The Explorer's Gene Quotes

“The trajectory of adulthood is toward ever greater efficiency, narrower focus, and well-worn routines that make each day more and more similar to the last. Exploration is the antihabit, the antidote to a diminished palette of life choices. We’re wired to seek out the unknown, to embrace the challenges we find there, and to find meaning in the pursuit.”
― Alex Hutchinson, The Explorer's Gene: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map – How Neuroscience and Behavioral Psychology Explain Our Primal Urge to Explore

“We actually enjoy, cognitively, not knowing,” Krakauer explained, “and we pay huge sums of money to not know things.”
― Alex Hutchinson, The Explorer's Gene: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map – How Neuroscience and Behavioral Psychology Explain Our Primal Urge to Explore

“There was, he wrote, “no state more immoral than that of the continual traveler.”
― Alex Hutchinson, The Explorer's Gene: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map – How Neuroscience and Behavioral Psychology Explain Our Primal Urge to Explore

“True exploring, even of the armchair variety, is hard, and that’s a big part of what we love about it.”
― Alex Hutchinson, The Explorer's Gene: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map – How Neuroscience and Behavioral Psychology Explain Our Primal Urge to Explore

“To explore the world, you have to be in the world, capable of acting on it and being acted upon by it, making decisions whose outcomes are unknown and have consequences.”
― Alex Hutchinson, The Explorer's Gene: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map – How Neuroscience and Behavioral Psychology Explain Our Primal Urge to Explore

“Ellsberg paradox:”
― Alex Hutchinson, The Explorer's Gene: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map – How Neuroscience and Behavioral Psychology Explain Our Primal Urge to Explore