Two new books look at why we explore and play, sometimes at the same time | Canada Voices

Ever wondered what the migrations of cane toads in Australia have in common with the migrations of French settlers in 19th-century Quebec? Or what connects Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings of the 1950s, the Olympic training regime of a Swedish speed skater and the centuries-old settlement of Polynesia?

If so I suggest picking up Alex Hutchinson’s The Explorer’s Gene (Mariner), an exploration, if you will, of exploration’s myriad forms (physical, intellectual, creative). As in his previous bestselling book, Endure, Hutchinson here shores up expert storytelling with a dizzying amount of multidisciplinary (anthropological, biological, neuroscientific, historical) research.

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The speed with which we settled the planet after emerging from Africa about 50,000 years ago suggests we “behaviourally modern” humans are natural explorers. (Our evolutionary cousins, Neanderthals, conversely, lazed around for hundreds of thousands of years, barely pushing the boundaries of their territory.) That mass migration, presumably no coincidence, aligned with the appearance of a novelty-seeking “explorer’s gene,” which persists in humans to this day (often in those with ADHD).

This isn’t to say we’re all equal in the wanderlust department. Some, after all, had to keep the home fires burning while others went roaming around, charting the uncharted.

But we do abhor boredom, as famously demonstrated by a 2014 study that found that most people (especially males) prefer to self-administer mild electric shocks to themselves rather than sit in an empty room doing nothing for 10 minutes.

The density of the presented research is offset (mostly) by the Canadian physicist, long-distance runner and regular Globe contributor’s engagingly broad interpretation of “exploring,” which ranges from the traditional – mapless continent- and ocean-crossing, say – to the microexplorations involved when we do things such as listen to new music or eat unfamiliar foods.

With most of our terra now cognita, human discovery has largely moved to scientific and quantum realms. “Coming up with new ideas is a more abstract concept than discovering a new continent,” writes Hutchinson, “but the underlying processes of physical and conceptual exploration have more in common than you might think.”

In all these contexts, Hutchinson often returns to the “explore-exploit” dilemma: a choice between exploiting the knowledge we have to get predictable rewards (as the movie industry has done through its reliance on mind-numbing but income-generating sequels), or flinging ourselves into the unknown in the hopes of grabbing bigger ones.

An example Hutchinson provides of the latter is Swedish speed skater Nils van der Poel, who, while training for the 2022 Olympics, concocted a wildly unorthodox, years-long training regimen ­that involved not skating for months at a time. It paid off, with van der Poel bagging two gold medals and a new world record. Van der Poel later made his training logs public, an act Hutchinson compares to Darwin or Columbus publishing their explorer’s journals.

Modern life, you won’t be shocked to hear, is sometimes at odds with our inner explorer. That most children are no longer allowed to roam farther than their own backyards has had ramifications on their cognitive development. And most video-game play is so passive that it’s been shown to shrink the hippocampus and put us at risk of Alzheimer’s, depression and schizophrenia. (An exception, amazingly, is Super Mario 64). Social media’s corporate algorithms are increasingly usurping the role trial and error used to play in our cognition.

Hutchinson has five suggestions for how to combat these assaults on our mental and exploratory well-being. Two are that we seek uncertainty and play more – which is a handy segue to Peter Unwin’s Playing Hard (Cormorant), a memoir in short essays billed as “a tribute to the power of play in all its forms.”

At the book’s heart is Unwin’s relationship with his late father, Al, who immigrated from the working-class steel town of Sheffield, England, to the working-class steel town of Hamilton in the 1950s, when Unwin was a young boy.

One of the first things the elder Unwin did, after decamping the family to nearby Dundas, Ont., was sign up to coach a local T-ball team. This despite the fact that he, a soccer aficionado, had never so much as watched a baseball game.

Volunteering to teach a sport you don’t know in a country you just landed in possibly makes sense in light of the explore-exploit dilemma. Perhaps Al Unwin figured that the difficulty of learning baseball would be offset by the insights he’d gain into his new environment. And as his son points out, the notion of “stepping up” was well within the lexicon of a navy man who, not so long ago, had fought on the beaches of Normandy.

Decades later, when Al was dying in hospital, he regaled Unwin with familiar tales about that time. Father and son also talked a lot about sports.

With opportunities for declarations or apologies (Unwin mentions that he and Al didn’t speak for a time) rapidly dwindling, it’s no surprise a man of Al’s generation would fall back on the same manner of barroom talk he’d relied on all his life.

Between anecdotes about his father, Unwin offers his own sport reminiscences. Among them, early, idyllic memories of playing baseball in Dundas (considered by some the sport’s birthplace), shooting hoops in the gym of a Toronto psychiatric hospital during the SARS outbreak and the time he played “Eskimo baseball” with a group of Inuit kids in Frobisher Bay.

Sweetly funny as these vignettes sometimes are, Playing Hard, as a whole, feels like thin gruel. Instead of the reflections one would expect in a book about the role of play in life, and mortality, what Unwin too often delivers is a stream of mildly interesting sport-related factoids and random-feeling histories.

He describes, for instance, playing a lively game of snakes and ladders with his four-year-old daughter while camping on the shores of Lake Superior: the same spot, we’re told, where 65 years earlier a group of German POWs played various sports to while away their boredom. And yet, Unwin’s claims that “the ghosts of these young pilots and their memories play in the wind outside the tent” notwithstanding, it’s unclear what real connection he sees between these two events.

At one point he mentions the philosopher Johan Huizinga, who once suggested renaming we Homo sapiens as Homo ludens: people who play. Huizinga also posited that play happens in a special space separate from everyday reality. He dubbed this, the “magic circle.” If only, in this occasionally charming book, Unwin had drawn us closer into a circle of any kind, no magic required.