their little slender catamarans built with… They didn’t necessarily have big trees on their islands. So a lot of cases, it’s like little pieces of wood kind of sewn together, and there was a strong view. There’s a guy named Andrew Sharp, a historian, who was like, there is no way. The only way they made it to these islands was by being blown off course or by being banished. And most of them died. But occasionally someone would make it to one of these islands.
And that led to this famous voyage. In the 1970s, there was the Polynesian Voyaging Society. They built a traditional boat, and they’re like, we’re going to sail from Hawaii to Tahiti, which is like 900 miles or something like that. We’re going to do it with no technology. We’re not even bringing watches, because being able to tell time is useful for navigating. We’re going to navigate by the stars and we’re going to prove that, yeah, it’s possible to navigate using traditional knowledge. And they did it, they made it. That doesn’t prove that that’s what happened in the past. But I think the general consensus, based on sort of all the lines of evidence, is that, yeah, it required deliberate exploration to go and settle these islands again, to, like to the extent of places like Easter island, where it’s like, no… It wasn’t just random chance that people ended up there.
Brett McKay: So with human exploration, there’s intention behind it. It’s not just like a wolf who kind of happens to wander into new territory. For humans, it’s like the Moana lyrics. See the line where the sky meets the sea, it calls me.
Alex Hutchinson: It calls me. Yeah, exactly. Because lots of animals spread out and normally it’s like, yeah, you’re looking for food you don’t see any here. Let’s try over there. Oh, over here’s pretty nice. Maybe I’ll actually make my den over here. To set out on a water crossing. It’s like, there’s another concept that I came across in the book, which is this idea of expanding the adjacent possible. So if they look at patterns of how people discover new music on Spotify or even how they write new articles on Wikipedia, most of the way people expand into new territory, whether it’s intellectual or physical, is you take where you are and you take one step beyond the border of what you know you’re expanding. And so when you’re expanding on land, you can expand the adjacent possible, but you can’t get to Easter island by expanding the adjacent possible. You have to stand there at the border of your island or your shore and imagine what might be completely out of sight and why it might be nice to get there, what you might get out of it. So it’s a real imaginative leap, and it requires, like, there’s a lot of reasons not to get on a boat and sail out into the ocean, not knowing where you’re going or what lies over the horizon. So there has to be some strong intrinsic drive that pulls you to take on this seemingly crazy challenge.
Brett McKay: Oh, let’s talk about that intrinsic drive. So your book is called The Explorer’s Gene. Is there a gene in humans that nudges people to explore?
Alex Hutchinson: Yeah. I will confess that the Explorer’s Gene was maybe a slightly deliberately provocative title.
Brett McKay: The editor picked that.
Alex Hutchinson: You know, I can’t even blame the editor. I picked it. But I was like, let’s stir the pot. Look, no, exploring isn’t determined by one gene, but there is definitely some genetic underpinning. And where I got the name from is that there is one particular gene that’s associated with one particular dopamine receptor, the DRD4 receptor, which basically there are different variants and some people get a bigger kind of jolt out of discovering something new or experiencing something novel than others do. And this variant seems to have first appeared about 50,000 years ago, which as it happens is roughly when our ancestors started really spreading out rapidly from Europe and Asia and Africa to the rest of the world. You know, moving out to crossing the Bering Strait and getting down into, well, Polynesia and South America and all that. So what’s interesting is there’s a study in 1999, so it was quite a while ago, that asked if you look at populations around the world, do they have different proportions of this so called explorer’s gene based on how far their ancestors migrated? And the answer is yes. It’s basically a linear relationship. The farther a population moved, the higher the proportion of this explorer’s gene they have this dopamine receptor gene.
So at the southern tip of South America you’ve got population groups that have 80% of the people have this explorer’s gene, whereas closer in Europe you have some populations where it’s like 20% or lower. Now the key thing that I want to, the caveat that I have to throw in there right away is this doesn’t mean that some people always want to explore and others never want to explore or that all South Americans want to explore and no Sardinians want to explore. That’s not what we need to take from this because we all have the same kind of reward circuitry, dopamine circuitry, that, and it’s complicated, but that essentially is looking for surprises, is looking for things that it didn’t expect. We all have that. It’s just that some people have a slightly bigger helping than others and over time that can lead to these changes we see in populations, but we’re all wired in… Like I definitely as someone who spent the last five years writing a book about exploring, I’ve had lots of conversations that go along the lines of like, oh yeah, exploring. Well, if there’s an exploring gene, I definitely don’t have it.
I don’t like exploring. And it’s like, no, no, no, you may not like parasailing to the South Pole. But we’re all drawn, I think, to novelty in some way, whether it’s listening to new music or finding books that you haven’t read, or ordering different things in the restaurant or whatever. Exploring doesn’t just mean physical hardship, but what it means is we’re drawn to novelty. All of us have that wiring, that gene, but some of us have variants that amp it up a little bit more.
