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Marc Berman, "Nature and the Mind: The Science of How Nature Improves Cognitive, Physical, and Social Well-Being" (Simon and Schuster, 2025)
00:33:54
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- [00:00]
A
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- [01:07]
B
Welcome to the Van Leer Institute series on ideas. I'm Renee Garfinkel. Today we're exploring the deep and often surprising relationship between the natural world and the human mind. How trees, parks, and even brief moments outdoors can sharpen our thinking, improve our mood, and shape who we are. My guest is Dr. Mark Berman, a cognitive neuroscientist whose groundbreaking research reveals how contact with nature, from forest trails to urban green roofs, can restore our attention, boost creativity, and even reduce crime. His work bridges psychology, urban design and environmental science, offering a blueprint for cities that don't just house us, but heal us. Dr. Berman is professor of Psychology, Chair of the Department of Psychology, and Director of the Environmental Neuroscience Laboratory at the University of Chicago. His book, Nature and the Mind asks us to rethink what it means to be human in an increasingly artificial world and how reconnecting with nature might be the most modern thing we can do. Mark Berman, welcome to the show.
- [02:25]
C
Thank you for having me.
- [02:26]
B
Mark, what first led you to suspect that spending time in nature could actually change the way our brains function?
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C
It's a good question. I've always been somebody who's been pretty kind of sensitive to the environment, to different kinds of environments and situations, and I always liked nature, but I wasn't like, you know, A huge nature lover or anything like that. My grandmother on my mom's side had kind of a big farm with a lot of land and these big spruce trees in the front yard. And that always kind of was very interesting to me. But I didn't really think very seriously about it until I took a class in graduate school with Professor Steve Kaplan and he introduced this idea of attention restoration theory, or art as he called it, where you could interact with different environments and improve our attention, which would then have a lot of interesting applications to helping people to meet their goals better, helping people to be less impulsive, and then maybe even helping people to have more self control. And I just thought that was such an interesting idea and I, I kind of wanted to try to test it, doing some different kind of experiments.
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B
Well, let's, let's get some definitions down. You often describe nature as restorative. What does that mean in scientific terms?
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C
Yeah, and maybe before I get there I'll talk about the importance of kind of two kinds of attention. So in attention restoration theory we talk about humans having two kinds of attention. So one kind of attention is called directed attention. And that's the kind of attention that we use a lot at work or at school, where you're deciding what to pay attention to, even if it's not the most exciting or interesting thing. And it's thought that we can only sort of direct our attention for so long before we become mentally fatigued and you can't really focus anymore. And we've all kind of had that sensation, you know, at around 3 or 4 o' clock in the afternoon after a long school day or work day, where you might be just kind of staring at the computer screen and it's very hard for you to focus. And we call that a directed attention fatigue state. And that's a good time to take a break. There's another kind of attention that we talk about that's called involuntary attention. And that's the kind of attention that's automatically captured by interesting stimulation in the environment. The bright lights, loud noises, those things automatically capture our attention and we don't really have any control over it. And it's thought that this involuntary attention is less susceptible to fatigue or depletion. So you don't often hear people say, oh, I can't look at that waterfall anymore, it's just too beautiful, it's making me really tired. Or oh, I can't watch this really interesting movie anymore. It's so interesting, it's tiring me out, I have to shut it off. So the idea behind attention restoration theory is that if you can find environment that don't place a lot of demands on directed attention while simultaneously having interesting stimulation to activate the involuntary attention, you could restore or replenish this precious directed attention resource. And we think that many natural environments kind of meet this criteria of not placing a lot of demand on directed attention while simultaneously having interesting stimulation to activate the involuntary attention. And so when we talk about restoration, we're talking about restoring this precious directed attention resource. This resource that sort of in some ways of like a mental energy or what we as humans can control to pay attention to. We're kind of limited in that ability. And so we think interacting with nature can kind of restore or replenish our ability to direct attention.
- [06:21]
B
So with all the writing about concerns about our declining capacity for attention these.
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C
Days.
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B
Are you saying that what we're worried about is the declining capacity for directed attention or too much distractibility, too many things pulling on the other kind of attention that's easily captured?
