Angry Legos?

Nathan Sawaya, a sculptor who works in the medium of Legos, opened an exhibition, The Art of The Brick,  in New York City in June. Sawaya has more than 2.5 million colored bricks in his New York and Los Angeles art studios and his work is obsessively and painstakingly crafted -- elevating an ordinary toy to the status of fine art.

According to journalist Scott Jones,”Sawaya is a surrealist mash-up of forms and artists. Imagine Frank Lloyd Wright crossed with Ray Harryhausen, or Auguste Rodin crossed with Shigeru Miyamoto, and you start to get a sense of where Sawaya is coming from.”

But as the Lego company introduces more aggressive characters, an unintended consequence might be a dampening down of the kind of creativity that inspires Sawaya. Shaunacy Ferro of the website PopSci, posted the following story:

When it comes to criticizing the violent ways our kids play, Legos don't usually get a lot of flack. But according to a recent study led by Christopher Bartneck of New Zealand's University of Canterbury Human Interface Technology Laboratory, Legos are becoming more conflict-oriented, and the human figures featured in Lego sets are getting angrier.

The study found that Lego figures most frequently feature happy or angry expressions, but since their introduction in 1975, the proportion has been tilting in favor of the angry.

"Our cluster analysis shows that toy design has become a more complex design space in which the imaginary world of play does not only consist of a simple division of good versus evil," the researchers write, "but a world in which heroes are scared and villains can have superior smile [sic]."

Through the Amazon Mechanical Turk marketplace, 264 study subjects in the U.S. viewed photographs of 628 different heads that appeared on the 3655 Lego Minifigures released between 1975 and 2010, and evaluated how intense their facial expressions were on scales for anger, happiness, sadness, disgust, and surprise. (They were paid one cent for every evaluation.) The face was then categorized by the expression people rated it as most often.

Starting in 1989, Lego began introducing more variety into their figures' facial expressions. While overall, the Minifigures' expressions featured happiness most often, the characters are increasingly moving toward angrier expressions, and the authors write "it is our impression that the themes have been increasingly based on conflict."

People were more likely to categorize a face as angry if there was a body attached to it, rather than just an image of a floating Lego head, but overall the study found the presence of bodies did not make the facial expressions significantly more distinct, nor did the skin color of the figure.

The paper estimates that on average, there are 75 Lego bricks for every person on Earth. "We cannot help but wonder how the move from only positive faces to an increasing number of negative faces impacts how children play," the researchers write. "The children that grow up with LEGO today will remember not only smileys, but also anger and fear in the Minifigures’ faces."

Check out the whole paper for the intense scientific discussion of Lego theory you've always wanted.

What Makes Us Unique?

Gary Marcus, research psychologist at The University of New York and author of Guitar Zero: The New Musician And The Science Of Learning, writes for Nautilus on what makes humans unique.

"If you dropped a dozen human toddlers on a beautiful Polynesian island with shelter and enough to eat, but no computers, no cell phones, and no metal tools, would they grow up to be like humans we recognize or like other primates? Would they invent language? Without the magic sauce of culture and technology, would humans be that different from chimpanzees?

Nobody knows. (Ethics bars the toddler test.) Since the early 1970s, scientists across the biological sciences keep stumbling on the same hint over and over again: we’re different but not nearly as different as we thought. Neuroscientists, geneticists, and anthropologists have all given the question of human uniqueness a go, seeking special brain regions, unique genes, and human-specific behaviors, and, instead, finding more evidence for common threads across species.

This year President Obama pledged $100 million to the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative, and the European Commission committed one billion euros ($1.29 billion) to the Human Brain Project. The ambitious projects aim to map the circuitry and functions of the brain, and may help us better understand what makes us human. But so far science has found only the tiniest clues.

As someone who has studied language, cognitive neuroscience, and human evolution, I say that with a tinge of chagrin; my professional career has been about trying to understand the origins and development of the human mind. My colleagues and I are all still struggling to find the answers. Why has pinpointing the origins of human uniqueness proven so difficult?

In the old days, the main hypotheses were behavioral. “Humans are the only animals to use tools.” “Humans are the only animals to have culture.” “Humans are the only animals to teach their young.” But over time most of those guesses have turned out (to read more.....)

