Your Wanderlust, Explained By Science

Your Wanderlust, Explained By Science

It’s no secret that the phenomenon is a hot topic. But why do people love to travel?

From Paris to New York, a great many people receive satisfaction from exploration. In the frame of our modern culture, wanderlust abounds and it’s no secret that the phenomenon is a hot topic. But why do people love to travel? Counter to what one would assume is the default human desire (for safety or stability), we’re out roaming the globe challenging our views, adopting new ways of life, and embedding ourselves within the colorful embraces of the different cultures our planet has to offer.

Perhaps most importantly, through travel we learn that no matter what we’ve been conditioned to believe or how we’ve been taught to see the world, our borders are imaginary human fabrications. We realize that we’re all just people, roaming around trying to find ourselves, and finding others along the way.

For perspective, it is entirely by chance that you were born in New York, or California or Africa or Europe. What if your great grandparents had never immigrated? What if they had? It’s vital to regulate the judgments we use to make sense of each other’s lives on a frequent basis, and what better activity to demonstrate this exists than breaking down borders?

It’s also true that there are some people who would rather stay home, safe and sound in their comfortable towns. This is baffling for some. To others, it’s the ideal way to spend a lifetime.

So, when we have these two very different kinds of people, how can we explain each group’s respective preferences on a more scientific level?

Are Some Brains Truly More Wired For Travel Than Others?

There have been myriad studies on the brain; your brain on caffeine, in love, even on fiction. So what concrete conclusions can we glean when it comes to those prone to searching out the addictive newness, exploration, excitement, and sometimes even danger that accompanies a trip to an unknown land? When every other “type” of passion has been grouped, studied and analyzed, it’s interesting that travel hasn’t quite made the list. The reason may lie in the fact that defining a “traveler” is no easy feat; does one big trip do the trick, or do many sporadic journeys throughout a lifetime a traveler make?

For the sake of this post, let’s utilize the traits “openness” and “love of excitement” as qualifiers for the average traveler as, after all, someone who dreams of foreign locales, unknown places and exotic food, music and language is most likely sure to exemplify both.

A Propensity For The Unknown May Be Inherent.

It is now a largely acknowledged fact that we’re able to judge a person’s propensity for both openness and excitement based on the way their brains are formed, as well as which parts are most active. While researchers have conducted these studies with the purpose of proving there is a physical difference between people of polar political preferences, we can use these findings to our advantage in this case a bit differently.

Salon, Mic and Huffington Post have covered these reports, which reveal that while the brain activity of what we’ll call “Group Corgi” lends to a stronger physiological reaction to threat, fear and new experiences like change, “Group Shepherd” simply doesn’t have the wiring to react this same way. The amygdala, in this instance, is the star of the show. It controls decision-making and emotions. The studies effectively provide tangible evidence that there may, indeed, be a physiological reason some experience wanderlust while others would much rather stay home, that keyword being “fear.”

As Time writes on one study,

“…the insula/amygdala brain function model does offer [what they claim to be] a 82.9% accuracy rate in predicting whether a person is a Democrat or Republican — better than previous models which rely on a parent’s party affiliation or brain structure.”

If it’s true that one group is naturally less comfortable with the unknown while another is completely open to it, we may have our explanation.

To be clear, there is no “right” or “wrong” way to think; the cornerstone of diversity is that we are, in fact, different. But it’s fascinating to think that aspects of what make a born traveler could be aspects they are born with, and a lesser propensity for fear.

So whether you’d rather chill in your room with some coffee and a book or fly out to the Galapagos to bounce through hostels, you may have your explanation. Wanderlust could be something we’re born with.