Medium Article

Why Do We Feel the Need to Explore Things and Places?

The Continuous Battle Between Not Being Forgotten and Taking Great Risks in Your Life

7 min readAug 28, 2023

On Mar 15, 1925, "The Air Mail" premieres, film directed by Irvin V. Willat in which a stuntwoman whose name will not sound familiar to you acted.

I am going to focus on her story to explain, discover and understand together why we act as we do. How the fear of being forgotten moves every section of our life and what is hidden behind these desires and behaviours.

Leonardo DiCaprio — The Aviator (2004 film)

“We only find the world we are looking for.”
— Henry David Thoreau

All Starts with Doing Crazy Things

Her name won’t ring you because history has almost forget about her. In one way or another, she dedicated her entire life to explore new ways to made her profession increasingly “exciting”, especially for the others.

Gladys Roy is our protagonist, a brave women that dedicated to did “wing walks” and frequently performed high-flying stunts at state fair type events.

She made a name for herself by doing the Charleston on the wings of a speeding plane, 3,000 feet in the air and holding — in those years — the record for the “world’s lowest parachute jump” from just 100 feet.

Impressive, right?

On May, 1926 she talked the following about her stunts in the Los Angeles Times:

I do everything from the Charleston to playing tennis on the wings of a speeding ship, to hanging by my legs from the landing gear as the ship comes to earth. The moment my fingers touch the earth i snap my body upwards and the plane alights in a cloud of dust.
It looks ten times more thrilling than it really is because the crowd cannot see me on account of the dust cloud. Of late, the crowds are beginning to tire of even my most difficult stunts and so I must necessarily invent new ones, that is, if I want to hold my reputation as a dare-devil.
Eventually an accident will occur and then …
The exhibitors know and welcome these accidents, for their ears are turned to the clink of gold as it falls into their strong boxes. Thus does the event spell success or failure.
Were one to turn back the pages of this world they would have probably found me again in the Roman circus. I would have been crying: “Hail, Caesar! We who are about to die, salute thee! And promoter Caesar would have turned ‘thumbs down.’”

And excuse me but I thought that such an interesting letter could not be cut into pieces to make it shorter.

Let's turn back to the subject and start from the beginning — don't forget this letter since that will help us make sense of that need to discover, that we all have inside.

Let’s Start With the Beginning

Even before birth, some babies are already able to dream inside their mother's womb. What's more, something I didn't know and has left me amazed is that we dream more actively in our first two weeks of life than we ever will. But we don’t appear in our own dreams until around the age of three.

This allows us to reaffirm the following: we dream even before we are aware of our own existence in those dreams.

Dreaming can allow us to simulate what we have always wanted to achieve. It may even be that without being aware, in one of our dreams, we are presented with the meaning of our life, the goal we have to achieve or the reason why we are in this world.

Our Physical Obsession to Explore

Every event you experience for the first time leaves a mark on your brain.

The nervous system and specifically neurons can be born or even die from the experience of such events. Your brain has a super-power that you don’t know called “structural plasticity”. This attribute helps the brain to modulate the nerve responses caused by the experiences we live.

What we must understand is that the driver — you — pilots very complex artifacts, both physical and metaphysical called body and soul. With which we have never received detailed instructions so we tend to create our own ideas about how we will act and what decisions we will make throughout our lives.

«Mientras nuestro cerebro sea un arcano, el universo, reflejo de nuestra estructura, será un arcano también».
“As long as our brain is a mystery, the universe, the reflection of the structure of the brain, will also be a mystery.”
— Santiago Ramón y Cajal, pioneering neuroscientist, 1922.

Even before we talk or be able to walk, at the beginning of our adventure, these physical responses are nourished by our need to explore, both this world and the inner world of which we are composed.

Exploration Propels The Brain’s Activity

Any adventure that enriches your environment will elevate your own personal growth.

Imagine that you are traveling through that place you have always wanted to explore. Now reflect with me on how the following actions would stimulate and impact each section of your brain:

Visiting museums — Frontal Lobe
Smelling the ocean mist — Olfactory Cortex
Tasting local cuisines — Gustatory Cortex
Ordering food in a foreign language — Wernicke’s Area
Hiking through national parks — Motor Cortex
Navigating a new city — Parietal Lobe
And so on.

According to Dr. Adam Galinsky, a professor at Columbia Business School:

“Foreign experiences increase both cognitive flexibility and depth and integrativeness of thought, the ability to make deep connections between disparate forms.”

Reckless Adventure 101

Give me the opportunity to go back to our protagonist again.

Gladys Roy and Ivan Unger play tennis on the wing of a biplane in flight, 1925.

Everything we have understood about our brain played a key role in Gladys Roy. Even without knowing the theory behind her constant need to innovate, she understood that her body "called her to adventure," in one way or another.

Many of us wait for life to make us a "call to action" and in a large percentage this call will never come. This is how we try to delay the inevitable: The passage of time.

How many times have you dreamed of leaving everything you have and traveling the world? How many times have you accepted a job that takes more hours, when what you deeply want is to spend more time with your children? How many times have you dreamed of learning that new language or simply reading that entire book that has been gathering dust on the shelf for years?

It's not the load, but how you carry it.
— Old saying.

Our brain, in a broad sense, is made for adventure. We are machines created to be nomadic, explorers, adventurous.

It is the awareness of that "nature" that we have, that makes us able to shape our actions and desires to continue advancing as a species.

Perhaps Gladys Roy, like most of us, has not contributed anything transcendent to the history, but I am convinced that our body is more intelligent than our understanding of it lets us understand.

Perhaps if she had had more time, his name would have gone into history.

Fear of Being Forgotten

*“Sadak in Search of the Waters of Oblivion”,* an 1812 oil painting by John Martin

Tragically, in 1927, after a photoshoot, his "adventure" came to an end when she was struck by a propeller. She was only 25.

Unlike Gladys Roy, other personalities such as his namesake Gladys Ingle have overcome the barrier of oblivion, thanks to the fact that she lived until she was 82 years old to tell his exploits and his family has been able to continue sharing them.

When you get forgot, your story does not continue and your legacy will be lost in time. That is why this is the only thing that makes human beings try to achieve great feats and transcend continually: so as not to die forgotten and may our legacy endure for millennia.

We All Fall on The Same Rock

But let's talk about tennis. Isn't that why we started this story?

“Ideas are more dangerous that the H-bomb. You can ask Edward Teller for it.”
— Lohman Narciso

The crazy things have always caught our attention. It is part of the behaviour of our species. Whether it's jumping from a fifteen-meter cliff into the sea or playing a game of tennis on one of the first planes created as Gladys Roy.

But when time passes and everything evolves, we try to remember those old challenges or create some even more impressive ones.

Roger Federer Playing Against Andre Agassi on a Helipad in 2005

Our voracious hunger to challenge ourselves gets us to succumb to the past again to put ourselves to the test. And we fall on the same stone of exploration and discovery once again.