Books Reveal Emotional Climate Of Their Times

An All Things Considered segment by Alix Spiegel exploring what literature can reveal about the emotional character of different eras is a wonderful complement to a previous piece of mine in Harvard Business Review on the cognitive benefits of reading fiction.

"Were people happier in the 1950s than they are today? Or were they more frustrated, repressed and sad?

To find out, you'd have to compare the emotions of one generation to another. British anthropologists think they may have found the answer — embedded in literature.  Several years ago, more or less on a lark, a group of researchers from England used a computer program to analyze the emotional content of books from every year of the 20th century — close

to a billion words in millions of books.  This effort began simply with lists of "emotion" words: 146 different words that connote anger; 92 words for fear; 224 for joy; 115 for sadness; 30 for disgust; and 41 words for surprise. All were from standardized word lists used in linguistic research.

The original idea was to have the computer program track the use of these words over time. The researchers wanted to see if certain words, at certain moments, became more popular.  But Alex Bentley, an anthropologist at the University of Bristol involved in the research, says no one expected much when they set their computers to search through one hundred years of books that had been digitized by Google.

"We didn't really expect to find anything," he says. "We were just curious. We really expected the use of emotion words to be constant through time.  Instead, in the study they published in the journalPLOS ONE, the anthropologists found very distinct peaks and valleys, Bently says. "The clarity of some of the patterns was surprising to all of us, I think."

With the graphs spread out in front of him, Bentley says, the patterns are easy to see. "The '20s were the highest peak of joy-related words that we see," he says. "They really were roaring."

But then came 1941, which, of course, marked the beginning of America's entry into World War II. It doesn't take a historian to see that (to read more...)

The Incidental Steward: Reflections On Citizen Science

A search for a radio-tagged Indiana bat roosting in the woods behind her house in New York's Hudson Valley led Akiko Busch to assorted other encounters with the natural world -- local ecological monitoring projects, community-organized cleanup efforts, and data-driven citizen science research.  Whether it is pulling up water chestnuts in the Hudson River, measuring beds of submerged aquatic vegetation, or searching out vernal pools, all are efforts that illuminate the role of ordinary citizens as stewards of place. Here are some excerpts from The Incidental Steward:

" I am grateful to all of the scientists for reminding me about the value of uncertainty; that questions are often more important than the answer; that the facts of the natural world are overwhelming and contradictory; and that there are rarely clear answers."

"Maybe another way of saying this is that there are two ways of paying attention:  when you know what yo are looking for, and when you don't."

"In Chinese folklore a bat represents the five great happinesses:  health, wealth, long life, good luck, and tranquillity."

"The only thing I was beginning to grasp for sure was what had brought me here, which had something to do with the chance to restore clarity to what is cloudy and cluttered in our lives.  That it is possible to weed something so fluid as river water speaks to our ability to put some kind of order to those things in our lives thought to be too quick, too changeable , too transparent to require our care."

"Ground truth means what is 'on location,' what is real, what your eyes and ears tell you rather than what the sensors suggest."

"But none, I knew, is still data; zero can be data, too.  I had heard this statement more than conce, and it's a good lesson:  when we don't see anything or hear anything or say anything or think anything, when we have nothing to go on, that, too, is information.  This seems to be a known fact that transcends the boundaries of discipline.  In music, silence can be as resonant as sound; in mathematics, zero can have the authority of a number.  Robert Ryman's white canvases are a primer in the richness of white space, Merce Cunningham's choreography an inquiry into stillness.  Waiting for Godot, one of the most celebrated plays in the English language, is famously described as the play in which nothing happens.   'I have always been as interested in what is not there as what is there -- the void, the interior spaces, the things that you don't see,' the designer Marc Newson has said.  And in the words of abstract painter Ellsworth Kelly, 'The negative is just as important as te positing.'  Absence can be as powerful as presence."

