Becoming a stranger
What dépaysement is actually doing to the brain, and why "travel rewires you" overshoots the evidence
The French word dépaysement names something real — the strange clarity that comes from being somewhere unfamiliar. There is a wellness-internet version of this idea that has drifted some distance from what the research actually shows, and a smaller, more interesting version supported by predictive-processing accounts of perception, by Ritter and colleagues' work on schema violations, and by Maddux and Galinsky's finding that living abroad — but not travelling abroad — predicts creativity when people psychologically adapt to the new culture. This essay walks the gap between the two versions and arrives at the more defensible claim: temporary unfamiliarity interrupts the brain's habitual predictions, which sometimes lets people recover parts of experience that routine has quietly edited out.
By Mick
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