It has already become a fact of life that, aside from having fun and collecting positive memories, traveling has a way of enhancing a person's quality of life. However, several objective studies also confirmed that traveling also enhances the quality of a person.
A research commissioned by the US Travel Association has confirmed that the exposure to an unfamiliar environment jumpstarts a person's overall mental performance. Hence, these mild waves of 'fight or flight' adventurer stimuli encourage the top 5 areas of mental performance:
Spatial Intelligence
Traveling requires a good sense of direction. For better or worse, the misadventures of getting lost or going around in circles within the foreign territory develops that innate mental compass. With enough exposure (say, three months), a person can move around the unfamiliar 'concrete jungle' with relative ease.
Enhanced Ingenuity
In a study conducted by a professor at Columbia Business School, people who experienced long exposure to foreign cultures are more creative than their insular peers. After all, it requires a serious degree of flexibility to accommodate more than one type of society - to think outside the box, per se.
Interpersonal Skills
As an extension of ingenuity, traveling also allows individuals to effectively deal with people within the vast cultural spectrum. In fact, being able to turn on the same page with assorted personalities is (arguably) the most crucial career-oriented trait gained of all the top 5 ways traveling makes a person smart.
Knowledge Expansion
Whether it is practicing new useful skills or updating academic trivia, traveling is the 'textbook and classroom lecture on overdrive.' Literature provides second-hand knowledge about things that originate in other places. Traveling, however, allows explorers to acquire detailed knowledge via the original source.
Numerical Acumen
Traveling, particularly one that is done solo, entails a gruesome day-to-day logistical assessment. Making every second and every penny count becomes a natural chore of every avid traveler. Simply put it, traveling forces one to do the math on an hourly basis.
