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| Category | Special Event |
| Age Groups | Adult |
| Location | Zoom |
McKinley Memorial Library is pleased to announce we are in partnership with the Library Speakers Consortium (LSC). The Consortium is a group of libraries that pool resources to hire well-known fiction and nonfiction adult, children's, and young adult authors to speak to their patrons. All programs are broadcast live (online) and recorded for later viewing. You can access our LSC webpage to see a list of upcoming speakers and view past recordings. You can also subscribe to monthly event email reminders about current and upcoming speakers from the Library Speakers Consortium!
Register for this online event. You do not need to have a library card to register.
In The Explorer’s Gene: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map, Alex Hutchinson dives headfirst into a fascinating and provocative new field of research, examining how exploration is a fundamental part of what makes us human.
Off the beaten path, on unmarked trails, we are wired to explore. More than just a need to get outside, the search for the unknown is a specific, primal urge that has shaped the history of our species and continues to mold our behavior in ways we are just beginning to understand. In fact, the latest neuroscience suggests that exploration is an essential ingredient of human life. Exploration, it turns out, isn’t merely a hobby—it’s our story.
And yet, it has never been easier to live an exploration-free life, without the struggle and uncertainty that true exploration—of places, experiences, and ideas—requires. With the digital world designed to exploit the neural circuitry behind our drive to explore, we receive the illusion of novelty without accompanying growth.
From paddling the lost rivers of the northern Canadian wilderness to the ocean-spanning voyages of the Polynesians, The Explorer’s Gene combines riveting stories of exploration with cutting-edge insights from behavioral psychology and neuroscience. The end result offers a singular approach to finding meaning in our past struggles, embracing the possibility of failure in our future, and crucially, recognizing when our present is good enough.
Find the book in the online catalog.
About the Author: Alex Hutchinson is a National Magazine Award-winning science journalist with a big-picture focus on human performance and particular interests in fitness, endurance sports, and the outdoors. He is Outside magazine’s longtime Sweat Science columnist, and his writing also appears in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. Before journalism, he was a postdoctoral physicist at the National Security Agency and a long-distance runner for the Canadian national team. He lives in Toronto with his wife and daughters.