The correlation between insights and travelling
Travelling has proven to be a great tool to increase insight manifestation and thus improve your writing skills overall. Read on to find your own “aha moment!”
Insights are not as uncommon as they seem
In 2008, Jonah Lehrer penned ‘The Eureka Hunt’ for The New Yorker. The work analyzes those brief moments of lucidity during which the brain makes sense of scattered data. An account of such an occurring would be how Archimedes figured out how to calculate the volume of irregular objects using liquid bodies — a discovery after which he famously screamed ‘Eureka!’ Such moments actually have a name. They are called “insights”. As Lehrer himself puts it, ‘an insight is a fleeting glimpse of the brain’s huge store of unknown knowledge.’
Insights occur in not so mysterious ways
As random as insights might seem, they actually involve some science in the way they operate. In a paragraph of ‘The Eureka Hunt’, Lehrer mentions the research of cognitive neuroscientist Mark Jung-Beeman:
‘The insight process, as sketched by Jung-Beeman and Kounios, is a delicate mental balancing act. At first, the brain lavishes the scarce resource of attention on a single problem. But, once the brain is sufficiently focused, the cortex needs to relax in order to seek out the more remote association in the right hemisphere, which will provide the insight. “The relaxation phase is crucial,” Jung-Beeman said. “That’s why so many insights happen during warm showers.”’
In other words, after the brain focuses on a problem for a long time, it has to relax. And most of the time, that is exactly when the magic happens.
Travelling can induce insights
Travelling is very often an activity meant to unwind and to cut away from all of the unwritten essays, the unsolved equations, and the near impossible quagmires. A holiday is probably the last context in which one would ever wish to have to focus! For instance, almost every writer will tell you that trying to write in a setting that is foreign to their pen might feel a little intimidating, if not undermining to their concentration abilities. However, according to the science of insights, your travels would probably be the key to better writing. As the theory goes, it is when you feel relaxed that your inner muse will take over and connect the dots together. So bring your writing on the plane with you!
Famous writers travelled for insights
Myriads of famous writers have produced works of peerless beauty that, according to many, would not have seen the light of day without a hefty dose of travelling. For instance, Ernest Hemingway, originally from Oak Park in Chicago, had already travelled to Toronto and Paris by 22. F. Scott Fitzgerald had a similar experience when he travelled to Europe for 3 months right before publishing his classic ‘The Beautiful And The Damned.’ And Vladimir Nabokov, on his side, was born in Russia but spent more than 20 years of his life in the United States as well as in Europe.
Hopefully, more and more will take a cue from those famous writers, letting their travels spawn insights conductive to the next classics of literature.