Brett McKay: Yeah. When you talked about how some populations have more of this gene than others, it made me think. I know this is reductive, and I know this is not the point you’re trying to make, but it made me think about America. Like, America is like, this dynamic that people are constantly moving like, what’s going on there? And there’s probably a lot going on, the environment and history. But I do wonder if, like, sort of our immigrant past, like the type of people who come to America, they probably maybe, I don’t know, maybe had some more of that dopamine gene, and so maybe that contributed to a bit of, sort of the national character of America. I don’t know.
Alex Hutchinson: Yeah, well, there’s some… So people have tried to look for this, and the signal for the dopamine receptors is hard to see. Like, these things are subtle. But the piece of evidence that I found really fascinating is someone did a big analysis of the emigration records from Scandinavia in the… I can’t remember the exact, like, late 1800s, early 1900s, where there was this huge, like, millions and millions of people went from countries like Sweden and Norway and settled in, like, Minnesota and places like that. So you look at the… They looked at the ship records of who emigrated and correlated them with their family. So people who emigrated were more likely to have unusual first names than people who… Than families who stayed relative to the general population. And what they think is that having an unusual first name is kind of a marker of these people didn’t want to just do the same old thing and follow the same old path. These families were families where someone in the family valued novelty and trying something new and being different and being individual. And those are the people who left Scandinavia and came to the United States.
So you could say that might have informed the character of the United States and that. I’m sure that was sort of replicated not just in Scandinavia, but who chooses to leave and emigrate to the new world as it was then informs the country, and then it may also have had an impact on the old country. So one of the then sort of corollary theories is why the Scandinavian countries have such strong social programs and a sort of collectivist mindset. Well, the individualists all went to Minnesota and the collectivists stayed behind it. And so those two societies have kind of diverged. And like you said, that’s reductivist. And people and countries are complicated. But it’s interesting to think that there may be some kind of effect like that.
Brett McKay: That’s really interesting. So nothing you do in this book, besides looking at the genetics, potential genetics, that influence exploration as you get into cognitive science, probability, mathematics, to help us figure out why we have this nudge to explore. And you really brought to bear your experience as a physicist into this book. I thought it was a lot of fun to help us figure out, like mathematically why humans explore. And one area you start exploring and talking about is this idea of predictive processing. What is predictive processing and what role does it play in the human urge to explore?
Alex Hutchinson: Yeah, this was a fun little digression for me. I actually didn’t expect to get into that. And then I discovered this literature on it. I was like, oh, this is super interesting. It’s relevant to exploring, but it’s also like a cool topic on its own. So this was kind of news to me. So I’ll give some general background for listeners who may not have heard the term predictive processing, because I think it’s going to be something that people are going to hear a lot about in the next 10 years. Basically, it’s an idea that emerged about 20 years ago in neuroscience as a very small niche idea and has gradually kind of taken over the field to where I think it’s fair to say it’s probably become, or becoming the dominant view of how our brains work, why they’re wired the way they’re wired. And the basic idea is that our brains and everyone’s brains, that all living things, the fundamental goal in order to stay alive is to be able to successfully predict what’s going on in the world around you so that you’re not just like sitting there looking around and seeing what’s happening around you.
Your brain is always predicting, and then basically what your senses are doing is just checking whether your predictions are right. And having good predictions is a good way of staying alive because you know what’s happening. You’re not going to get surprised. So this creates a philosophical problem, which is that if our brains are fundamentally wired, all we want to do is to be able to predict exactly what’s going to happen next. Then what it suggests is we should hate exploring. We should, in fact, want to just go into the closet, turn off the lights and shut the door and stay there, because then we’re going to know exactly what’s happening next at all times, which is nothing in the sort of philosophy and cognitive science world. This is called the dark room problem. Why don’t we just all want to lock ourselves in dark rooms? And there’s been a lot of debate about this for about a decade. But I think where the current thinking is it’s like you need to think about prediction, about learn, knowing about the world. Not just in the sense of can you predict what’s happening exactly right now, or two seconds from now? You want to know what’s going to happen in the future.
You want to be able to predict well in advance what things are happening. And to do that, you need to understand how the world works. And so you need to learn as much as you can about the world. So this idea of having a predictive brain then ends up suggesting that we should be wired to seek out the areas that we know the least about. That when we see a closed door or a road leading over the horizon or around a corner, we want to know what’s around that corner. Because if we don’t, then something might jump out from around that corner and come and chase us. So predictive processing ends up creating this argument that we are wired to pursue uncertainty, to pursue what we don’t know, not because we love uncertainty itself, but because it gives us the opportunity to reduce that uncertainty. And so the kick we get from exploring is the feeling of finding an area where we didn’t know how things were going to turn or know what was going to happen, and then having the satisfaction of reducing that uncertainty.
Brett McKay: Okay, so we explore and we see uncertainty so that we can be more certain in a way?
