How your brain gets bigger with moving and travel
Novelty increases your brain plasticity
Perhaps it’s the free spirited Sagittarius in me, but I’ve always loved to travel and wanted to live abroad.
I’m a big believer in getting outside your comfort zone and changing up your environment on a regular basis.
After I left my hometown of Charlotte, North Carolina, for college at UNC-Chapel Hill, I didn’t look back.
When I graduated, I moved to the next closest big city, which was Atlanta, Georgia.
Then, it was New York, then London, and New York again, with short stints in Rio de Janeiro and Paris for business school. Of course, I spent a lot of time traveling around the world in between.
Content entrepreneur | Agency Founder & CEO | Author | Featured in Forbes, Wall Street Journal, Business Insider, Cheddar TV, HuffPost
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I vibe with people who are true global citizens and who’ve seen and done a thing or two with the time they’ve been given on this planet.
Wanderlust, travel, and uprooting oneself must also be hardwired in my DNA, because my parents emigrated from Taiwan to the U.S. when I was just 2 years old.
I always imagine what massive balls, courage, and faith it took them to trust in their abilities with a family in tow. They had to learn how to survive, and fast.
What is brain plasticity
When you try new things, your brain rewires itself in a positive way.
It gets “bigger” as it absorbs, processes, and catalogs the unfamiliar.
This is known as neuroplasticity, or brain plasticity.
Clinically, it’s your brain’s ability to structurally and functionally rewire itself to compensate for injuries, say, after suffering from a stroke.
But day to day, it can simply mean learning and adapting to what’s new.
Learning languages and playing video games are ways to increase brain plasticity. Elon Musk has been an avid gamer since childhood, and played video games for hours after buying X (formerly Twitter). Like him or not, his brain is definitely on some different shit.
Moving and brain plasticity
An ideal circumstance for increasing brain plasticity is traveling to and even living somewhere new — no matter city or country, small or big, foreign or domestic.
One UCL study suggested that it is the area of the retrosplenial cortex that operates as you move through a familiar space.
But navigating new places requires you to use the hippocampus instead.
For me, my choices to study, travel, live, and work abroad were out of a desire to satisfy curiosity, scratch an itch, or tick a romanticized box.
I could then figure out for myself, after seeing and doing, if a place was not as it was cracked up to be.
Interestingly enough, this week I find myself back in New York, where I lived for 10 years, and I’m just so impressed by how resilient this city is.
It’s full of novelty and adventure. It gets thrown a lot of punches. It adapts and rewires itself.
In fact, New York City is the perfect metaphor for brain plasticity.
The city is a fast, ruthless, hard, edgy, demanding, and cutthroat teacher.
You’re always in competition with someone else. You get upstreamed by people who steal your taxi, shoved by others who need to get on that subway car (not the one arriving in 2 minutes).
You feel like you’ve “made it” when your apartment has the trifecta of garbage disposal, washer and dryer, and dishwasher — and you better be ready to cough up cash and navigate paperwork with every move.
Restaurants disappear overnight if they fail to impress the locals.
But, the city is also fun, chaotic, and vibrant. Its cultural variety and opportunity for incredible human connections is what makes it unique.
This duality is what trains your brain “to make it anywhere.”
While I’m grateful for my time here, I’m also grateful for my ongoing curiosity to discover and experience new cities.
Even if it means rediscovering my hometown.
Or living somewhere like Miami, where I never would have considered living even several years ago.
What about you? Where were you last pleasantly surprised and ended up spending more time there?
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Until next time,
Shindy
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