What Happens to Your Brain When You Travel? A Neuroscientist Tells All

We’re all traveling all the time. It might be mundane, like that rote commute to school drop-off or our workplace, or the travel might be unusual, like that time my husband and I swam with stingrays in Bora-Bora. The travel might be in a group with a tour guide, or a solo expedition. We might consult a map or more likely, use GPS tech. But all of it’s travel—which makes me wonder, what’s happening in my brain during those times? I spoke to a neuroscientist, who explained how travel is basically brain exercise, so it’s practically mandatory that we do it.

Paul Nussbaum, PhD, ABPP Clinical Neuropsychologist, is an Adjunct Professor of Neurological Surgery at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. A self-described “passionate messenger about brain health,” Dr. Nussbaum educates the public on the basics of the human brain and how to keep the brain healthy, drawing on over 30 years’ experience caring for adults and older persons suffering dementia, head injury and many neuropsychiatric disorders. An expert in neuroanatomy and human behavior, he has published many peer-reviewed articles, books and chapters within the scientific community.

According to Dr. Nussbaum, our brains are dealing with novelty and complexity when we are traveling. As we’re inwardly musing, where does this one-way street go? What is this strange food I’m eating? How do I say ‘more white wine’ in Italian? the synapses in our brain are multiplying to take in all the strange and complicated new information. “Learning is a physiological, neurophysiological thing that occurs when, essentially, a part of your brain cell called the synapse multiplies, taking in all this information,” he explains. When he’s giving talks, the doctor illustrates this mechanism by holding out his hand, then wiggling the fingers on one hand. Then he raises his other hand and wiggles his fingers, finally, he asks the entire audience to wiggle their fingers. “We've got all these fingers wiggling, and that's the way the brain operates,” he says. “And so you're developing new neural connections with anything that's novel and complex.”

So many parts of the brain are stimulated when traveling. When you’re visiting museums and adapting to new people and situations, you’re lighting up your frontal lobe. Smelling a lavender field stimulates the olfactory cortex; eating local food, the gustatory complex. Reading and then ordering from a menu in a foreign tongue? Those communication skills are centered in Broca's and Wernicke’s areas. Hiking a cliffside? You really are exercising your motor function. Once at the hilltop, when you stand to admire the 360-degree view? Your visual cortex is the center of this. And finally, the spatial understanding to navigate a new city? That’s the parietal lobe. “And so travel is just, you know, it's a really robust way to kind of have your brain just flooded with all these goodies,” says Dr. Nussbaum.

“You’re literally developing more synaptic connections,” Dr. Nussbaum says. “Even though brain cells never touch, they get very, very close and have ‘chemical marriages.’ One brain cell releases a chemical, then another brain cell accepts it. It's called a receptor cell. But they never touch each other—they just have this chemical union.” Dr. Nussbaum says these familiar chemical unions, which produce up to 100 neuro chemicals, such as dopamine, serotonin, GABA, glutamate and more, are just a fraction of a much wider array of chemicals scientists have not identified yet.

“With travel, your brain's reacting physiologically and begins to look like a jungle, so densely packed with neural connections. Imagine Alzheimer's disease as a weed whacker: How long is it going to take you with a weed whacker to go into a jungle and create a path? A long time! The idea is travel builds brain resilience.”

Dr. Nussbaum

“The brain just wants to be stimulated, and so travel, for example, in this case, at any age, as long as the person can process it, is going to be very valuable,” Dr. Nussbaum says. “Because of plasticity, your brain can be shaped. So when we engage in, for example, travel, and we're doing all kinds of things that are novel and complex, and the brain's reacting physiologically, your brain begins to look like a jungle. There's all these neural connections, and it's so densely packed with neural connections. Imagine Alzheimer's disease as a weed whacker: How long is it going to take you with a weed whacker to go into a jungle and create a path? A long time! And so that's the idea, what we're doing with brain health promoting activities is we're building what's called, technically, brain resilience.”

Your brains needs a challenge, but it also needs rest. Dr. Nussbaum suggests determining how long you can stand attending to the stressful details of your trip (that means good stress, called eustress), then leave that tense environment and play a game, do something physical or playful. And get plenty of sleep, he suggests.

“The other side of this is not everybody has enough resources to travel, but they can gain some benefit from travel by going a different route to work.” Dr. Nussbaum said. He pointed out the taxi cab study, which measured the brains of London taxi drivers, who are challenged to customize routes in a complex maze of roads, bridges and tunnels with every new fare, against the brains of London bus drivers, who manage the same route daily. The study found that taxi drivers had much larger hippocampi, which makes sense because the hippocampus is the region of the brain involved in spatial navigation. In other words, taxi drivers were exercising their brain every time they had to work out the route to a new destination, and you can, too.