Is “travel psychology” a real thing? How have our definitions of where we’re from changed over history? What do highways, our passports, and the lines and lounges in an airport reveal about travel and movement in the modern world? And what happens when we shift from viewing humans as fixed in place to constantly in motion?

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Erratic
By Tim Cresswell
 
Sitting there for all the world
as if you owned the place.
An error. Bluestone among 
chalk. Wanderer. Heretic. 
Stowaway, suspended as the world 
warmed leaving you upended – 
culture-shocked and supersized. 
Your crystals milky,
opaque, glittering.
Brimming with another kind of 
winter. Fire and freeze. Ten 
thousand years of exile – 
now part of the scenery.

—

Episode 2 featured Geographer Tim Cresswell. The episode was produced, edited, and mixed by Stephanie Tam. Our theme music was composed by Nina Humphreys.

Thank you to the Kahneman-Treisman Center for Behavioral Science & Public Policy at Princeton University for sponsoring Behavioral Scientist Reads and helping to make the podcast possible.

Find out more at bookclub.behavioralscientist.org and behavioralscientist.org.

Published by Behavioral Scientist magazine.

Why did we choose this strange, fragmented novel for the summer book club? What do we know about its author, Olga Tokarczuk? And what are some “reading maps” we can use to start finding our way in this very different kind of story?

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Episode 1 was produced and edited by Stephanie Tam, and mixed by Phil Bodger. Our theme music was composed by Nina Humphreys.

Thank you to the Kahneman-Treisman Center for Behavioral Science & Public Policy at Princeton University for sponsoring Behavioral Scientist Reads and helping to make the podcast possible.

Find out more at bookclub.behavioralscientist.org and behavioralscientist.org.

Published by Behavioral Scientist magazine.

Introducing Behavioral Scientist Reads, the podcast that explores what it means to be human through conversations at the intersection of science and culture, and books that illuminate who we are and who we can become. 

This summer, we’re reading Flights by Polish author Olga Tokarczuk, the recipient of the 2018 Nobel Prize in literature.

Flights explores the human impulse toward movement—the perpetual tension between traveling somewhere new or staying put. At times playful and surprising, at others morbid and mysterious, Flights offers us a chance to explore our own journeys—through space and time, in our minds, and over the course of our lives.

New this year, the Book Club will include: 

• A five-part podcast exploring themes from the book with guest experts
• Collaborative memory map of the places and travels that have changed us
• Live and asynchronous group discussions 

Find out more at bookclub.behavioralscientist.org and behavioralscientist.org.

Published by Behavioral Scientist magazine.