Traffic Jams: Hazardous to Our Health

I'm a New Yorker who loves Los Angeles.  In no other American city is wild, raw nature so immediately accessible.  One can be hiking deep in a canyon, hearing only the sounds of birds, within a half hour from almost every part of the city.  Yet a week ago I was stuck for two hours in a traffic jam trying to go five miles.  I could have been relaxed and walked to my destination in that time.  Instead, I was stressed and felt like I was having a heart attack.  According to a report published by the Texas Traffic Institute, Americans spend a shocking average of 38 hours a year sitting in our cars, stuck in traffic - instead of attending kids' soccer games and excellent dinners and sprawled out on sofas with loved ones reading good books. And this matters because we’re not simply missing out on meaningful experience or destroying our environment; we’re literally killing ourselves sitting in our cars.

Dwight Hennessy and David Wiesenthal, at York University in Canada, investigated the influence of traffic congestion on stress and discovered that "one of the most common contributors to driver stress is traffic congestion, and most regular commuters experience some level of daily traffic congestion. Congested traffic is often interpreted as a negative event in that it tends to slow or block the attainment of goals, such as driving at a certain speed or getting to a destination at a scheduled time. Those who are forced to drive below a desired speed, especially for long distances, tend to report greater levels of stress."

The study emphasized the following: “repeated exposure to stress, without effective coping, has been linked to a series of physiological and psychological pathologies including increased heart rate, blood pressure, anxiety, and negative affect. Driver stress has also been found to influence performance, mood, and health in work and home environments."

Yikes! We knew our blood was boiling as we sat in our cars, but I had no idea the actual physical nature of the ill effects.

In a piece in New York Magazine, Lawrence Frank, a professor of urban planning at the University of British Columbia, added yet another health risk to idling in traffic: "the more you drive, the more you weigh."

The Texas Institute calculated that it costs the U.S. economy almost $78 billion per year in lost time and wasted fuel while people sit in traffic jams.

What would we do with $78 billion a year? Who knows what futuristic solutions would emerge if we launched a national competition, funded at that level of investment, to solve our transportation crisis by 2020?

Alan Pisarski, a transportation expert and the author of Commuting in America, put it this way: "Things are bad and they’re getting worse. We’ve used up the capacity that had been bequeathed to us by a previous generation, and we haven’t replaced it." I’d say the rubber has more than hit the road.

Until we make this kind of investment, you might want to plan ahead and anticipate the wait with a good audio book – learn a new language or how to meditate – it might add years to your life.

A Room Of My Own

The day I moved into my new home office, my horoscope (hey, I take guidance wherever I can find it) declared that I had embarked on “a momentous process of entering the next phase of my future … one that would involve some farewells and some significant changes.” Wow, deep, I thought. And yet, weirdly accurate.

My new office was the old bedroom of my younger daughter, Lucy, now 23. I was working in a room that had been her private and carefully composed inner sanctum. This was a space vibrating with Lucy’s personal resonances: her infant cooings, her 6-year-old late-night forbidden encyclopedia readings, our nightly go-to-bed “You Are My Sunshine” songfests and all of the heartbreaks and secrets unknown to me yet shared with her friends. Until she left for college and later moved with her sister, Kate, into an apartment a few miles from our home, her entire life had unfolded within these four walls.

My husband and I had preserved first Kate’s room then Lucy’s throughout their college years, reveling in their holiday whirlwind returns while chafing under the chaos of their stuff upending our serene-while-they-were-at-school household order. I never gave much thought to this liminal place — kids not living at home but kids also not living with permanence anywhere else. It just was how things were.

Even with those college years of practice separations, though, I wasn’t prepared for the big, adult move out. I continued to keep their rooms as they were, although they’d become stagnant reliquaries for the stuff the girls were unwilling to deal with: clothes, old school papers, fading photographs, childish jewelry, souvenirs, years-old magazines and comics.

The occasional what-if-they-lose-their-job-or-break-up-with-their-boyfriend-and-need-to-come-home bolus of anxiety allowed me to indulge in the sense that I was keeping their rooms intact for the girls, rather than because I was engaging in magical thinking, choosing to believe the illusion (beds at the ready, stuffed animals waiting) that my kids weren’t really adults.

(MORE: The Art of Shedding Possessions)

Admitting the Kids Aren’t Moving Back Home

But one day, during my morning meditation, a transgressive thought bubbled up. And again and again I found myself imagining a Virginia Woolf-ish room of my own. I began to fixate on the fact that as an adult, indeed for 40 years, I’d never had any space that I could call my very own.

