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Alex Hutchinson had a problem. An enviable problem, it would seem, given that just a few years earlier his Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance, with a foreword by Malcolm Gladwell, had found its way onto the bestseller lists and “positioned me perfectly to brand myself as ‘the science of endurance guy’ and milk that role for the rest of my working life.”

Can you hear dissatisfaction in those words? Hutchinson’s confident, lucid reporting on the latest developments in studies of physical achievement and human performance had long commanded admiration from inquisitive sports scientists, fitness obsessives, and business gurus looking for a competitive edge. Fellow journalists like Gladwell, compelled to explain the complexities of cutting-edge research in everyday language, could barely contain their envy at Hutchinson’s range of skills. Not only had he earned a PhD in condensed matter physics from Cambridge’s renowned Cavendish Laboratory and secured a post‑doc with the National Security Agency, but he had an easy way with words and ideas after a stint at the Columbia Journalism School and several years as an energetic freelancer turning out high-risk-adventure travel stories alongside practical and provocative columns on the latest in exercise science. He could talk the talk as the science of endurance guy but also walk the walk — or run the run, given that he’d advanced to the Olympic trials in the 1500 metres before switching to hardly more pedestrian routines at the NSA, where he helped build vibrating silicon nanobridges with the ultimate goal of developing a quantum computer that could hack into the secret world’s encrypted communications. How many more mountains did he need to conquer?

Helpful therapeutic types, full of good advice from a safe distance, will talk of creative dissatisfaction as if it were simply a useful and necessary stage on the path to higher achievement. Complacency is the enemy of originality, they will tell you, and habit-formed routine becomes creatively deadening. You need to explore to get anywhere new, ipso facto, but the maddening itch to deviate from the soporific norm all too often must begin — and all too often ends — with the funk of sleepless nights and the drag of disappointed days.

So it was with Hutchinson. The subtitle of his new book, The Explorer’s Gene: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map, suggests boundless release from overly predictable routine. More soberly, as if to balance out the sunny optimism that is the end point of most self-help quests, the striking black and white photograph on the book’s jacket shows a heavily laden mountaineer, tethered to a taut rope that disappears out of the frame, peering down into a steep crevasse with what could be wonderment or fear or just deep uncertainty.

Exploration begins with this sense of uneasiness. As his specialty narrowed, Hutchinson realized in the darker moments of late-night reflection, he had started losing the thrill of discovery, the uncertain pursuit of the not yet known that had provided him with so much pleasure in his wide-ranging formative years. By the time Endure appeared to great acclaim in 2018, he knew his subject exceedingly well: still in his early forties, he was well positioned for a stultifying if dependable career of writing on the same topics, repeating the same ideas, and monitoring learned journals for news of incremental scientific advances that might or might not make much difference to the sum of knowledge.

Yet Hutchinson was wary of making another career swerve, given his history of what the rest of us might consider serial overachieving but what he, with a harsher sense of self-awareness, viewed as a dilettantism that could easily veer from the quixotic to the pathological: “setting an audacious goal, spending years working tirelessly toward it, and then, once success was within reach, walking away to pursue something completely different.”

The Explorer’s Gene is not a memoir per se, even if it begins with Hutchinson feeling panicky as he, his wife, and their young daughters tapped into their exploratory DNA by getting disoriented off‑piste on a misty Newfoundland mountaintop and ends with an older, wiser dad peacefully kayaking with his children through the strip of urban wilderness that is Toronto’s Humber River, the serene end point of this particular hero’s mid‑life quest. The science behind the compulsion to explore over thousands of years and across every continent and sea (and, more mundanely, to sample new commuter routes, exercise regimens, and Netflix options) is at the core of this story. Befitting the eager doctoral student he once was, Hutchinson positively wallows in any journal article or lab experiment that offers insight into the brain’s complex decision-making circuitry and the range of uncertainty-chasing behaviours it prompts, from venturing out into unknown waters beyond the horizon (Big Challenges!) to trying an unreviewed restaurant on the off chance that while it may well turn out to be worse than the standby pizza place, it may also be much better (New Flavours!).