Alex Hutchinson: That’s right. It’s kind of like, why do we like sugar? Well, we like sugar because ultimately it gave us something good, which was calories. And similarly, we don’t like uncertainty because we like not knowing what’s going to happen. We like uncertainty because we like learning what’s going to happen. We like the result of pursuing that uncertainty.
Brett McKay: And then you bring this idea of the Wundt curve. Pronounce that with W-U-N-D-T?
Alex Hutchinson: Yeah, I’ve been debating how I should be like, should I put on the full Germanic. The Wundt curve. Very important. It’s named for a, I should not do accents. It’s named for a 19th century Wilhelm Wundt, who was the first to kind of look at this idea, but let’s call it the Wundt curve. So I’ll anticipate your question. I’ll jump in and say what the Wundt curve is. Yeah, basically it’s like a bell curve. So it’s an upside down U that’s saying there’s a relationship between how complex or how novel or how unexpected or how complicated something is and how much we like it. And if it’s not complex at all or not unexpected, we find it boring. But at the other end of the spectrum, if it’s really complicated and really unexpected, we find it scary and incomprehensible. But there’s a sweet spot in the middle where it’s… There’s enough uncertainty that it’s interesting and we feel like we can learn something about the world, but it’s not so uncertain that we can’t actually make sense of it. So there’s this sweet spot of uncertainty, which is really a moving target. It’s different between people.
It’s different over time. Wundt curve will shift. I mean, I think a good example of that is musical tastes. You don’t like music that’s just like Mary had a Little lamb after after you’ve heard it a billion times because it’s too simple. You might not like atonal 20th century classical music because it’s like, I can’t figure out what the heck’s going on. There’s a sweet spot in the middle of intermediate complexity. But that changes. If you spend a lot of time listening to music, you’ll generally start to like more and more complex and dissonant and unexpected music. And conversely, like, if my life is really stressed out and I’m I’ve got lots of uncertainty in my professional or my family life. I want to listen to, like, some simple music that I know really well, that I listened to a lot when I was 18 or whatever. I want to go back. And so my Wundt curve has shifted just based on what’s going on in my life.
Brett McKay: And I imagine dopamine is interacting with this kind of shifting the Wundt curve. So when it’s like completely boring, there’s no dopamine. And then when it’s just chaotic, you just can’t even make sense of it. So you don’t have any dopamine release. But then that sweet spot, it’s like, yeah, you need to hit this more because you’re getting some good dopamine here.
Alex Hutchinson: Yeah. Well, and one way the dopamine turns out to be super complicated. I was hoping that there’d be a simple dopamine story so I could once and for all say, here’s what dopamine does. But one of the ways of understanding dopamine is that it’s effectively a marker of prediction error. So it’s not that you get a hit of dopamine when something is good. You get a hit of dopamine when something is better than expected. So that’s why the first time you take a drug, let’s say you get this feeling that’s good, and you’re like, that was way better than I expected. I need to do this again. The 10th time you take the drug, you’re like, that was exactly what I expected based on the last nine times I took it. So you don’t get a hit of dopamine, and that’s why you have to then increase the dose. You know, your Wundt curve has changed. I guess you have to increase the dose to make it better than expected. So what this Wundt curve is telling us is you’re looking for ways of finding prediction error that you can then resolve so that you can get that hit of dopamine because something was different or better than expected.
Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Okay, so let’s kind of summarize what we’ve talked about. One reason why humans might explore or have this urge to explore. There’s a gene potentially that plays a role in that kind of nudging some people more than others to explore. But then also cognitively, all of us are wired to look for new things so that we can figure out the world in a way. That’s what the whole predictive processing thing is. Then you also talk about this idea that’s been floating around in cognitive psychology that’s popping up more and more. It’s the Explore vs. Exploit framework. What is the Explore vs. Exploit framework?
Alex Hutchinson: Yeah, so we’ve been talking all about exploring and how great exploring is. And I started writing this book and figuring that the subtitle might be, like, why we should all explore more and that kind of thing. And one of the sort of nuances that I eventually realized is actually exploring isn’t the only option. Exploiting can be a good option too. So exploiting is set up as a classic choice. And exploiting is basically staying on the path you’re on, taking advantage of the knowledge you already have to pursue where you kind of know what the outcome’s going to be. Exploring something is getting off the beaten path where you don’t know what the outcome is going to be. And the classic example of this is that it’s often used to explain it is you’re at a restaurant, it’s a familiar restaurant you’ve been to many times. You know that you like the hamburger quite a bit, and you always order the hamburger, and then you see the server walking by with the meatloaf or with the special or something like that, and you’re like, oh, wait, I know I like the hamburger. I know it’s pretty good.
I’ve never tried that. It might be better, but it might be worse. And so do you want to take the chance? And we all wrestle with this, right? And then you order the meatloaf, and then it turns out to suck. And the person you’re with ordered the burger and you’re like, I can’t believe I ordered the thing that I didn’t know was going to be good when I could have ordered something I knew was going to be good. So it turns out that exploring and exploiting are both useful. And trying to figure out when you should do one and when you should do the other is a super, super complicated challenge.