My kids had their rooms, and when my husband reinvented himself as a novelist he claimed as his office a room with a door he could shut. Yet when I’d transitioned from being a corporate worker to a freelance journalist, I’d been forced by the physical limitations of our Brooklyn house to use a makeshift Murphy desk sandwiched into the narrow pass-through between a sitting room and the living room.

It was wide-open to anyone who might pass through, and by default I was expected to answer every phone call or doorbell. I was up and down all day long and wore earplugs in a losing battle to concentrate. When Woolf wrote, “For women, I thought, looking at the empty shelves, these difficulties were infinitely more formidable. In the first place, to have a room of her own, let alone a quiet room or a soundproof room, was out of the question, unless her parents were exceptionally rich or very noble, even up to the beginning of the 19th century.” For decades, I realized, I’d been living like a 19th-century daughter: roomless.

After months of imagining my ideal office space (and how I could turn the other bedroom into a proper, grown-up guest room) and months of worry that the kids would feel like I was erasing their lives and history from our home, I took action. I told the family what I was planning.

My husband, unsurprisingly, couldn't have cared less, but I was right to have been concerned about the kids’ response. Intellectually, they understood that what I was proposing was reasonable; emotionally, it seemed they weren’t ready to let go either. We came to an agreement. I would leave the rooms the original colors the girls had chosen.

I would furthermore repurpose most of their furniture, keep some of their more precious objects in place, curate the important items for posterity — and they didn’t have to help with any of it. Passive aggressive as the non-helping bit might feel, I got it. This change was not their choice, it was mine. I should do the heavy lifting. And on the bright side, their non-involvement showed they trusted me to do the right thing. With resolve I plowed ahead.

(MORE: Make Your Home Office Work for You)

Old Kid Bedrooms Become New Grownup Rooms

Over the course of several weeks, I tackled the project, each day managing to go through bookcases, drawers and stacks of stuff — pruning the detritus from the kids’ lives, placing curated items into storage bins for the basement and other things into piles to relocate to their new place.

I relived so much of our lives together by myself. I felt a deep melancholy as I allowed myself to experience trips we’d taken, read letters they’d written or received, and mourn passions (anime, painting) abandoned. It was similar to what I’d shared with my sister when we’d closed up my parent’s house, but we had each other. This time only I walked down these wistful paths — saying goodbye to my babies and that life.

And then I was done.

I write this, finally, from a room of my own. As my horoscope predicted, the move involved some deep farewells and changes, but in the end, nothing was lost and an infinitude was gained. Every day I’m surrounded by the presence and love of my kids — all the treasures they’ve given me over the years that never before had a proper place.

I’m bathed in family and history and meaning: A painting of an Egyptian sloop my father gave me in college is displayed over my desk, my mother-in-law’s painting of wildflowers in a mountain pass that Lucy had in her room now hangs above sheep in a manger from the home of my maternal grandparents. Sunlight streams in, glinting off my mother’s cobalt and emerald perfume bottles beside Lucy’s cheerful stuffed animals. The first chair my husband and I bought beckons me to a corner to read. Beloved ghosts of the past support me as I stand at my hyper-modern electric standing desk.

The poet Anne Sexton called the place she worked “the room of her life.” So is this mine. This is a room I’m pretty sure Virginia Woolf would love. She wrote, when you “earn money and have a room of your own, I am asking you to live in the presence of reality, an invigorating life, it would appear, whether one can impart it or not.”

Yes, this room is filled with invigorating life. Now to impart it.

Forgotten Lessons From the '60s

The other day as I was stopped at a traffic light, a tiny woman with long white hair wearing an old suede fringed jacket inched across the street in front of my car. It was so incongruous to see someone of her age wearing such an iconic '60s artifact. I found myself remembering the fall of '68 when I was turning 13 and had gotten my very own groovy, fringed jacket. Which I made sure to wear to the couple of anti-Vietnam War rallies I attended.

My fringed jacket practically vibrated with symbolic importance- I thought it showed my parents that I was liberated from their middle-class suburban mores and that it identified me with a group of people who I thought were going to make the world a better place.

