Lay people do not have the background to understand research methodology or scientific terminology, and just take the scientist’s simplified conclusions at face value. Scientists are seen as sages, and most people focus more on the scientist’s social prestige than on details of a specific research project, which are opaque to them.

Also, lay people don’t see scientists as normal people, so when scientists go rafting, lay people find it strange and interesting. Again, lay people focus more on the scientist’s scientist-identity than on objects of study, so scientists saying stuff while rafting is equivalent to scientists saying stuff when doing actual research.

Wallace Stevens is on your side:

The greatest poverty is not to live
in a physical world, to feel that one’s desire
Is too difficult to tell from despair.
(from “Esthetique du Mal”)

Though, there is something that profoundly alters one’s mental state, when one changes to a different setting like this.

On the trail, the first day or two, one stumbles around, trying to find a new “rhythm” to one’s new daily routines. You don’t bathe or shave anymore. You don’t load the dishwasher. You don’t drive out and stop at Starbucks on the way to work. It’s all new tasks. Wake, maybe turn your underwear inside out, brush teeth, fetch and filter water, prepare breakfast, wash dishes, break camp and pack, etc. After 3 or so days, you get into these new habits, and it really kind of changes how you use your brain. At least, that’s my take on it.

After the prior months of the daily-work routine, where one’s sole-survival task, really, is earning money. . . it’s really a jolt to a whole different set of neurons, where you’re now concerned with locating water sources, maintaining good navigational orientation, sticking to an itinerary so that the food you’re carrying lasts, keeping food and other “smellable” products safe from bears, are you getting dehydrated? did you re-apply sunscreen? . . . etc.

My mind and awareness are the same person. My daily tasking is actually . . . MUCH more stressful. But, I’ve given my “normal” functions a much needed rest. I come back home, exhausted, but strangely, refreshed. It’s a whole different set of skills, but the normal-daily skills are given a rest.

A lot of this electronic mutlitasking stuff is very language-oriented. Reading, texting, emailing, telephone, management of verbal or literal communications and information. This is very different than the ordinary non-verbal multitasking that goes on in everyday life, or, “on the trail”. It’s very bound-up in sensations of adequacy, self-judgment of pleasing others, satisfying creditors, bosses, spouses, etc.

I think that why this “new” multitasking feels so wrong to many people, is because they get so tied up in the verbal, rational, higher-brain functions, that they lose the linkage to the emotional coping that it’s being used to satisfy. And the more people do this, or “train” their brains to do it, without adequate rest and reflection, the more out-of-touch they become, and perhaps, the more neurotic coping mechanisms surface . . like obsessive checking of email and text messages, out of fear that they’re going to “miss something” – or not respond to a boss or a client quickly enough.

So, my conclusion is; it’s really important to find ways to detach, and do this often, in order to reflect, and “recharge” – so to speak. I think this is why we invented weekends. (and I’m guessing we used to have 6-day weeks, (Babylonian division of cycles by 60/30/15/12/10/5). . . And someone figured, that’s not enough, we need two-days off.

I would also say; 4 weeks per year of PTO is definitely not enough.

That was my amateur’s introduction to evolutionary neurobiology.