The exploratory circuits in our brains are old.
They’re as old as anything else in our brain. These circuits are in the oldest part of our brain, in the base of the brain.
Exploration is one of our basic behavioral responses.
We get caught-up in our daily lives and forget about the simple processes. This is one of the simplest.
To explore the unknown is designed to make us feel good.
We are meaning-making machines.
Our primary drive is, in my opinion: to search for meaning and to create meaning. This is how we and why we explore: to find reason, to make reason, to search for reason and life and purpose and goals.
Exploration is in our blood. Or, in our brain. And, it’s in the most basic, fundamental, animalistic part of our brain.
Exploring, or going in to the unknown releases dopamines: so it makes us feel good.
It is also analgesic. Meaning: it helps us heals. That’s how our brain has prioritized it as a reward.
Exploring heals.
It’s also that primal place where motivation and reward from being motivated have always lived. It’s the place where the drive for hunger and thirst lives: in the same place where the motivation to explore exists.
Being motivated enough to cull the courage needed to engage in exploring is the both the output and the variable needed to make all this happen.
To explore is one of the grand analogies of existence.
It is, at once, motivating and motivation itself.
It feels good.
And it heals.
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