As I daydreamed at the stoplight, I realized that I almost never had the feelings of hopefulness that I felt whenever I wore that fringe jacket 35 and almost 40 years ago. It got me thinking that it was worth revisiting the '60s (by which, of course, I mean the late '60s and early '70s) ethos. Here are a few thoughts:

Intoxicate Yourself And I don't mean take LSD. But I do think I could use some of the kind of joy that I used to feel wandering in my tie-dyed T-shirt through Volker Park in Kansas City - just hanging out and listening to music with nothing else to do but be there now.

All of us might feel more optimistic about the world if we grooved a bit more to life's sensual pleasures. Try this. Do nothing for the afternoon except rock in the hammock and listen to Bob Dylan. Walk barefoot through the grass. Don't wash your hair or make your bed. Seriously. Hang loose.

Let Your Hair Down Find more comfort in being yourself. It's OK to have wrinkles and bags under your eyes. God knows we had a lot of bags under our eyes in 1971. View all the signs of having lived a full life as markers to be worn proudly.

It used to be we changed our clothes and let our bodies be natural testaments to our values; now we radically alter our bodies and keep our clothes the same. Does anyone else see a problem with this approach?

Dream Bigger Dreams In the '60s we imagined a better future; now we tend to cling to a haloed past and our youths. What's up with that? We never wanted to represent the status quo and now, even though we are, perhaps we should occasionally surprise the world and ourselves.

Try to embrace the transformative spirit of the '60s - the meditation, the individual expression, the exuberance.    Maybe it's time to turn on and tune in.

The Calculus of Happiness

Can you identify what makes you happy? Did you know that there might be a loose equation that could lead you to a greater likelihood of long-term happiness? In her provocative new book, "The Happiness Myth," Jennifer Michael Hecht says three distinct kinds of happiness make up our overall sense of well-being: good day happiness, good life happiness, and euphoria.

She suggests that each of us has our own optimal personal combination of those happiness components. And it's up to each of us to determine what mix of these three elements is ideal.

As she puts it, "Live as you wish you had lived yesterday." As a person potentially entering the last third of my life, I definitely would like to optimize my good experiences.

According to Hecht, here are ways to think about the various strands of happiness in your life.

Good Day Happiness If you make it onto an air-conditioned subway just as it is about to leave the station on a searing afternoon, or find $20 on the sidewalk, or take a moment to appreciate the scent of lilacs as you walk past a bush, or revel in your team's playoff victory, then you are enjoying good day happiness.

Such chance pleasures are essential to life's enjoyment, but they're transitory and require little effort, apart from acknowledging and savoring the good fortune.

Good Life Happiness Good life happiness, on the other hand, requires effort - working hard to provide opportunities for your kids, finishing a challenging new project on the job, exercising to maintain your health, practicing the piano to achieve a level of mastery, taking care of your aging parents.

These efforts have long-term benefits and, according to Hecht, "the rewards are not merely the result of the struggle; they are the struggle, seen from a different angle, from a different vantage point in time." Without good life kinds of happiness, our lives would be less satisfying in fundamental ways.

Euphoria One's wedding or the birth of a child, climbing a mountain, or winning an award or seeing a once-in-a-lifetime concert - a quota of euphoric moments are essential to give us a sense of the sublime or spiritual.

We don't necessarily need frequent euphoric experiences, but can have them peppered throughout our lives; each experience can and will sustain us for a long time and we can draw on and in essence recreate the euphoric feelings for as long as we live.

But Hecht suggests that American emphasis on productivity and longevity have thrown our calculus out of balance and robbed us of some essential happiness moments. She says "there is a big difference between the value of longevity in our rhetoric and the value we give it."

She suggests that we've become a culture of denial and utilitarianism that values weird isolating kinds of drudgery like running indoors on a treadmill, dieting, or shopping in malls rather than the kinds of exhilarating festivals and pageants that sustained our ancestors.

She struck a nerve with me. I intend to think a bit more consciously about the three kinds of happiness and hope to find more opportunities to immerse myself in joyful communal celebrations of life - seeing a great play, watching 4th of July fireworks, learning to scuba dive - that fill me with pleasure and awe - and maybe spend a little less time alone on the treadmill.