- [06:46]
C
I think it's sort of two sides of the same coin. So definitely I feel like humans now are under more of a directed attention fatigue state because there are just so many kinds of stimulation that are vying for our attention. And a lot of activities, you know, like social media or surfing the web or streaming something on your favorite streaming service, streaming your favorite show, a lot of those activities feel restful, but they're actually potentially depleting, depleting more of directed attention. So that's one kind of problem. The other kind of problem, I haven't explained this yet, but we think the kind of stimulation that activates involuntary tension in order for the environment to be restorative needs to be what we call softly fascinating. So what do I mean by softly fascinating? So, for example, when you look at the beautiful waterfall, it captures your involuntary attention. It's very interesting, but you can still kind of mind wander and think about other things. When you look at that beautiful waterfall, it doesn't sort of capture all of your attentional resources. If your brain is resting, it's resting sort of. I mean, it's not, it's not sleeping, but it's. It's kind of like moderately engaged. Whereas if you're in Times Square, that's also really interesting, lots of interesting stimulation to capture your involuntary attention, but it kind of does so in a harsh and all consuming way. It's very hard to kind of mind wander or think about anything else when you're in Times Square. So we think the kind of stimulation to restore directed Attention needs to be softly fascinating. And I would say that a lot of our stimulation in current modern times, like social media, surfing, the web, streaming services, they're more harshly fascinating than softly fascinating. So not only do I not think that they're neutral activities, I think they actually might be further depleting our directed attention. So I think all of those things are kind of causing us, at least in modern society, to kind of have shorter attention span than a more limited ability to direct attention. And there's been other research that's shown that, for example, like Twitter hashtags, you know, they used to be the top ones used to last for 48 hours. Now the top ones only last for 20 hours. Box office movies that were blockbusters, they used to be blockbusters for six months. Now they're only blockbusters for three months, which all kind of suggests that our attention span is shorter. We just can't, can't focus as well. And I think anecdotally, a lot of us know that it's hard, you know, when talking to friends or family. A lot of people just don't have the ability to pay as much attention anymore as they, as they used to.
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B
And normally when we talk about things like attention or other cognitive functions, we think of it all as being in the brain or at least the mind. But tell us about how your work connects to what's known about stress hormones and inflammatory inflammation more widespread within the body.
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C
Well, I mean, the, you know, the brain and body are one. So anything that's going to be good for the body is going to be good for the brain. And, you know, I do think, you know, all of this attentional research that I'm talking about is, is about the brain. But it's kind of interesting that actually putting yourself in a different physical environment is, is affecting your, your brain. It's actually changing your physical location and being exposed to different physical stimulation. So, you know, one of the reasons why we think interacting with nature is softly fascinating has to do with the patterns in nature that nature has more fractals. So, so fractals are kind of repetitive patterns that you can see a different scale. So if you imagine like a snowflake, a snowflake has a characteristic shape. If you put that snowflake under a microscope and zoomed in, you'd see kind of the same shape. And if you zoomed in even more, you'd see kind of the same shape. And what that suggests is that looking at that snowflake, it doesn't matter what spatial scale you look at, it it's kind of got the same shape. So that's called a scale free stimulus or a fractal stimulus. And nature is filled with this kind of fractal scale free stimulation, which actually might be easier for our brains to process compared to the built environment that we built that has a lot of straight lines. It's not scale free. It's got a lot of objects that we kind of need to identify which might be causing this depletion of directed attention.
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B
So all this applies not only to being in a natural environment, a park or a forest or a seaside, but even just looking at trees from a window can make a measurable difference, as you point out. What about looking at art that features nature, art that features landscape or even individual flowers?