Brett McKay: Well, yeah, this problem pops up in big issues, too. Like, you had the explore exploit problem when you were deciding after you rode indoors. Like, all right, I set myself up as the endurance guy. I can write about the science of endurance and fitness and I could have a great life. That’s the exploit. Like, you found something you could exploit, but then you started feeling like, what am I missing out on? Is there something that would actually be better if I did something different and leaving more of a sure good thing to try something else? That was a risk. It’s like that whole a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush type thing. That’s kind of the explorer versus exploit problem right there.
Alex Hutchinson: Absolutely. Yeah. The explore exploit terminology was actually, it came from a 1991 paper by a guy named James March, who was a Stanford University management prof. And he was writing about it in a corporate context. How do companies decide when to, like, spend money on R&D trying to develop something radically new versus why don’t we just spend that money marketing our current product line? You know, we’ve got some good stuff. Let’s exploit what we’ve already done. And so it’s a corporate context, it’s a societal context. Like, how much of our resources do we want to devote to like, blue sky research and development that we don’t know is going to pay off in any tangible way? And James March’s argument was fundamentally that, because when you exploit, you know what’s going to, you’re going to get. And you get feedback pretty quickly. Like, you find out I spent more money on marketing, hey, look, sales went up. Whereas when you explore I gave money to R&D and three years later, we still have no idea whether it’s going to work out. There’s a big chance of failure.
We might get nothing. That we tend to systematically underinvest in exploration because the feedback loop is so much less direct. Even though when you look over time, the return on exploration in the corporate context or in the ordering food from a restaurant context, the return is actually positive. But it’s still hard to take that leap because you’re giving up the bird in the hand.
Brett McKay: So when humans are trying to make this decision of whether to explore or exploit. So imagine there’s a guy, midlife, he’s got a solid career house, and he’s like, man, I’m feeling the… Is this all there is? That I don’t want to leave, I don’t want to jump careers, because that’s going to take a long time. How do we make that decision, whether to explore or exploit what goes on inside of our head?
Alex Hutchinson: Okay, I thought you were going to ask, what should the right decision be? And I was going to say, I don’t know. I don’t want to get in trouble for the guy leaving his career. What’s going on in our side of our head is actually a really interesting. It’s a deep and interesting question, and one that cognitive scientists have been spending a lot of time working on in the last, let’s say seven or eight years, there’s been a ton of work. So I guess the thing to start with is that… And you know, you mentioned the math trying to “solve the explore, exploit dilemma,” even when you restrict it with very specific conditions so that it’s the kind of thing you can solve in a lab. It is mathematically super, super hard. For decades, scientists were working on this, and then in the ’70s, someone finally came up with a solution called the Gittins index. But it only works under very specific solutions, circumstances, and the math involved is just insane. So it’s like, that’s not what’s going on in our heads. We’re not doing the Gittins index. Instead we have sort of shortcuts that try and help us figure out what we should do.
And you can dig into the math behind them. And it turns out that we actually do a pretty good job in most cases of coming up with good, rough and ready solutions. And one example that I think is a good illustration is, well, okay, let me give two examples. One is that there’s two ways of exploring. One is that you can pursue the thing you know the least about. So when you’re choosing options, exploring is like, well, I know a lot about that. I know a little bit about that. I know nothing about that. Let’s do the thing I know nothing about because I have the most to learn about that. The other way you can explore is you can just basically flip a coin. You can say, I’m going to do what’s called random exploration. It’s like, well, in order to avoid biasing myself by always going with what I know, I’m just going to make all decisions randomly. There’s been some funny experiments where people have tried to live their life that way. It’s like I’m just going to draw a random number every time I have to make a decision. And that’s another way of making sure that you don’t get stuck in a rut.
And so these things happen in our brain. And you can put people in like decision making lab studies and dial up and change the parameters so that it’s more advantageous to use random exploration or more exploration to use uncertainty directed exploration or more advantageous to not explore. And people do respond. And so like random exploration, for example, you can see the variability in the nerve signals in the brain goes up. So you just, basically you’re putting noise in the circuit and your brain is deciding, okay, well, we’re going to follow the usual instructions, but we’re going to add some random noise as I send this signal so that sometimes I’m going to get the opposite answer of what I thought I was going to get. And that’s going to make sure I keep exploring. So there’s really subtle sort of neuroscience that goes on that influences these decisions.
Brett McKay: No. Yeah, it is really interesting. You go deep into it, it’s completely fascinating. But I think you’re right. Like humans just kind of use heuristics. And I think most people, like I’ve noticed in my life, I use that sort of uncertainty directed heuristic to decide whether to explore and exploit. And something I’ve noticed too, that I’ll do is I’ll do both at the same time or try to do both at the same time. I’ve noticed that with my career with the Art of Manliness, I started off just as a website where we just published articles. And then 2009, like, podcasting kind of came up, and I’m like, oh, that’s interesting. I’ll try that. But I kept writing articles. I knew that was a good thing. I was exploiting it. So I started exploring the podcast. And then that worked out. This is great. I’m going to exploit that. And then I tried video, explored that for a bit, didn’t like it, so I stopped. I just didn’t do that anymore. So I think that’s one thing that humans do is like they’ll try to explore and exploit at the same time.