A Permanent Residency

My Midwestern family, vastly more “Leave It to Beaver” than “Addams Family,” enjoyed one notable quirk. We loved cemeteries. While other families visited museums or churches on their summer vacations, when we traveled, we’d seek out the oldest graveyards we could find, wandering happily among the headstones, reading aloud to each other as we went, imagining the lives of the people buried beneath. History was written in those stones: town politics (the fanciest mausoleums or best sites revealed which families were considered important), epidemics (waves of young deaths), wars (generations of boys wiped out; the stark immensity of the cemetery at Omaha Beach in Normandy where my father landed), tragedy (five out of eight children predeceasing the parents)and poignancies (couples entombed together after 60 years of marriage).

Once I had my own family, we embraced my parents' legacy (and my in-laws’ similar graveyard love despite their preference for cremation) with even more gusto: picnicking—off-the-beaten path cemeteries are far less populous and more interesting places to eat than parks—and even going so far as to ritualize a headlights-off-spooky-soundtrack-on nighttime drive through the old cemetery close to our Upstate New York farm.

My husband and I had always thought we’d have our ashes scattered on that farm. But when we sold it, I found myself longing for the green calm of country life and began taking walks in the closest verdant place to my home in Brooklyn: Green-Wood Cemetery.

(MORE: A Guide for Funeral Planning and Expenses)

Green-wood is a 478-acre paradise—a National Historic Monument and part of the Audubon Sanctuary System (home to horned owls and Quaker parrots)—deep in the heart of dense urbanity. And it’s the “permanent residence” for the famous and the infamous: Horace Greeley, “Boss” Tweed, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Leonard Bernstein, The Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, Samuel Morse, Louis Comfort Tiffany and, my personal favorite, “Whatever Lola wants, Lola gets” Montez, the 19th-century adventurer and mistress of King Ludwig I of Bavaria.

The truly great thing is that it is not a depressing place. Unlike most cemeteries, where people visit only on national holidays, Green-Wood is teeming with life and energy—from its magical-seeming fauna to cemetery-sponsored events like moonlight tours accompanied by accordion players to 1950s-feeling Fourth of July brass bands and picnics to people like me enjoying their daily constitutional. When it was founded in 1838, it was part of a new trend in American cemetery design: to turn them into rural, park-like destinations where people could go on weekends to picnic and stroll.

Although I was raised Catholic and don’t really believe in an afterlife, I have found that as I’ve grown older, the need for some kind of a marker that acknowledges that I lived has begun to insinuate itself into my consciousness. And while my husband and I hope to be above ground for a long time, over the past few years during my walks, I've begun to hear a little whisper in the back of my mind that Green-wood might be a place where we’d want to have an enduring presence.

So when I read a piece in The New York Times that reported that Green-Wood was “close to capacity” and that the president of the “organization” was hoping to “recruit” distinguished literary types, I turned to my husband, an author, and said, “Kurt, I want you to contact that man right now and let him know we’d like to be buried in Green-wood.”

Perhaps that's not the most romantic thing a wife can say to her husband before coffee, but he, too, loves our walks and, like the awesome husband that he is, immediately dashed off a letter. And the president promptly responded, “No introduction necessary, Mr. Andersen, your reputation precedes you.”

It was a classic New York moment. Maybe we aren’t quite A-list enough to score a table at Per Se at the last minute, but as authors we had enough mojo to secure a burial plot at the exclusive Green-Wood Cemetery!

The most amazing thing? Unlike any other piece of real estate I've coveted in New York City, it turns out that cemetery plots are surprisingly, shockingly cheap. Really. You could buy a third of a Kelly bag…or get a magnificent little bit of Brooklyn forever. Seems like a pretty good deal to me.

Last month, we went for an official visit. A sales counselor showed us around, and after much family discussion, we’ve just about settled on a beautiful little wooded depression in the heart of the cemetery where you cannot see a building or hear any traffic. Our daughters, used to picnicking in cemeteries, have come to accept the fact that we’re buying a burial plot. My dream, in fact, is for them to collaborate on a design for a bench they can sit on as our headstone.

(MORE: Family Reactions When a Loved One is Dying)

Interestingly, friends far closer to the horizon line tend to put their fingers in their ears, nah-nah-nah-nah’ing so they can’t hear us, obviously squeamish when we describe our recent adventure in real estate.

