Hey Eco Champions 💚,
Ten days in Ticino with my mother, most of them on the Via Alta Idra, and somewhere around day six I noticed something I hadn’t felt in years: ideas showing up unprompted, the way they used to.
I just got back from ten days hiking with my mother in Ticino, most of it on the Via Alta Idra… a high-altitude route through the Ticinese and Lepontine Alps that traces the river Ticino from its source down toward the lakes. We took on a T6 section, which on the Swiss hiking scale means genuinely demanding alpine terrain: exposed ridgelines, scrambling, the kind of ground where you need to be sure-footed and comfortable with exposure the entire way. Doing that with my mother, at her pace and mine, is not something I take for granted. It was, without exaggeration, some of the best time I’ve spent with her in years.
Something happened partway through that I wasn’t expecting: I started having ideas again. Not forced ones, not “I should probably think about X” ones, the kind that just arrive, half-formed, while you’re doing something else entirely. It took me a few days to place the feeling, and when I did, it stopped me: this was the same time of year, almost to the week, that I used to come up with my Young Scientist project ideas as a teenager.
I want to be honest about why that mattered so much, because I don’t think I’ve said it publicly before. School, for a stretch of my childhood, was not a safe place, I was mobbed, and spent a lot of that time feeling like there was nowhere I properly belonged. The Young Scientist Exhibition changed that. It wasn’t just that I found a project I cared about; it was that I found a room full of people who were curious about the same kinds of odd, specific things I was curious about, and for the first time, that was enough to be liked for. I made my first real friends there. I felt, maybe for the first time, unthreatened.
I think that’s why the ideas used to come so easily around this time of year, and why they came back so easily this week at the lake. Both times, the ingredients were the same: distance from whatever was making me feel unsafe or watched, and enough unstructured time for my mind to actually wander somewhere new. It turns out that’s not just a nice story… there’s real research behind it.
The Science: Why Getting Away Actually Makes You More Creative
In 2012, researchers Ruth Ann Atchley, David Strayer, and Paul Atchley ran a study that’s since become one of the better-known pieces of evidence on this (Atchley et al., PLOS ONE, 2012). They recruited 56 adults heading out on 4–6 day Outward Bound wilderness expeditions… real hikes, no phones, no laptops, nothing electronic allowed for the duration. Half the group took a standard creativity test (the Remote Associates Test, which asks you to find the hidden connective word between three unrelated words, the classic example is SAME / TENNIS / HEAD → MATCH) the morning before they left. The other half took the same test on the morning of day four, mid-hike.
The difference was large: the in-hike group solved 6.08 items correctly on average, versus 4.14 for the pre-hike group, a 50% jump in creative problem-solving, driven by nothing more than four days away from screens and routine, immersed in nature.
The explanation lines up with what most of us feel intuitively but rarely act on: sustained attention, the kind email, notifications, and daily obligations demand — is a finite resource, and it directly competes with the looser, associative kind of thinking creativity requires. Remove the demands on that attention for long enough, and the associative machinery comes back online. That’s the mechanism, I think, behind both versions of my own story. A classroom where I felt watched and unsafe left no room for anything but vigilance. A lake in Ticino, or a room full of fellow odd, curious teenagers at Young Scientist, removed that threat entirely, and the ideas showed up because, for once, they were allowed to.
What Actually Helps (If You Want More Ideas)
Go somewhere your attention isn’t being demanded. You don’t need four days in the wilderness: even a weekend without your phone measurably changes what your brain has room for.
Walk without a destination. No podcast, no destination, no task. The point is the wandering, not the exercise.
Write ideas down the second they show up, before you judge them. Judgment is what kills half of them before they’ve had a chance to be useful.
Find your version of safe. Notice where you feel unthreatened enough to think freely… a place, a group of people, a routine… and protect it. It’s doing more work than you realize.
Start from an annoyance, not a subject. Almost every winning science fair project traces back to something specific that bothered someone… not a topic off a syllabus.
🧪 Something I Built: The Science Fair Idea Lab
A confession, since I’m already being honest this issue: I built the thing I wish had existed for sixteen-year-old me. The tagline I put on it says it plainly — “the hardest part of a science project isn’t the science, it’s finding a question worth months of your life.” Not everyone gets a lucky lake trip or the right exhibition to stumble into. So I made a tool to manufacture that spark on purpose.
It’s called the Science Fair Idea Lab, it’s free, no account needed, and it does three things:
Find Me an Idea - seven questions (the first is “which subjects actually hold your attention,” pick up to three, “be honest, not strategic”), and out come four project ideas built around what you actually care about and what equipment you can actually get your hands on.
Check My Idea - already have a concept? Seven questions get you an honest read on whether it holds up, before you sink weeks into it.
The Library - 38 real winning projects across competitions, each with a “why it won” breakdown, filterable by competition or by what equipment you’d need.
The whole thing runs on four principles I noticed repeating across nearly every winning project:
“Almost every winning project traces back to something specific that bothered someone. Not a subject on a syllabus… a thing in the world that seemed wrong.”
“’Microplastics’ is a topic. ‘Can a magnetic liquid pull plastic particles out of water?’ is a project.” a question, not a topic.
“One trial is an anecdote. The thing separating a fair project from a demo is replication.”
“Some of the best projects were done on a kitchen table. Having no lab forces you to find a simpler mechanism.”
If Young Scientist was the room that made space for me, I’d like this to be that room for someone who can’t get to one like it. If you know a teenager staring at a blank “project idea” box, send them to fionnferreira.com/science-fair.
What I’m Up To
🎓 Grinding forward on the PhD at ETH
🎬 Got filmed for two days for an exciting upcoming project — can’t say more yet
🥾 Ten days in Tessin with my mother, most of it on the Via Alta Idra
📸 Working on new content for Instagram
🧪 Released the Science Fair Idea Lab for all of you
🏊 Enjoying the Limmat and the lake here in Zürich
🏄 Paddleboarding a lot
Things I’m Loving
🍅 A tomato rough puff galette, on repeat (recipe above)
🏔️ Refugio Garconera in Ticino
🥾 Exploring the hills with my boyfriend Lennart even when I push him onto slightly more exposed routes than he’d like
🧗 Planning a climbing trip with Felix this fall
✨ Getting ready for two major events next month... stay tuned
Reply and tell me: where do your best ideas actually come from? I read every one.
That’s all from me,
Fionn✨
This edition of Fionn’s Green Journey is fully carbon offset, thanks to the amazing support from Atlas Project! Each tree emoji below represents a verified tree planted to offset our digital footprint. 👣
🌟 This Month: A new Black Ironwood has taken root! 🌳
Fionn’s Green Journey Forest
🌲 🌳 🌴 🌿 🥑 🌴 🌿 🌳 🌲 🌳 🥭 🌴 🌴 🌺 🥭 🌲 🥑 🌲🥭🌳
🌲 = White Fir, 🌳 = Black Ironwood, 🌴 = Indian Cedar, 🌿 = Red Mangrove, 🌺 = Pomegranate, 🍋 = Lemon, 🥑 = Avocado, 🥭 = Mango
Watch the forest grow with every edition. Feel free to request exact coordinates 🥾✨
How wonderful to have such special time with Anke. ❤️