Alex Hutchinson: Yeah, and I think that you relate this back to the one curb, a little bit of a sweet spot. But it’s like if you’re always exploring, and I use the example of music too, like, okay, most of us become less exploratory in our musical taste as time goes on. And so you might say, well you’re 28 and you’ve got all the songs you need, so you’re not going out there looking for new music. You might say, well, you’re missing out on something. You should still be listening to new stuff, exploring new stuff, and that’s great. But if you were to push it to the extreme and say, I’m going to always explore everything essentially means I’m never going to listen to the same song twice. I’m going to just seek new music. And once I’ve heard it, it’s dead to me. I need to explore something new. And that’s obviously you can, that’s obviously an absurd example, but it makes no sense. Like, one of the reasons to seek out new music is to find things you like and then to enjoy it, to exploit it, to sit back and listen to this music you’ve discovered that you like.
And so I think career wise, or more generally making these decisions, if you don’t have a mix of exploring and exploiting, it’s clear that you don’t want to be on either end of the extreme, both for the point of view of satisfaction, but also like, risk and safety and like career wise, that I definitely identify with what you’re saying with the Art Of Manliness in terms of how I’ve managed my career. I’ve taken some big risks, but I’ve generally tried to cover My risks so that the downside is not too serious.
Brett McKay: Something you explore too is that, or you explore about exploring is kids, young people are more likely to explore than adults. Why is that?
Alex Hutchinson: Well, it’s a smart decision in a lot of ways. So, I mean, you can think of it mathematically, you can also think of it just logically, that the more time you have in front of you, the greater the time you have to enjoy whatever or benefit from whatever you discover through your exploration. There’s a scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, Alison Gopnik, who’s proposed this theory or this idea that childhood really is basically designed as a solution to the explore, exploit dilemma. That the reason humans have an unusually long childhood, even compared to, like, apes, and the reason is it’s a good solution that you learn as much as possible about the world when you still have lots of time to enjoy whatever you learn. And as time goes on, you take advantage of what you learn and you start exploiting more and more to the logical endpoint that in theory, the day before you die, you should not be exploring at all because there’s no benefit.
Brett McKay: Well, let’s talk about that. That’s kind of depressing. As you get older, it’s like, well, there’s no benefit to exploring. What do you think about that? I mean, it sounds like you’re not for that, that we should keep exploring?
Alex Hutchinson: I hate that idea. I hate that idea. Yeah, but I also like, look, I respect the math.
Brett McKay: So, yeah, mathematically it makes sense, right? It does make sense rationally, but I just, I don’t like that.
Alex Hutchinson: Yeah, I hate it. And I asked pretty much every scientist I spoke to, I asked about this and they had various answers. I think most people agreed that it’s like, it is logical that you explore less as you get older. That, I mean, for one thing, when one of them said this quote like, you can’t regrow your expectations about the world when you’re older, you know stuff. So it’s like, for my kids when they were young, it’s like, oh, we’re going to go tobogganing for the first time. This is going to be an act of exploration. It’s going to be so much fun. They don’t know what it’s like to slide down a hill. It’s like, I already know what it’s like toboggan. I still like tobogganing, but it’s no longer exploratory for me and I can’t invent new sports every day. Like, I already know stuff. So there is a logical progression, but the trend or the sort of natural progression of exploring less may not match up well with modern life. And so one of the scientists said if you’re 60 years old a million years ago, when you’re 60 years old, it may have been like, yeah, dude, just kind of, you know where the tubers are.
You keep digging those tubers and just try and stay alive a little longer. Don’t explore anymore. Now if you’re 60 years old, there’s a good chance you’re going to live 20, 25, 30 years. And so how depressing is that if you’re like, well, I’m not going to make any new memories, I’m just going to kind of coast along on fumes. So there’s that argument that we live longer, so you want to keep exploring longer than you might otherwise assume. And there’s the other thing, which is that we can describe the reasons for exploring in two ways. One is that it leads to good things. It’s how we learn about the world. The other is that it feels good and those two things are linked. The reason it feels good is that evolutionarily it led to good things. It was good for us, but now we’re in this world where it’s just like sugar told us where calories were. But sometimes, even if I don’t need calories, I like to eat dessert because it tastes good. And I’m 49 now. I hope that when I’m 75 or 80 or whatever, I still will enjoy the feeling of discovering something new, of the frisson of uncertainty of, of not knowing how something’s going to turn out instead of just doing the same things over and over again.