None of us wants to think actively about death, but I can honestly report that wandering through the hills and dales of Green-Wood with Kurt on warm spring days, listening to the birds chirp, marveling at the virtuosity of the sculptures adorning the gravesites and contemplating the precise place where we might lie together was impossibly romantic. We held hands, celebrating the life we’ve lived in our chosen city, planning to go gently into the good night.

Live Differently

My husband and I have contentedly lived in the same two-mile radius of New York City for more than three decades. And while we certainly aren’t bored with life, in recent years the daily grind has somewhat inured us to its swellness. The winters had begun to feel more onerous, the leaks and creaks of our late 19th-century townhouse a little more problematic, the people and streets and buildings just a bit routine. So when our youngest daughter left for college in 2008 and my husband was serendipitously offered a four-month residency at Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles, we jumped at the chance to experience living in a new place. Southern California beckoned us with everything New York was lacking: warmth in the winter, accessible natural magnificence of all sorts (hiking, swimming, aromatic flora and unfamiliar megafauna), and an abundance of exquisite mid-20th century architecture, which we both adore.

As writers, fortunately, we can work anywhere there’s an Internet connection, which at this point is pretty much anywhere on Earth, so that meant that our stint in Los Angeles would not be a vacation so much as a no-risk opportunity to experience what it would feel like to live in a radically different environment.

Friends offered us, at well below the market rental rate, their Rudolph Schindler house in Studio City, just over the mountain ridge of Los Angeles proper. In New York we lived vertically, on four floors; in L.A., horizontally, on one. The house was compact, filled with light, and a short walk from miles of trails through thousands of wild acres.

Rather than trudging along the treadmill in the basement of my grotty, urban gym, I began to hike in actual nature, coming across coyotes — within the city limits. Almost every daily pattern was jettisoned, and it was positively thrilling. By letting go of decades-long habits I started rediscovering the more fun, creative version of myself that had been buried under the weight of tasks, like managing tedious college admissions and keeping our household afloat.

It’s as if dormant synapses in my brain were suddenly rebooting. We developed new routines that didn't feel routine at all: breakfast in the garden, work until lunch, an adventure each afternoon, dinner with new people. Even driving had its upsides: My husband, a novelist who also hosts a public radio program, had the pleasure of listening to more of his colleagues' shows in real time during our four months in Los Angeles than in the previous several years in New York.

We began to find that everything from the most mundane — where we had our prescriptions filled or clothes cleaned — to the most awe-inspiring (a day spent in the Mojave Desert with visionary airplane and spacecraft designers or an afternoon wandering the Museum of Jurassic Technology) was fresh and inspiring. And 30-plus years into our relationship, my husband and I were experiencing this exciting newness together.

At the risk of sounding TMI New Age-y, it was sexy. We are not natural extroverts, but we made a decision to say yes to practically any invitation, which meant that we ate in a few subpar places and drove on some hellish roads. But saying yes also allowed us to meet some phenomenal people who have become friends, and to expose ourselves to very different ways of thinking and working and living.

The time together felt remarkably similar to the days when we were first dating, but without all the angsty “does he like me?” drama. It was plain old fun. By opening ourselves to the new, we stumbled into rich moments of enhanced happiness — “Wasn’t the hummingbird beautiful this morning?” “Didn’t the air smell amazing last night?” Even parking, like teenagers, on Mulholland Drive to watch the full moon rise — at a rate we would not have experienced in the familiarity of our adopted hometown.

The location need not be exotic or expensive. Once, when our home was being renovated, we stayed in the house of a friend who was out of town for a few weeks. Just living a few miles away was a complete novelty: Nothing was the same; everything seemed alive in a new way.

Tips for Successful Transformative Travel

1. Let your heart guide you to the destination. Where have you wanted to go, what have you wanted to experience? You don’t have to be young or recently divorced to craft your very own Eat, Pray, Love journey.
2. Rent or swap a house or apartment, go couch-surfing, but do not stay in the bubble of a hotel, where you'll meet only tourists. Immersing yourself in a new environment takes you out of your comfort zone and forces you to interact with locals and the richness of their everyday life.
3. Say yes to new food, to new vistas, to  any activity you might not do at home.
4. Do your homework. Before you leave, research whether there are any courses or schools that might have an interesting program — cooking classes, a painting or photography program, walking groups — and enroll in one.