The Science Behind Exploring New Ideas and New Geographies
A conversation with Alex Hutchinson, author of "The Explorer’s Gene."
Posted July 7, 2025 | Reviewed by Monica Vilhauer Ph.D.
Should you try something new? Or, should you stick with what you know? Alex Hutchinson’s new book The Explorer’s Gene: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map , is a delightful review of the science behind why we as humans have often sought to push beyond our current boundaries into the unknown, but also why sometimes we might stay put. Alex mixes personal narrative with excellent summaries of the current science that span everything from psychology to anthropology, making delightful connections between all these literatures that connect geographic and intellectual exploration. Very few books have made me take so many scribbles and notes in the margins, and I still have so many references that I want to look up.
Jonathan Wai: What did you learn about exploration by connecting geographical exploration with idea exploration?
Alex Hutchinson: At first, I thought the parallels were mostly metaphorical, but as I dug into the science, I realized there are real connections there. For one thing, we use the same brain structures. We’ve known since the 1970s that the hippocampus has a bunch of specialized neurons that literally encode a physical map of the places we explore. More recently, it has become clear that we also encode the relationships and relative positions of ideas in the same way, using the same neurons.
That means the strategies we use to explore also have analogues in both realms. Sometimes we’re cautiously exploring the “adjacent possible”; other times we’re sailing out into the unknown, trying to find new routes between two distant points, Christopher Columbus style. When you analyze big datasets of patents or scientific papers, you find that it’s the ones that find a route between two conceptually distant points—they cite a pair of journals that have never been cited together in the same paper, say—that are most likely to generate genuinely new insights.
It's not that we should always be trying to make crazy conceptual leaps. But for me, thinking about my creative process in geographical terms helps me be more aware of what mode I’m in. If I’m trying to come up with something really fresh, I need to look for paths between distant ideas.
JW: Some authors have explored the idea of staying put rather than pushing the next boundary, for example Annie B. Jones in Ordinary Time . How much of the need to explore comes from individual differences?
AH: The Explorer’s Gene as a title is intended to be tongue-in-cheek, but there are clearly individual differences, and some of them are genetic. The most well-studied example is the DRD4 gene, which mediates dopamine response (and has also been associated with ADHD ).
But I don’t necessarily think that Annie B. Jones was born to live in small-town Georgia, while I was born to roam the globe. Most of us, away from the edges of the distribution, are pulled in both directions. Maybe you love hiking in the backcountry, but are very cautious in your career choices. Maybe you listen to a lot of new music, but eat the same thing for lunch every day. It’s not that you’re born to explore in one situation and born to stay put in the other situation. It’s that we’re pulled in multiple directions, and how we choose in any given situation depends on the context and our life history in addition to whatever innate differences are present.
JW: Your book is a mixture of your own narrative of moving across multiple fields, from physics, to journalism, and beyond, then back again, as well as reviews of scientific literature on exploration across numerous domains. In The Happiness Curve by Jonathan Rauch, he argues that life gets better after 50. How much of your personal need to explore might have come about due to facing the pressures of midlife ?
AH: As I was working on the book, I swore I wouldn’t let it turn into a midlife crisis book… but in all honesty, there’s no doubt that what you delicately term “the pressures of midlife” were simmering not far under the surface. Do I have to reinvent myself in the coming decades in order to continue feeling challenged and fulfilled, or can I just keep doing what I’m currently doing? What’s the point of exploring if, whenever I find what I’m looking for, I decide that I need to set out again to find something new?
I won’t claim that I’ve found the answers to these questions, but my perspective has shifted. When I started working on the book, I figured it would basically be a celebration of exploring, with more always being better. Instead, it ended up being as much about when it makes sense to not explore, and how to enjoy the process of exploration without getting fixated on the destination. Bottom line: I turn 50 this year, so here’s hoping Rauch is right!
Hutchinson, A. (2025). The explorer's gene: Why we seek big challenges, new flavors, and the blank spots on the map . Mariner.
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Jonathan Wai, Ph.D. , is Assistant Professor of Education Policy and Psychology and the 21st Century Endowed Chair in Education Policy at the University of Arkansas.
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.