Brett McKay: Okay, so this is inspiration to even if you’re 40, 50, 60, keep doing new things. You don’t have to go crazy. You don’t have to like just upend your life. Maybe. I mean, if that’s what you want to do. That’s how you scratch your itch and it’s like you can minimize the downside. But yeah, keep trying new things. There is a benefit to it, even though rationally it doesn’t make sense.
Alex Hutchinson: Yeah, so a good example is a few years ago I took up rock climbing and I’ve been a runner all my life. And I pat myself on the back here. I’m a very good runner. And so in terms of like, recognition from other people or even self actualization of like doing something good. Running is the no brainer for me. I can go and feel good about myself. I’m a terrible rock climber. I just suck at it. But there is something amazing about… Because when I took it up, it had been a long time since I’d done something that was just totally new and that I sucked at. And it’s not that I enjoy sucking at things, but I enjoy, I realized that I was kind of missing this feeling of learning something new. Of like every day is a journey of of, not that I’m making tons of progress, but I make little bits of progress and I don’t know how it’s going to turn out. I’m not an expert in this area. And so yeah, I would absolutely say that you don’t have to go to the North Pole or whatever, you don’t have to take up wingsuit flying or anything like that.
But you should have something in your life that’s new and different, that’s different than you were doing a decade ago where you have the prospect of learning that is… It’s good for your brain on a neuroscientific level, but it’s also just the cool feeling.
Brett McKay: It’s good for the soul. Let’s talk about how we explore landscapes. You go into this. So how does our brain explore physical landscapes?
Alex Hutchinson: Yeah, so this is a really neat area of science. And I think a lot of people are familiar with the idea of cognitive maps. That there’s an area in our brain, in the hippocampus that maps areas that we’re familiar with in an actual, like a completely literal sense. You get to know a neighborhood, then there will be one neuron that fires whenever you’re at that particular intersection and another neuron that fires when you’re at a different intersection or halfway down the street. These are called place cells. And in addition to place cells, we have like boundary cells and direction cells and stuff. So we literally have like this GPS in our hippocampus. And there’s famous study from about 25 years ago where they studied London taxi drivers who have to basically memorize the streets of London in order to get their license and found that their hippocampuses are enlarged. That this is a “muscle” that enlarges with use. So we can find our way around the world by wandering around gradually mapping the world and recording it in our hippocampus. We can also get around by just memorizing basically a series of stimulus response directions.
I Want to get to the library? I go two blocks that way until I see the gas station. Then I turn left and go up the hill until I see the church and then I turn right or whatever. That’s called stimulus response navigation. And it’s generally faster and easier and more efficient than this cognitive mapping approach. And we all use both, right? Like there’s context when one is better than the other. But the general trend in the modern world is that we need cognitive mapping less and less. Even if no one has given us directions. We have our phones with GPS and turn-by-turn directions, we don’t have to know anything about where we’re going. We just have to press a button. And when it says turn right, we say turn right, we turn right. When it says jump, we say how high? And it’s just removing the need to actually know where we are or to form a cognitive map.
Brett McKay: Yeah, so GPS uses that stimulus response navigation?
Alex Hutchinson: Yeah, certainly the turn-by-turn directions, it’s pure stimulus response. A key distinction is like, if I know how to get from point A to point B and I know how to get from point B to point C, if I’m following stimulus response, it’s just a series of turns, then I have no idea how to take a shortcut from A to C. Like to get to C, I have to go first to B because I know the directions to B and then B to C follows directions. If I have a cognitive map, I know where everything is relative to each other. So I can say, oh, I can just cut straight across here to get to C, because I understand where these things are because I have a map in my head.
Brett McKay: What does the research say that this reliance on turn-by-turn directions using GPS, what is that doing to our ability to create cognitive maps?
Alex Hutchinson: This is a small area of research, but the researchers I spoke to are worried about it because like everything the brain responds to how we use it. Stimulus response navigation is mostly dependent on an area of the brain called the caudate nucleus instead of the hippocampus. So the more you use stimulus response navigation, the more you use your caudate nucleus, the bigger it gets, in fact, and the less you use your hippocampus, the smaller it gets. Smaller hippocampus is a risk factor for a whole bunch of pretty unpleasant things. Things like Alzheimer’s and PTSD, cognitive decline. And so there are some researchers who are like, yeah, you should really be wary of turn-by-turn directions on your GPs of being overly reliant and not actually taking time to look around. To explore, to be lost occasionally. And I don’t want to be like again, I don’t want to over hype the findings, but I will say I try to avoid using turn-by-turn directions on my phone or in my car. You know, I will look up where I’m going, I’ll try to figure out where I’m going and then I’ll just turn it off until if I’m not sure where to go, I’ll turn them back on.
So that’s my reading. My reading of the events is such that I’m trying to be more conscious of wandering through my surroundings and knowing where I am, even if that means occasionally getting lost.
Brett McKay: Well, it’s something else that some research have speculated is that our reliance on GPs not only has affected our ability to navigate the physical world, but it also might be affecting how we explore, navigate abstract ideas in our head.
