Humour me for a moment.
Imagine it’s your first day on vacation. Your destination is Paris, the city of lights, of love, and of Eiffel Tower keychains (5 for €1, no less).
Where do you go after you drop off your luggage?
Now, there’s no need to get too far out of your checked baggage with this mental exercise. If you’re anything like 40 million other people visiting Paris this year (which, let’s face it, you probably are), you’ll probably head to one of these attractions:
Thanks to Chris Karidis on Unsplash for the photo
Thanks to Fábio Roque for the photo
Thanks to Clark Van Der Beken for the photo
There’s no shame in admitting this. After all, you’re in Paris for this mental trip remember. When else will you witness such magnificent displays of history, culture, and art?
This, by the way, is what everyone else waiting in line with you is thinking. That, and, “who do I have to pay off at this place to get Fast Pass tickets?”
The better destination
Now let’s imagine instead that you choose a different road branching off of the Champs Elysees. A road that leads you to a place that also has lines, but they never last more than 10 minutes.
This place is also magical, albeit lacking in art and history:
Thanks to Markus Spiske for the photo
“The supermarket?”
“Why,” you ask, “would I ditch the chance at selfies in front of the Eiffel Tower for the laundry detergent aisle of a local supermarket?”
Because laundry detergent and pet supplies are where authenticity is found. It’s where you’ll find people that have lived alongside Parisian monuments for decades and never stepped inside.
And it’s where no tourist goes first.
The Science Behind Supermarket Travel
“When we engage in other cultures, we start to have experience with different people and recognise that most people treat you in similar ways.”
— Adam Galinsky, professor at Columbia Business School
In recent years, neuroscientists and psychologists have been studying the effect of travel on the brain. What they’ve found, unsurprisingly, is that travel is good for the brain. However, to be truly beneficial and lasting, a certain type of travel is necessary.
“Foreign experiences increase cognitive flexibility… the mind’s ability to jump between different ideas, [which is] a key component of creativity,” reports Adam Galinsky, a professor at Columbia Business School and author of multiple studies on the benefits of traveling. He’s also my inspiration behind what I’m calling the science of supermarket travel:
“The key is multicultural engagement, immersion, and adaptation. Someone who lives abroad and doesn’t engage with the local culture will likely get less of a creative boost than someone who travels abroad and really engages in the local environment.”
This is why striking up a conversation in the supermarket aisle, or daring to ask a store clerk where you might find the toilet paper, has potentially far greater mental and emotional benefits than acting like you’re holding up the Eiffel Tower.
Most people avoid supermarket travel either because it’s too intimidating or not sexy enough. It’s in the discomfort of travel, however, that we truly feed our brain.
Everything else we do, no matter how glamorous or eye-catching, is little more than mental junk food. That doesn’t mean the Eiffel Tower or the Louvre, or Versailles can’t be enjoyed. It just means we need to recognise that we’re probably also checking our cognitive flexibility at the bag check.
So, next time you travel, whether that be next door or halfway across the world, consider packing your brain along for the journey.
