Are you travelling for the holidays? Will your New Years resolutions list include a vacation? Well think on this…travel can make you smarter. Writer and frequent Radiolab contributor Jonah Lehrer has a piece in the latest McSweeney’s about how trudging around the world stirs the creative juices by taking us away from our problems.
The problem, of course, is that most of our problems are local–people in Indiana are worried about Indiana, not the eastern Mediterranean or California. This leaves two options: 1) find a clever way to trick ourselves into believing that our nearby dilemma is actually distant, or 2) go some-place far away and then think about our trou-bles back home. Given the limits ofself-deception–we can’t even tickle ourselves properly–travel seems like the more practical possibility.
Of course, it’s not enough to simply get on a plane: if we want to experience the cre-ative benefits of travel, then we have to re-think its raison d’ètre. Most people, after all, escape to Paris so they don’t have to think about those troubles they left behind. But here’s the ironic twist: our mind is most likely to solve our stubbornest problems while sitting in a swank Left Bank café. So instead of contemplating that buttery croissant, we should be mulling over those domestic riddles we just can’t solve.
