The science of your wanderlust!
If you’re constantly daydreaming about traveling the world, rarely feel settled in one place, and get a case of the itchy feet regularly, you probably have wanderlust. As inconvenient and worrisome as travel is right now, amid this raging pandemic, there’s actually a scientific reason why our suitcases are always half packed.
Okay! A short history class now.
Wanderlust is a strong gene embedded in us through millions of years of human evolution. We humans have lived in nomadic communities for almost 99 percent of our history, following the seasons, hunting, opportunities and ritual patterns. Sometime around 10,000 years ago, agriculture, a.k.a. the skill to harvest crops in one place that could feed bigger communities, and the domestication of animals was developed. The catch? You had to stay in that area to tend to the things you were growing. Hence, human settlements popped up, people stayed and had kids, and gradually villages became towns and then cities. But a nomadic urge isn’t unnatural; if the situation in one place seems dire, it’s always made good evolutionary sense to pack up and move on, even if in today’s world you actually have rent to pay etc.
The feeling behind wanderlust doesn’t necessarily have to do with the glamour of getting on a plane, though there isn’t too much that’s glamorous about air travel anymore. It’s about novelty: seeing new places and new things. Human brains are acutely attuned to novelty and find it deeply pleasurable. We seek new and interesting things all the time, and our brain makes completely novel information “stand out”. Various neurons in our brains have the specific job of finding novel things, and can distinguish between sights you’ve never seen before and stuff you saw once many years ago! Why? Because curiosity and pleasure at discovering unfamiliar stuff are also a major evolutionary advantage. When you want to go to a place you’ve only ever seen in travel brochures, you’re playing into an age-old reward system in your brain that gives you dopamine hits for new experiences that can help you understand the world around you. Thanks to a characteristic called ‘neoteny’, which means that we tend to act more child-like than other primates even when we’re grown up, humans retain childlike curiosity and a desire to try new things into our adulthood. In many other species that tendency stops at maturity, if it exists at all.
The flip-side of the novelty coin is also the fear of boredom. Humans hate boredom and will do a lot to get away from it. This is pretty evident in the reactions that ‘lockdowns’ tend to elicit from those of us who have stuck our butts at home for long enough this past year. But, please! Let’s exercise some caution this time around. Just hang in there, with your sanity intact. If there’s any takeaway from the paragraphs you’ve read just now, TRAVEL isn’t going anywhere! Once we’ve endured this pandemic to its last leg together, we shall travel to frolic once again!