And even if an unfamiliar menu item at the offbeat boîte disappoints (Hutchinson tells a funny story, instantly recognizable to peripatetic gourmands, of pointing to a random menu item at a Spanish seaside café and being rewarded with an entire boiled octopus and nothing else), you can still experience the dopamine rush that equates with pleasure through your uncertainty-directed exploration (though brushing up on your Spanish might help to minimize randomness). It isn’t so much the momentary experience of something enjoyable that spikes dopamine activity (responses to the chemical compound diminish when a pleasant sensation becomes habitual) as the anticipation of a reward greater than expected. Novelty seeking in itself stimulates pleasure. “We explore because we want something else more than we like what we already have,” writes Hutchinson. “Dopamine is what drives that wanting. No matter how great the status quo is, it soon becomes predictable. To get the better-than-expected rewards that trigger our dopamine neurons, by definition, requires trying something new.”

In the lab, monkeys whose dopamine levels have been artificially elevated immediately increase their exploratory behaviour. But how does that observation connect with a Polynesian navigator heading out into the featureless ocean or a migrant risking everything to find a new life on the other side of the world or even a restless journalist like Hutchinson, who passed up the Taj Mahal while covering the Commonwealth Games to wander through the serpentine alleyways of Old Delhi in search of a route to the seventeenth-century Red Fort, with a few bonus pakoras devoured along the way?

We’re wired to explore, Hutchinson contends, even if most of us don’t manage to break free from our habitual behaviours to seek the big challenges and search out the map’s blank spots, no matter how persuasively the motivational handbooks urge us on. The possibility is there in all of us, and we may be better placed to achieve our true skill level by following Hutchinson’s five guiding principles on how to explore better. Embrace the struggle, he tells us with his fifth principle: “The most challenging paths often turn out to feel the most meaningful — not in spite of the effort required, but because of it.”

Still, we hesitate, almost as if we’re just as wired not to take big risks that could lead to failure. GPS is so much easier than going by gut instinct. Struggle, effort, challenge — you can understand why our latent novelty-chasing neural circuits remain unactivated. It’s possible that Hutchinson’s perspective as a high-level distance runner with a doctorate who owns up to finding pleasure in navigating barren wilderness in horrible weather with exhausted children in his muddy wake might lead him to overestimate his readers’ zeal for the tougher side of exploration. But then I think of my own most vivid travel memories, and they invariably involve a combination of struggle, effort, and challenge (some self-imposed but much of it, I must admit, blindly stumbled into) — with an intense mental engagement that matched the physical demands and made the vacationing whole greater than the sum of the very trying and sometimes worrying parts.

“Wasn’t it fun,” I ask my daughter, who like the Hutchinson brood has learned how to embrace the effort-filled, unexpected swerves, often as the sun is about to set, “when we had to ford that swollen river on the walk to San Gimignano?” She counters by asking, “Do you remember when we got lost climbing up Mount Pelion, and a hunter gave us a lift, and his rifle was sticking into my leg, and you made us jump out when you realized he was going in the wrong direction?” Of course I remember — and then we found the elusive turnoff by overriding our misleading trail notes, climbed three separate peaks of the mountain where the centaurs of Greek legend lived, and walked home in the dark along a steep gorge in time to pick up stewed beef and potatoes from the local taverna before claiming an olive-wood Three Peaks medallion in recognition of our heroic feats.

Hutchinson’s argument for the rewards of challenge seeking holds true, even if the struggle embraces us more often than we choose to embrace it. Certain people seem born to exploration’s novelty seeking, though, with the innate predisposition to the dopamine rush that gives The Explorer’s Gene its title. Early humans certainly wandered purposefully as part of a tribe, seeking new food sources, escaping enemies, battling the elements. Then came a sudden, sweeping expansion of far-flung migration, when “anatomically and behaviorally modern humans — the ones whose descendants settled the rest of the world — left Africa and the Near East around fifty thousand years ago.”

The compulsion to expand territory and move far beyond the boundaries of the familiar has been equated with an intellectual and technological adaptability that made all Homo sapiens better able to confront the unknown. But someone had to be the leader of everyone else, and someone had to be the restless (or deranged, in the eyes of unevolved types more resistant to endless novelty seeking) adventurer who said, “Why stop here?”

Hutchinson homes in on a genetic variant affecting a dopamine receptor in the brain called DRD4, which is associated with thrill-seeking, attention deficit hyperactivity, and (at the lab‑rat level at least) exploratory behaviour. One study, focusing on a variant that seemed to be more prevalent in children with ADHD, noted wide geographical differences in the prevalence of DRD4. The variation could be assumed to be the result of random mutations, but the developmental psychologist Chuansheng Chen wondered whether the distribution of a gene associated with novelty seeking could actually be linked to the exploratory urges underlying migration in the distant past.

