Travelling

The taxi is late, and I get nervous. Once at the airport I’m thrown into the harsh lights of Terminal B, running with my suitcase so I can wait in a long security line. My belt buckle sets off the metal detector, and my aftershave is confiscated. By now you can probably guess the punchline of this very banal story: my flight has been cancelled due to bad weather. I will be stuck here for the next 218 minutes, my only consolation a plastic cup of coffee and the predictably tasteless sandwich. Then I will miss my connecting flight and wait, in a different city, with the same menu, for another plane. It’s not the flying I mind – I will always be awed by the physics that gets a fat metal bird into the sky. The rest of the journey, however, will inevitably feel like a depressing lesson in the ills of modernity, from the pre-dawn X-ray screening to the sad airport malls peddling rubbishy souvenirs.

So why do we travel? Sometimes it’s because we have to, but most travel isn’t non-negotiable. (In recent years only 30% of trips over 100 kilometres were made for business.) Instead we travel because we want to, because the annoyances are outweighed by the thrill of being someplace new. Because we need a vacation. Because work is stressful. Because home is boring. Because New York is New York. Travel, in other words, is a basic human desire. We’re a migratory species. But here’s my question: is this collective urge to travel still a worthwhile compulsion? Or is it like the taste for fatty foods: one of those instincts we should have lost a long time ago?

The good news is that pleasure is not the only advantage of travel. In fact, several new science papers suggest that travel is essential for effective thinking. Of course it’s not enough simply to jump on a plane: if we want to experience the psychological benefits of travel, then we have to rethink why we do it. An Englishman, for example, might take a short break in Paris so as not to think about those troubles he’s leaving behind. But here’s the twist: that tourist is actually most likely to solve his stubbornest problems while sitting in a stylish Parisian café. Our thoughts are constrained by the familiar, and with a near-infinite number of things to think about, our brain spends most of its time choosing what not to notice. As a result, imagination is traded for efficiency. Putting some space between you and home, however, makes it easier to see something new in the old; the mundane is grasped from a slightly more abstract perspective. So while contemplating some delicious French pastry, we should be mulling over those domestic riddles we just can’t solve.

And that isn’t the only psychological perk of travel. Recently researchers at business schools in France and the USA have reported that students who had lived abroad were 20% more likely to solve a classic experiment, known as the Candle Task, than students who had never lived outside their birth country. In this task, subjects are given a candle, a cardboard box containing drawing pins, and some matches. They are told to attach the candle to a piece of corkboard on a wall so that it can burn properly and no wax drips on to the floor. Nearly 90% of people either try to pin the candle directly to the board, or melt it with the matches so that it sticks to the board. Neither strategy works. Only a slim minority of subjects come up with the solution, which involves attaching the candle to the cardboard box with wax and then pinning the box to the board. According to the researchers, the experience of another culture gives us the open-mindedness to realise that a single thing can have multiple meanings. Consider the act of leaving food on the plate: in some Oriental countries this is seen as a compliment, a signal that the host has provided enough to eat. But in many Western countries the same act is a subtle insult, an indication that the food wasn’t good enough to finish. Such cultural contrasts mean that seasoned travellers are alive to ambiguity, and more willing to accept that there are different (and equally valid) ways of interpreting the world.