An excellent article that argues that traveling, by giving us physical distance from our problems, helps us think more abstractly about them, and frees up our brains to think in different ways, make more associations.

Distance = abstraction. This works for drawing, too: I often find it’s easier to cartoon people from further away.

Of course, if you stay too far away from your problems, they become too abstract. Take old friends and family, for instance (they’re often problems): if you stay away from them too long, they become cartoons in your mind…

Study examines link between “creativity” and living abroad.

Novelist Richard Stern has noted the particular importance of living abroad for a creative mindset: “Once I went abroad it was extremely exciting for me to become a new personality, to be detached from everything that bound me, noticing everything that was different. That noticing of difference was very important; the languages, even though I was no good at them, were very important; how things were said, the different formulas. Being abroad has been very important.”

My time living in Italy and England when I was 19 and 20 certainly changed my life, but I would note that a “foreign” culture isn’t necessarily across the sea or in another country—think of the story arc of the small-town Midwestern folks who move to the big city, etc.

i.e. For most folks who grew up where I grew up, Texas or New York City might as well be Mars…

It’s not *only* about travel: it’s about exile.

From the Neuroscientists Telling Us What Folk Wisdom Has Told Us Forever department: it’s a thin line between artist and crazy person. Hooray!