Jonah Lehrer writes:
We travel . . . because distance and difference are the secret tonic of creativity. When we get home, home is still the same. But something in our mind has been changed.
He’s wrong about animal fat (“the taste for saturated fat, one of those instincts we should have left behind in the Pleistocene epoch”) but he’s right about that. A trip to Amsterdam is why I have a scooter. It’s so much better than a bike or a car. Only after visiting Amsterdam did I figure this out. The Shangri-La Diet came out of a trip to Paris. Living in Beijing half the year is somewhere between emigration and travel but whatever you call it it has opened up a whole new world. (Whether this will make me more scientifically creative remains to be seen. It certainly makes blogging easier.) My study of the faces/mood effect showed that travel changes something in the brain in a bad way: The light-sensitive oscillator involved takes about three weeks to fully recover from a big change in time zones. The effect takes three weeks to regain full strength, which is longer than it takes sleep to appear normal.
Reading literature is like poor-man’s travel. It changes you in interesting and unpredictable ways. RIP JD Salinger.
I liked this passage on traveling I read in Catherynne M. Valente’s Orphane’s Tale:
It is not the sea that calls us back. What calls is stronger and more inexorable than any current. I long for the sea, yes, my skin is always dry, and I am always thirsty, and I miss the crash and swell of the black waves, but more, I long for the leaving . I am restless, I am ready, and the leaving whispers to me at night. It says that I will breathe easier when the air is full of fog and seagulls, that I will breathe easier when I am at the start of a story, rather than at the end.”
Many of us just love the idea of a new adventure.
Aaron, I would say that travel is the poor man’s self-experimentation.
You don’t have to go too far for some of the effects of travel–when I even just take local day trips to those places you never visit when you live here, I find my mood expands, I take in more sensory information–it’s not the same as going to another culture for a period of time but nevertheless something is there–that’s how I do it now that I’m a poor man.
Seth:
*Anecdotally, have to agree with a major time shift sapping strength and motivation.
*I can hang for the first two to three days in a new time zone with my workouts. Then, just when my sleep feels calibrated, I bonk on my workouts.
*Coming back to the original time zone starts the drain all over again. A recent trip from Seoul to SF had me not performing or performing badly in the gym, etc. for at least two weeks.
Q: What do you think the recovery time is before you feel back to your normal strength/ability?
I suppose you long ago gave up on melatonin to help your sleep cycle, but have you tried it for adapting to time zone changes?
Nathan, no.
Adam, about 2-3 weeks. Although I haven’t measured this.