Distance From a Subject Frees the Imagination

I've been asked on more than one occasion how moving away from where I grew up has affected the way I write about that place in my poetry, and I've always answered that for some reason the distance allowed me to feel comfortable letting that setting reveal itself metaphorically in ways that interacting with it on a mundane, day-to-day basis seemed to discourage.

Now I see there's actually evidence that this is how our brains work. Interesting.

From an article in 99% called "The Cure for Creative Blocks? Leave Your Desk." by Jocelyn K. Glei.

As Jonah Lehrer writes in a recent Guardian piece, “Several new science papers suggest that getting away – and it doesn't even matter where you're going – is an essential habit of effective thinking.” Certainly, we’ve all experienced the feeling that work concerns are just less important the farther away we get from the office. Now there’s proof to back up the classic “out of sight, out of mind” expression.

Lehrer goes on, “The reason such travels are mentally useful involves a quirk of cognition, in which problems that feel ‘close’ – and the closeness can be physical, temporal or even emotional – get contemplated in a more concrete manner. As a result, when we think about things that are nearby, our thoughts are constricted, bound by a more limited set of associations. While this habit can be helpful – it allows us to focus on the facts at hand – it also inhibits our imagination.”

Going even further, another study sparked by the productivity of expats like Nabokov, Hemingway, Yeats, Picasso, Gaugin, and Handel showed that not just traveling but living abroad for an extended period of time can improve our capacities for problem solving and creative thinking.

Anybody out there want to bankroll a four or five-year adventure to Europe for the family and me?