Alex Hutchinson: Yeah, so this was a really cool thing that I didn’t realize until I started researching this, which is that the hippocampus, this idea of a cognitive map, I thought of it purely in terms of physical landscapes, but it turns out there’s a growing amount of evidence that we map ideas and people and social relationships. We also map those in the hippocampus in a very similar like sort of map. So that you can think of like two ideas that are close to each other or farther apart and you can have shortcuts between ideas and you can expand the area around those ideas. Or people, for example, there is a study that shows that we tend to map people in the hippocampus based on how well we know them and what sort of interactions we have with them. So that’s like a two dimensional map of like, I know this person really well and they’re a jerk, I know this person not very well, but they seem nice or whatever. And so the hippocampus is important. So on the one hand what this suggests is that even if we use GPS navigation, we’re not going to stop using our hippocampus because we use it for lots of other things.
So we shouldn’t overstate the dangers of GPS. But on the other hand, it suggests that if we do allow our hippocampus to become less, if we use it less and it atrophies to some extent, if we’re compromising our hippocampus, it might be not just that we’re having more trouble finding our way around, but also that we’re having more trouble mapping ideas together. Seeing how things connect, keeping track of people.
Brett McKay: Okay, so maybe the takeaway there, use GPS less, try to navigate by dead reckoning every now and then perhaps. I also, it kind of inspired me. Like I thought about. Because you talk about this in the book, doing orienteering. Maybe that’s something you could do to exercise your hippocampus. Take an orienteering course.
Alex Hutchinson: There we go. ‘Cause there’s a little bit of research coming out on orienteering where it’s like ’cause these are races where you run but you have to navigate with hippocampus and it’s like whatever you’re doing for your brain, you get a supercharged effect because the physical exercise is flooding your brain with things like BDNF, which helps enhance the growth of neurons or the connections between neurons. So you’re getting a double whammy of the exercise plus the cognitive effect. But yeah, just to amend or to follow up on that point, I’d say yeah, GPS is an easy example. And so I use GPS turn-by-turn directions as a thing. That is an example of the way we’re moving towards stimulus response. But I think it’s not just the one specific technology. It’s more the idea of always optimizing efficiency, of always prioritizing getting to the destination rather than seeing where you’re going. So I think that the big picture advice is like be present, look around, know where you are. Like, so I’m looking out my window right now as we speak and it’s like I should know what’s there, I should know what kinds of trees are there and which direction the river is and stuff like that.
I should be aware of my surroundings. I’m willing to get lost occasionally willing to take a wrong turn because that will force you to pay your attention to start forming cognitive maps. So yeah, it’s about being present as much as avoiding your GPS.
Brett McKay: Yeah, this goes back to predictive processing. You want to make errors because it’ll help you in the long run.
Alex Hutchinson: That’s right, yeah. Otherwise you’re just living at the bottom of the Wundt curve where there’s no uncertainty and no prediction error.
Brett McKay: So exploring it feels good, but it can also be uncomfortable and frustrating. Like your explorations might lead to failure, setbacks, disaster sometimes. It’s not exploration if there’s no risk of failure. But we still explore despite knowing that, oh my gosh, like things could end up poorly. Like what’s going on there? Like why do we do this thing that can make us feel bad but we still enjoy doing it?
Alex Hutchinson: Yeah. This was one of those kind of eureka moments for me when I stumbled across some research in psychology about something called the effort paradox.
Brett McKay: This is from Michael Inslicht.
Alex Hutchinson: That’s right.
Brett McKay: We had him on the podcast. Yeah, we had him on the podcast.
Alex Hutchinson: Yeah, there we go. So I refer listeners then to hear Michael himself explain this.
Brett McKay: Well, we actually, we talked about willpower. He debunks willpower. But we talked a little bit about the effort paradox. So, yeah, flesh this out a bit more because we didn’t get much into that.
Alex Hutchinson: Yeah. So the idea is that there are things that we value not in spite of the fact that they’re hard, but because they’re hard. And so this is a kind of mental shift because I’ve been talking about how wonderful exploring feels. And like, we do it because it’s self actualizing and blah, blah, blah. And then it’s like you, you actually get out and take a risk and do something, whether it’s career wise or climbing a mountain or whatever. And it’s like, actually, this is really hard and I’m scared and it could all go very wrong. And so there’s a tendency to assume that we’re willing to put up with the challenge in order to get to the destination. But what Michael Inslicht and his colleagues essentially argue is that that’s not actually a satisfying explanation of why we’re willing to do hard things. We really seem to actually like the hardness of it in some way. You know, we’re eating spicy foods and we’re climbing mountains and we’re buying furniture from Ikea. There’s some hilarious research on something called the IKEA effect, which is if you buy a piece of furniture from IKEA and you spend all this time trying to sort out the stupid pictographic instructions and find all the mismatched screws, you put it together.
