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5 Ways Travel Makes You Smarter

By Allison Hope

There are plenty of things you can spend money on that don’t increase your IQ, but travel is one wise investment that pays annual dividends beyond the fun of bragging to your friends about your most recent vacation . That’s right, travel actually makes you smarter.

In fact, a recent study of chimpanzees in Uganda showed that those who traveled farther on a regular basis were more resourceful and intelligent than those that didn’t. Given that we share 99 percent of the same DNA as chimps, it’s not a stretch to believe that the same is true of humans. "Our results show travel fosters tool use in wild chimpanzees and it may also have been a driving force in early technological evolution by humans," writes Dr. Thibaud Gruber , one of the authors of the study. Here are five ways travel expands your mind.

Expanded Reality

Traveling to new places literally develops your sense of reality . As you drink in new sights and sounds, you are broadening the scope of your understanding of the world around you and of new cultures that are different from yours, which can lead to all sorts of goodness, including heightened success in your career, according to one study. "Multicultural engagement—the extent to which students adapted to and learned about new cultures... predicted the number of job offers students received after the [international] program," they noted.

Boosted Brain Power

Travel helps fuel your brain to function at a higher level. One study showed that retired people who travel have 75 percent higher rates of mental stimulation , and 82 percent have an increased ability to “get things done,” versus 57 percent of those who don’t travel. The study's authors recommend that "businesses encourage use of vacation time as a way to improve health and wellness in the workplace." Take note, bosses everywhere !

Better Memory

Traveling to a new country, or even a new region in your country, where different languages or different inflections or idioms are spoken, helps increase your attention span and short term memory. Of course, there are also benefits to learning words and phrases in other languages that don’t exist in your native tongue, as it equips you with ways of describing things that your primary language may be lacking (check out these truly awesome words that sadly don’t exist in English).

Increased Creativity

Taking in the aesthetic greatness of the Eiffel Tower or La Sagrada Familia isn’t just enjoyable; it actually enriches your own imagination. The more time you spend in other countries, the more creative you become . Adapting to new smells, tastes, and sights creates new neuropathways in your brain, which enable new ways of thinking and increased flow of creativity.

Strength in Vulnerability

If you’ve ever arrived in a foreign country with zero knowledge of the language, culture, or social norms and have to struggle to figure out how to get to your destination in one piece, then you know what vulnerability feels like. It can be scary at first, but it's that ability to think on your feet and handle a situation that makes you realize just how strong and capable you are. To quote the Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön: “To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest.”

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