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How Exploration, Uncertainty, and Risk Help Us Find Meaning

with Author Alex Hutchinson

In The Explorer’s Gene, Alex Hutchinson dives headfirst into a fascinating and provocative new field of research, examining how exploration is a fundamental part of what makes us human.

Off the beaten path, on unmarked trails, we are wired to explore. More than just a need to get outside, the search for the unknown is a specific, primal urge that has shaped the history of our species and continues to mold our behavior in ways we are just beginning to understand. In fact, the latest neuroscience suggests that exploration is an essential ingredient of human life. Exploration, it turns out, isn’t merely a hobby—it’s our story.

And yet, it has never been easier to live an exploration-free life, without the struggle and uncertainty that true exploration—of places, experiences, and ideas—requires. With the digital world designed to exploit the neural circuitry behind our drive to explore, we receive the illusion of novelty without accompanying growth. 

From paddling the lost rivers of the northern Canadian wilderness to the ocean-spanning voyages of the Polynesians, The Explorer’s Gene combines riveting stories of exploration with cutting-edge insights from behavioral psychology and neuroscience. The end result offers a singular approach to finding meaning in our past struggles, embracing the possibility of failure in our future, and crucially, recognizing when our present is good enough.

Register now to participate in this timelessly relevant discussion.

About the Author: Alex Hutchinson is a National Magazine Award-winning science journalist with a big-picture focus on human performance and particular interests in fitness, endurance sports, and the outdoors. He is Outside magazine’s longtime Sweat Science columnist, and his writing also appears in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. Before journalism, he was a postdoctoral physicist at the National Security Agency and a long-distance runner for the Canadian national team. He lives in Toronto with his wife and daughters.

This program is sponsored by the Alexandria Library Foundation.

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