If you then want to sell it, you will ask for a higher price than you would have if you had bought the exact same furniture pre-assembled because you value it more because you had to struggle with it. And it’s it’s same with, like, you may start running because you want to get fit, but if you’re running your fourth marathon, there’s something more there. You’re pursuing something different. You know, if you keep hitting yourself on the finger with a hammer, you’re doing it because on some level you like it. And so why do we like it? There’s a whole bunch of theories that probably all have some grain of truth. But I think the big one that encompasses them all is that we tend to find things that are hard, meaningful. And we have trouble defining what it means to say that something is meaningful. Like, why is life something you do meaningful? I don’t know. I don’t know how to explain it. But this thing is meaningful, and that one’s not. And it tends to be. We find taking on challenges meaningful, and that leads to a feel of satisfaction and a feeling of wanting to do it again.
Brett McKay: Okay, so if you experience some difficulty, some discomfort in your exploration, like, lean into it, because you might find meaning in it. But then also, you don’t want to be stupid about this. You know, it might be hard, and it’s… Your brain’s trying to tell you, like, hey, you need to stop doing this because this is not working.
Alex Hutchinson: Yeah. And that’s a subtle distinction. And I don’t have a simple heuristic to know which is which. It’s like with running there’s two conflicting pieces of advice, which is that you’re going to have aches and pains, and you need to run through them because otherwise you’ll never run. But you need to rec… And running’s gonna be uncomfortable, but you need to recognize when you have like a shin splint or a stress fracture coming, and you need to be able to distinguish between those two. And to some extent, you just kind of have to get out there and explore, if you will, and figure out which one is which. But, yeah, something that is challenging, the feeling of challenge or difficulty or struggle, it’s just like if you playing on a soccer team and the soccer team wins 10 nothing that’s much less interesting and rewarding than it is than if you win 4 to 3. And so it’s great to have things that challenge you. If it’s just defeating you, it’s not great to lose 10 nothing. Losing 10 nothing is challenging, but that’s on the far end of the Wundt curve. And so don’t go out there and just take your beating as a masochist. But if it’s hard, don’t view that as a disqualifying factor right away.
Brett McKay: So you’ve been researching and writing about exploration for the past five years. What’s your Explore More playbook for people? What would you recommend people listening to this episode do this week to start exploring a little bit more in their lives?
Alex Hutchinson: Yeah. So, I mean, first of all, I would say exploiting is good too. It’s balanced. And that’s one of the things I came away from the book with, which is that it’s not about always mindlessly exploring more. It’s about making sure that you’re finding a role for both, exploring, exploiting in your life. So one of the big insights for me was, and we talked earlier about my sort of backpacking addiction and really trying to get into these crazy places. And after spending a lot of time thinking about exploration and marinating in all this research, I really came to the realization that I still love those places. But fundamentally, what I’m pursuing, this feeling of discovering something that’s new to me does not require that I go to the ends of the earth, that there are ways of exploring in my own neighborhood. There are ways of exploring intellectually, but also even physically. Like, I live in a city of 4 million in Toronto. There’s a river a block from my house. So in the course of writing this book, I bought a kayak and I bought a couple, actually, so I can go with my kids, and we go down and float on the river and it’s like, whoa.
I’ve actually lived in this neighborhood most of my life, and I know that river really well, but I’ve never I’ve never seen it from the water. And there’s places I can go. There’s a marsh near there, just half a mile down the river from from where I live. You can’t access it from land, so until I’d gone on the water, I’d never been there. And then you go in there and there’s like, turtles and deer and stuff. It’s like, wow I’m in a city of 4 million, but I’m having that feeling of discovering something new. So I think in terms of practical advice, it depends on the person. But what I would say is there should be something going on in your life, something you’re doing, something you’re pursuing, whether it’s a hobby or at work or in your personal life, where you don’t know how it’s going to turn out, where you don’t know what the outcome is, where it’s not all mapped out and maybe even makes you a little bit scared. Not in a, like, crap your pants way, but in a, like, I’m nervous about this. So that would be my big call to action.
Brett McKay: I love it. Well, Alex, it’s been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
Alex Hutchinson: Probably simplest place is my website which is alexhutchinson.net. I could not get.com unfortunately some kid in New Jersey got it. But yeah, alexhutchinson.net. I’ve got links there to the book, but also to various stuff I’ve written and stuff like that. Social media.
Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Alex Hutchinson, thanks for having me. It’s been a pleasure.
Alex Hutchinson: Thank you so much bud. I really appreciate it.
Brett McKay: My guest here is Alex Hutchinson. He’s the author of the book the Explorer’s Gene. It’s available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website alexhutchinson.net. Also check out our show notes at AOM is explore where you find links to resources. We delve deeper into this topic. Well that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you can find our podcast archives. And check out our new newsletter, it’s called Dying Breed for both men and women. You can sign up at dyingbreed.net. It’s a great way to support the show directly and if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate if you take one minute to use me up a podcast or Spotify. It helps out a lot and if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member. You think we get something out of it? As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time is Brett McKay reminds anyone listening to our podcast, but put what you heard into action.
