I’ve been in a new city for just over a week now, and I’ve been seeing all kinds of people who can’t possibly be here. It can’t be them, they live in Australia or they’re Shakespearian characters and have been dead for a really long time. Just for a second until they resolve into someone else. That doesn’t happen to me in cities that I’m comfortable with. This led me to wonder if there’s a mental plasticity lever in the brain. Some mode that lets the brain go into learn mode?

Model of a great white shark stuck head first into the roof of a house

This is a real house in Headington, Oxford. It was on Air B&B for a while too.

There needs to be some kind of increased level of credulity when you’re in a new place, or nothing would stick. You’d see the giant shark sticking out of the top of a house, assume that you were fooling yourself, and forget about it.

My guess is that the increased credulity is a trade off between speed of learning and safety.

In a situation where you are new to things you are likely to be easy to con. Maybe this is part of the reason why tourists get mugged so much more than locals?1

I’ve noticed that when I’m in new situations I have more ideas, but I don’t feel mental clarity (whatever that means).

I wonder if there’s a way to hack brains into and out of that mode? It’d be great to be able to induce some kind of free thinking state, then snap out of it to execute.

  1. It turns out that this is actually a documented phenomenon! In Rationally Speaking #151 - Maria Konnikova on “Why everyone falls for con artists” She talks about how people who have been through some kind of recent trauma or disorienting experience are more susceptable to con artists. ↩