By studying the migration routes and genetic data of numerous population groups, Chen found that the longer the migration, the greater the increase in DRD4: for example, among the Ticuna of Colombia, whose migration from northern Asia had covered 18,000 kilometres, 78 percent of the population had the so‑called explorer’s gene. And surely it’s more than a coincidence that this mutation emerged at the beginnings of the Great Human Expansion, when our formerly clustered ancestors set out to populate the entire habitable world.

Appropriately for a book that incorporates the DRD4 variant into its title, traditional explorers take pride of place in the storytelling. Sadly, we don’t have access to their specific DNA. Besides, their highly mixed motives for wandering and sometimes arbitrary methods of vagabondage likely wouldn’t fit the tidier experiments that scientists set up to test exploration-related spatial concepts like stimulus-response navigation and cognitive mapping.

Consider Alexander Mackenzie. When he searched for a river outlet to the Pacific Ocean in 1789, hoping to find a more efficient route to ship back to Europe the furs he’d been acquiring in western Canada, he found an ocean (which he mistook for a lake) via the river now named after him (though it’s said that he himself called it the River Disappointment). Alas, it was the wrong ocean: the Arctic.

From one perspective, and perhaps even in Mackenzie’s own view, the expedition was a failure. For an exploration theorist, however, it retains many of the elements of a resounding success, or at least of a hypothesis exemplified and vindicated. Why did Mackenzie persist, to his peril, as the huge river veered northward into uncharted territory and his supplies for the lengthening return trip ran low? Having vividly delineated the epic journey with a travel writer’s flair and a historian’s capacity to conjure up the living moment, Hutchinson steps back, puts on his scientist’s cap, and parses the trader’s professed justifications for his risky quest according to the academic psychologist Daniel Berlyne’s standard evaluation criteria for the motivations underlying exploration: “internal predisposing factors, pursuit of rewards and biological utility, ludic behavior.”

These generalizing theoretical terms sound cold, remote, and unsatisfying in this context. (By “ludic behavior,” does he mean playfulness or risk taking?) But what Hutchinson is trying to do in league with the myriad scientists he cites is to bridge the gap between the lab and the road less travelled, between the rigorous detachment of tightly controlled experiments and the unbounded humans who don’t always realize how useful they are in establishing nuanced theories of behaviour and supplying a real-world test for tentative (though often too confidently voiced) conclusions drawn from the lab rats’ maze.

In describing Mackenzie’s meandering journey, Hutchinson takes a cue from his subject matter and avoids the predictable direct route in his narrative — or “stimulus-response” navigation. Instead he lets his own intuitive but deeply informed cognitive mapping take over in a sort of intellectual grand tour that is characteristic of his book’s elaborate style. We start with Alexander Mackenzie, thirty-seven days into his canoe voyage, waiting for the northern sun to set after a sixteen-hour day of paddling so that he can establish where he might be positioned within the unknown realm he has entered. We hear, in passing, about Captain James Cook’s innovative use of a chronometer to determine the longitude of the continent’s west coast and to locate a possible outlet to the Pacific for fur traders like Mackenzie. We slide into a discussion of how humans calculate uncertainty and risk in the search for a big payout — going beyond the limits of the mapped world in Mackenzie’s case. Donald Rumsfeld’s famous commentary at a 2002 Pentagon press conference that distinguished “known unknowns” from “unknown unknowns” is brought into play, with references to economists like John Maynard Keynes who sought to understand the fundamental difference between uncertainties with known probabilities and those where the probability is unclear or unknowable.

Then we pivot suddenly to Daniel Ellsberg, the military analyst who leaked the top secret Pentagon Papers and an economics researcher with an interest in the various strains of uncertainty. The paradox named after him posits that people prefer a choice with a risk, which he defined as uncertainty that can be calculated, rather than one that is ambiguous, where the uncertainty can’t be quantified — even when the betting odds might favour the option where the outcome is harder to predict. Ellsberg later studied the effect of ambiguity on Cold War decision making: When is the right time to launch nuclear warheads? Then it’s back to Mackenzie’s world of Arctic uncertainty, where the potential rewards of a route to the Pacific overcame any ambiguity aversion the explorer already familiar with the limits of the known knowns might have faced by heading into uncharted territory. Deep breath — and on to a computational cognitive scientist’s invention of a modified two-armed-bandit casino game to “tease apart the respective influences of ambiguity, uncertainty, and reward.”

