Jason Silva on Science, Adventure and Exploration | Brain Games

[Music] What does it mean to explore? What does it mean to adventure? Walker Percy wrote, "The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life." To be aware of the possibility of the search is to be on to something; not to be on to something is to be in despair.

The search, you see, is existential exploration. Science and adventure is how we search, not just for answers, but for better questions. It's how we rage against the darkness, how we battle against ignorance, make inroads against dogma. Exploration is how we map the world; science is how we come to understand it. Adventure is how we come alive. These are our tools against meaninglessness.

Adventure, science, and exploration put men on the Moon, built marvelous liners, immersed us in virtual realities, and helped us make sense of the world. Technological marvels extend our imaginative capacities and help us overcome all of our [Music] limits. As the poet Yeats wrote, "The world is full of magic things patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper," and growing and sharper they have through the scientific process.

We've expanded our minds by building instruments such as microscopes and telescopes that pierce the micro and the macro, engorging our perspectives. And in doing so, blasting new tunnels between the mind and the other, we satiate our curiosities by getting outside ourselves, beside ourselves, creating cognitive appendages and new toolkits for the mind, taking us to spaces and places beyond mind, world, and wonderment.

Adventure is about expanding our minds. The outer journey is the inner journey. We seek to expand the boundaries of our humanness, the repository of our knowledge, to become more than what we are. And as poet and author Marina Benjamin wrote, "What the space age has been seeking all along was not so much an expansion of physical space as an expansion of mind." When we dream of space, she wrote, "We dream of transcendence; we dream of what we might become." Oh [Music]