Being an explorer of the world doesn’t require a plane ticket or a machete. It means training yourself to notice what’s already around you, treating your daily environment with the same curiosity a scientist brings to an uncharted ecosystem. The concept was popularized by artist Keri Smith in her book of the same name, but the underlying practice draws on centuries of philosophy, real cognitive science, and a set of skills anyone can develop starting today.
The 13 Rules of Everyday Exploration
Keri Smith’s framework boils down to 13 principles that function like a field guide for paying attention. They aren’t steps to follow in order. They’re lenses you can pick up at any time:
- Always be looking. Notice the ground beneath your feet.
- Consider everything alive and animate.
- Everything is interesting. Look closer.
- Alter your course often.
- Observe for long durations and short ones.
- Notice the stories going on around you.
- Notice patterns. Make connections.
- Document your findings in a variety of ways.
- Incorporate indeterminacy. Leave room for chance.
- Observe movement.
- Create a personal dialogue with your environment. Talk to it.
- Trace things back to their origins.
- Use all of your senses in your investigations.
The thread connecting all 13 is a shift from passive existence in a space to active engagement with it. You stop being someone who walks through a neighborhood and start being someone who reads it. That fire hydrant has a manufacture date. That crack in the sidewalk has a weed growing through it that wasn’t there last week. The couple at the next table is having a very different conversation than the one at the table behind them.
Why Your Brain Rewards You for Noticing
This isn’t just a feel-good creative exercise. When you encounter something new, even a small detail in a familiar place, your brain’s dopamine neurons fire. Novel stimuli activate reward-related regions of the brain, and your mind assigns an optimistic value to new information, essentially telling you: “This is worth investigating.” That’s the same system that makes travel feel exhilarating, but you can trigger it without leaving your zip code. The key is noticing what you’ve been filtering out.
Research in behavioral neuroscience has shown that increases in dopamine promote exploratory behavior by making novel options feel more valuable than familiar ones. Your brain is already wired for exploration. The problem is that routine dulls the signal. Walking the same route, eating at the same places, and looking at your phone instead of your surroundings trains your attention to ignore the environment. Reversing that habit reactivates the reward.
Observation as a Cognitive Workout
Deliberately paying attention to your surroundings shares a surprising amount of overlap with mindfulness practice. Both involve sustained, non-judgmental focus on present experience. A meta-analysis of 111 randomized controlled trials found that this kind of intentional attention training produces small-to-moderate improvements in working memory, sustained attention, and the ability to shift between thinking modes. It also reduces cognitive errors by quieting repetitive mental chatter like worry and rumination, freeing up resources to actually process what’s in front of you.
In practical terms, that means a habit of close observation doesn’t just make your walks more interesting. It can sharpen your ability to concentrate, remember details, and break out of autopilot thinking. The mechanism is straightforward: when you practice redirecting your attention to something specific (a texture, a sound, a pattern), you’re strengthening the same attentional muscles that help you focus at work, catch details others miss, and think more flexibly.
How to Start: Simple Observation Exercises
Harvard’s Project Zero developed a thinking routine called “See, Think, Wonder” that works beautifully outside a classroom. Pick any object, scene, or moment and move through three stages: What do you actually see? What do you think is going on? What does it make you wonder? A rusted bolt on a park bench becomes a question about when the bench was installed, who maintains it, what the rust pattern reveals about which direction rain hits it. You go from glancing to investigating in about ten seconds.
Sensory scavenger hunts are another low-barrier entry point. On your next walk, try to find: something bumpy, something that crunches underfoot, a sound you can’t immediately identify, a smell you associate with a specific memory, something that’s a color you wouldn’t expect in that setting. The goal isn’t to check boxes. It’s to force your senses open one at a time, because most of us navigate the world almost entirely through vision and neglect the other four channels.
Smith’s principle of altering your course is one of the simplest and most effective. Take a different street. Enter a building you’ve walked past a hundred times. Sit in a different spot. Novelty doesn’t require a new city. It requires a new angle on the same one.
The Art of the Flâneur
This idea has roots much older than any self-help book. In 1863, the French poet Charles Baudelaire described a figure he called the flâneur: a passionate observer who wandered city streets without a destination, merging with the crowd while remaining apart from it. “To see the world, to be at the very centre of the world, and yet to be unseen of the world,” he wrote. The flâneur’s purpose was to absorb passing glimpses of modern life and transform them into something lasting through art or writing.
You don’t need to be a poet to adopt this posture. The core idea is wandering with intention but without a goal. You’re not going somewhere. You’re going through somewhere, slowly, with your attention turned outward. It’s the opposite of the way most people move through public space today, which is efficiently, with earbuds in, eyes on a screen, navigating from point A to point B as fast as possible.
How to Document What You Find
Exploration without documentation is just a nice walk. The act of recording what you notice forces you to look more carefully, because you’re committing to specifics. Smith’s eighth rule says to document in a variety of ways, and that variety matters. A sketch captures spatial relationships your phone camera flattens. A written note captures the smell and temperature a photo can’t. A quick voice memo captures the soundscape.
Field journaling is the most versatile approach. Keep a small notebook and use it the way a naturalist would: date, time, location, weather, and then whatever catches your attention. You don’t need artistic skill. Stick figures, arrows, labels, and messy handwriting are fine. The point is to slow your perception down to the speed of your hand. When you draw something, even badly, you notice details you’d skip if you just snapped a photo. The curve of a leaf, the way shadows pool under a bench, the fact that a building has three different types of brick.
For digital documentation, citizen science apps turn your phone into a real research tool. iNaturalist lets you photograph plants and animals, and its community helps identify species you don’t recognize. Leafsnap, developed by Columbia University, the University of Maryland, and the Smithsonian, uses visual recognition to identify tree species from a photo of a single leaf. Project Noah, backed by National Geographic, lets you log wildlife sightings and contribute to location-based field guides built by other users. These tools give your observations a purpose beyond your own notebook. You’re contributing data that scientists actually use.
Building a Daily Exploration Practice
The biggest obstacle isn’t skill or equipment. It’s remembering to look. Most people spend their daily commute, lunch break, and errands in a state of functional blindness, seeing just enough to avoid obstacles and reach their destination. Breaking that pattern takes deliberate, repeated interruption of your own autopilot.
Start with a single daily prompt. Pick one of Smith’s 13 rules each morning and use it as your lens for the day. Monday might be “observe movement,” which means you’re watching how people walk, how pigeons land, how tree branches shift in wind, how water runs along a curb. Tuesday might be “trace things back to their origins,” which turns a manhole cover into a question about municipal infrastructure and a coffee cup into a supply chain. Each lens makes the same environment feel unfamiliar, which is exactly the point.
Over time, this stops being an exercise and becomes a default mode. You notice things without trying. The crack in the wall. The way two strangers unconsciously mirror each other’s posture. The fact that the light at 4 p.m. in October hits your street differently than it did in September. The world hasn’t changed. Your attention has. And that turns out to be the only passport you actually need.