For every airport, there are an extra 1,000 Jackie Collins novels unleashed upon the world. And for the visited, every tourist dollar is simultaneously income, and a reminder of their income inequality with the visitor. And yet since the time of Marco Polo it has been an axiom that, at least for the individual doing the actual moving around, journeys are a Good Thing. A voyage stretches our experience, widens our tolerance, deepens our wisdom. To set sail across the different seas of civilization is to strengthen our own human understanding.
Travel broadens the mind.
Not any longer. Scientists have discovered that travel actually shrinks the mind. Or at least the right temporal lobe. Dividing the group into two, Cho discovered that those allowed five days or less to recover from jet lag had significantly smaller lobes than those who had more than 14 days to recover. Particularly affected was the capacity for visual recognition and spatial memory, the bit that differentiates Homo Sapiens from goldfish.