A travel & ideas journal

Touring the mental and physical realms! 🧠

Dispatches on travel, psychology, culture, and economics, four fields that keep circling the same question: why people do what they do, and where.

A woman in a yellow sweater, seen from behind, standing where a road splits in two through golden fields

Travel · Psychology

What is Agency -- in the Era of Agentic AI

Exploring free will, habit cycles, and defining the 'self'

Travel · Economics

What Street Food Prices Tell You About a City

A plate of noodles is a cleaner economic indicator than most spreadsheets. Reading rent, wages, and inflation off a menu board.

Culture Shock Is a Cognitive Bias, Not a Feeling

What predictive processing says about why new places feel exhausting, and why the "stages" of culture shock are really just a brain updating its priors.

Social Psychology · Culture

What We Wear, Who We Are: Fashion and Enclothed Cognition

The transience of clothing, both in one’s closet and on one’s mind, was fascinating to me, as they had physically projected their mental states upon cloth draped or tied onto themselves.

Emily Fang in Paris, smiling, wearing a black leather jacket and a striped top

About these notes

I'm Emily, a fourth-year Psychology student at UCLA. I'm interested in cognition, behavior, mental health, and how psychological research can help with complex human problems.

So far I've traveled to 20 countries, mostly in Central America, Asia, and Europe, and I'm not done yet. This blog is where I write about the places I go and the questions they leave me with.

I also paint, mostly portraits. You can see my work at emilyfang.me. Follow along with my journey here and on Instagram at @emilyfang.me!

Where I've Been So Far

Click and drag the globe to turn it. Click a continent to read more.

Europe Asia South America North and Central America Africa Off the Beaten Path

So Far

The Wandering Mind

Countries I've visited

Countries and counting