Hutchinson’s extended digression takes us next to an experimental psychologist’s study that compares “the effects of ambiguity, reward, and information gain on explore-exploit choices in pre-schoolers” (hint: it involves marbles chosen from various boxes). And then it’s back to Mackenzie, venturing into the unknown again four years after his first voyage — and this time finding his roundabout way to the Pacific.

I likened it to a grand tour, but that’s too stiff and stately. Reading Hutchinson at his most cerebral and allusive feels more like being in a cab racing through the back streets of an unfamiliar city, even if as a passenger you can feel a bit lost and unsure about where you’re going to end up. Eventually each journey must reach an end, and then you’re left with the question that every explorer inevitably wonders about in the late, too-quiet nights of self-examination: What will I do next? Mackenzie dithered for a while, set aside the journals he hoped to turn into a book, and settled into the more ordinary life of a Montreal furrier, before finally hiring someone to polish his travel stories into publishable prose. Fame followed almost naturally, for such was the appetite for tales of endurance and wonder on the outer edges of discovery.

Hutchinson’s own explorations followed a different course. The inner conflict he faced after Endure, between settling down to do what he did well — and being content with what he already knew — and tearing off into the unknown in pursuit of some risky reward that may never come epitomizes what researchers call the explore-exploit dilemma. It’s a wholly familiar tension in the business world, more easily resolved when you keep doing the same thing, working with the knowledge and resources you already possess in the limited time available, rather than pursuing an uncertain reward you may never attain. Think of all those look-alike sequels that Hollywood churns out, and you can understand the appeal, and the limitations, of the exploitative mindset.

The emphasis in The Explorer’s Gene, quite naturally, is on exploration, both its motivation and its rewards. And the Alex Hutchinson at the beginning of the book, unable to resist a misty, mucky, bug-infested Newfoundland wilderness, displays many of the characteristics of the hell-bent explorer. By the end, after he’s teased out the scientific complexities of his theme, Hutchinson comes to recognize that the point of choosing the unknown over the habitual is to gain knowledge, supersede randomness, and refine uncertainty so that you can make better choices in the future. Why not improve the odds at the casino so you can reap the rewards? Explore, but then exploit.

It may sound demeaning to categorize The Explorer’s Gene as a personal-growth book, though I suppose that might increase sales. But it’s not surprising that the urban pastoral setting of its final chapter feels like the contented end of a long and sometimes arduous odyssey, with a father and his maturing daughters floating in their kayaks and studying sun-bathed turtles as they bask on the trunk of a fallen tree. It’s a comforting image that encapsulates the knowledge gained from wide-ranging exploration, both physical and intellectual.

As you’d expect from a writer and thinker with Hutchinson’s gifts, there’s more to it than that. He grew up along the banks of the very same river, and when he was the age of his turtle-observing daughters, he and his friends played their own exploration games in their local version of the wilderness: an oasis effectively created, or recreated, in the aftermath of a devastating hurricane that flooded the built‑up valley, carried away entire houses, and killed dozens.

The parkland that the tragedy produced, within steps of Hutchinson’s home, with smooth paths where he heads out for quick morning runs, is named after Étienne Brûlé, an adventurous young comrade of Samuel de Champlain and the first European to see the Great Lakes. The Humber River in Brûlé’s time was already a busy Indigenous trading route, hardly the great unknown, but wilderness is in the eye of the beholder, and for Brûlé, as for Hutchinson several centuries later, the feeling of solitude and the ambient sense of uncertainty that are instrumental to the explorer’s quest were potent and exciting.

“The thrill of exploration really does persist even when others have preceded you,” Hutchinson writes. There aren’t many blank spots left on the map. Maybe that’s not so bad if it becomes an incentive to seek out the everyday counterparts to exploration’s thrills and rewards — to exploit and refine and use the knowledge you’ve picked up in a life of searches and swerves. Facing the domestic challenges and incipient disappointments and well-worn routines of middle age, Hutchinson turned back to the lessons of science he’d been considering as he wrote The Explorer’s Gene and realized that there was not just a mathematical proof but a psychological case for knowing when to stop exploring on the grander scale that untrammelled wilderness and dilettantish career moves offer.

Exploration isn’t what it used to be. It’s been given a bad name by the superrich going where no grotesquely wealthy person has gone before, cutting the queue on Everest, burrowing down to the bottom of the Atlantic in a submersible for a peek at the Titanic, or shooting fairly high up into what can barely be defined as space on a ten-minute tour.

So maybe it’s time to say finis to the Final Frontier and stick closer to home, as Hutchinson has discovered with his daughters in the marshes of the meandering Humber. There are blank spots all around you, once you start looking.