Where Am I Giving: A Global Adventure Exploring How to Use Your Gifts and Talents to Make a Difference

21Travel If You Can – It's Fatal to Prejudice (Kenya, 2017): How travel makes you a better human / Travel creates philanthropists / Responsible tourism / Reverse culture shock

TRAVEL CHANGES YOUR BRAIN. We know this deep down, and science backs it up.

In Innocents Abroad Mark Twain wrote: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.”

When Twain wrote that he probably didn't think that years later neuroscientists and psychologists would document the mind-broadening impacts of travel. Travel exposes us to new sights, smells, languages, tastes, awkwardnesses, and cultures that ignite different synapses and alter our neural pathways.

“Foreign experiences increase both cognitive flexibility and depth and integrativeness of thought, the ability to make deep connections between disparate forms,” said Adam Galinsky, a professor at Columbia University.¹

For decades now in the travel-writing world, which I come from, there has been this debate between being a “traveler” and being a “tourist.” Travelers are savvy cultural explorers in tune with the ebbs and flows of local life, moving through foreign environments while having authentic experiences, whereas tourists are gawking, culturally insensitive rubberneckers wearing fanny packs, going on organized tours, and leaving a ...