This Is Your Brain on Cars

Two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Paul Salopek is in the middle of something extreme. He's walking around the world to retrace the migratory paths of ancient humans, beginning in the Rift Valley of present-day Ethiopia and ending in Tierra del Fuego at the tip of South America. The journey will take seven years and cover 21,000 miles. He’s about 1,500 miles in at this point. You can read about Salopek’s journey as he chronicles it for National Geographic.

As human quests go, Salopek’s is an epic one. But one of the reasons it captures the imagination is that it is made up quite literally of small steps. The ability to walk is one of the defining attributes of our species. The act of walking is something that humans relate to and experience on the deepest neurological level. Our brains are walking brains.