Eating - and living - adventurously
The benefits and downsides of loving novelty ... and how to balance them out
Do you remember the first time you ate pizza? I do. In the late sixties, my parents had a routine of preparing pizza every other Saturday or so. Enjoying the Italian staple at home was still special at the time, at least in Germany. I was in preschool, so about three years old. My parents always asked my brother (who is one year older) and me if we wanted some pizza, but the two of us decided the dish was too scary. While eating my tried and trusted pasta, though, I observed mom and dad taking big bites of the piping hot flatbread and envying them for their apparent joy.
And then, one Saturday, I asked to have some pizza, too. My mother let me bite off a piece of the crust with some tomato sauce and cheese. It was delicious: crisp and chewy, sweet and tangy, all at the same time, and I felt a whole new world opened to me. On the following Saturdays, I got even more courageous. First, I tried a piece of pizza with some oily artichoke – jummy! Then, I dared a bite containing an olive – too salty!!!! - that I spit out immediately. Despite the little setback, or perhaps just because of it, I felt tremendously proud and grown up.
The memories of my early pizza thrills came back to me when I recently read a column by Arthur Brooks in The Atlantic. The Harvard professor recounts how he and his wife tried to introduce his son, who was two years old and a fuzzy eater, to novel foods. Brooks writes that they wanted to fight their son’s food neophobia for practical, nutritional reasons. “But more fundamentally, we wanted him to eat adventurously so he could enjoy this part of life. Openness to a wide variety of tastes and smells enhances the pleasure of eating.”
This is an instance of a larger truth, as Brooks points out: “Openness to a wide variety of life experiences, from visiting interesting places to considering unusual political views, brings happiness.”
Research shows that openness to experience correlates with higher well-being measures, including overall happiness. Openness, or neophilia, causes happiness because it is an engine of interest, Brooks explains. “It is highly pleasurable to have your interest piqued, which naturally happens when you’re exposed to new things; neophiliacs thus stimulate this positive emotion more frequently and intensely than neophobes.” They also tend to have more warm and loving relationships with the people around them, which triggers positive emotions.
Scoring high on openness comes with other positive sides. Open-minded people tend to be creative and imaginative. For example, on average, they perform better on a creativity test called divergent thinking tasks. This test requires individuals to generate multiple, diverse solutions to a simple problem, such as: “How many uses can you think of for a brick?” psychologist Luke Smillie (University of Melbourne) explains in Scientific American: “Less open people typically generate fewer and more obvious answers to this question—building walls, building houses, building other stuff. But for highly open people, the possibilities flood in. A brick can be used as a weapon, a paperweight, a replacement leg for a broken sofa. Or it can be smashed up and mixed with water to make paint. Open people see more possibilities in even the most mundane of objects.”
But being a neophiliac comes with downsides, too. Embracing all sorts of ideas can lead to a tendency to eccentric thinking, overlooking issues of practicability and rebelliousness, as some scientists have pointed out. Especially in professional settings, this can be a severe impairment.
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