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C
Yeah, it's a, it's a great question. And I think the, the effect you can kind of, it sort of kind of works in steps. So we, we find that the strongest results are for your direct attention, are if you can actually go out into real nature and interact with real nature, because you'll get the sights, the sounds, the smells, even the tactile stimulation and being in real nature. But people have found positive results just looking at a view of nature out of a window that had, it's had both healing effects and mental health benefits. We find in our lab that even looking at pictures of nature, listening to nature sounds can have benefits. Other people have found that having plants indoors, even if they're fake plants, can have benefits. So a lot of those effects are not as strong as being in real nature. But it's very promising that, you know, a lot of people don't have easy access to nature, unfortunately, that you can get some of these effects from these simulations of nature. And what that kind of suggests to us is kind of what I talked about a moment ago, that there's something about how our brain processes the fractal stimulation of nature or the curved edge structure of nature that produces these benefits. And that would apply also to art. So, you know, different kind of art that maybe was natural landscapes or maybe that mimic the patterns of nature could yield some of these same benefits. In fact, we found that even if you take a nature scene and you scramble it so it's got all the same edges and lines that were in the scene, but you can't really tell what it is, it kind of looks like a Jackson Pollock painting, that viewing those kind of images can cause people to think more reflective thoughts about spirituality and their life journey compared to abstract looking art that has a bunch of straight lines which Again, suggests that there's something about mimicking these patterns of nature, these curved edges in this fractalness that our brains might process more fluently that might lead to a lot of these benefits.
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B
So these seem to be very subtle but very powerful effects that looking at an abstract painting that has the right fractal shape encourages thoughts of spirituality. How do you explain that?
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C
Well, it's complicated. We don't have all the answers yet. And it also might not be like a panacea. So you might be thinking, well, okay, let's. In our environment, let's have wallpaper that have a lot of curved edges, maybe carpeting or flooring that has a lot of curved edges. And we. We do find that it seems like that causes people to think more reflectively and more about spirituality. We think part of that has to do with people tend to like curved edges more than straight edges. And so it might have to do with some kind of. Kind of preference. We don't think it has to do with analogies that somehow people think, oh, curves, you know, lead to some kind of metaphors about spirituality. We don't think that's the case. But it is a bit complex because we also have other research to show that if you make an image like that, with the curved edges too disorderly, where it's kind of confusing to look at, that can also cause people to cheat more. So it's a little bit. We have to be a little bit careful here about this. But I think a lot of it has to do with, again, mimicking these patterns of nature that I think are a little bit easier for the brain to process, which are then leading to, you know, improvements in direct attention, but also potentially improvements in reflective thought.
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B
And so is there a difference in your research between walking in a forest or walking on a shore by the sea?
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C
We haven't tested that directly. I would say that if the nature walks is interesting, so it's. It. It's kind of inherently interesting. That's where you're going to get sort of the most restorative experience. You know, that could be in a forest, that could be on a shoreline. And. And the other thing you have to think about, too, is what other kind of noise or distractions are around. So if you're walking on the shoreline, but there's a lot of people, and maybe there's a lot of. Maybe there's people selling things, maybe it's close to car traffic, you know, that's not going to be as restorative as, you know, walking along a shoreline. Where it's quieter, where you can just hear the waves crashing in, where there's not a lot of distraction. So I think that's one thing to be really mindful of. Another thing to be mindful of is that you also might not want to be chatting on your phone or listening to anything on earbuds. You kind of want to let all of your attention be captured by the stimulation in the environment. You don't want to distract yourself from the softly fascinating natural stimulation.
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B
You want to be present, in other words.
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C
Exactly. You want to be present. Yeah.
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B
Now you've studied both lab based tasks and also real world experiences. Which kind of data has surprised you more?
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C
You know, they're, they've both been kind of surprising in the experiment. One of the things that surprised me the most from our experiments where we, we have people walk in nature and in more urban environments and look for changes in their directed attention. One of the surprising things that we found there was that individuals didn't need to enjoy the nature to get, to get the benefit, the cognitive benefit. And I thought that was somewhat surprising and counterintuitive. So in all of these studies, we also look for people's changes in mood. And it, it does seem to be the case that people like walking in nature more and that improves their mood more. But we didn't find a strong relationship between improvements in mood and improvements in directed attention. So it wasn't the case that only the people who showed huge improvements in mood were the ones that showed big improvements in indirected attention. And a strong demonstration of that is that we had participants walk at different times of the year. And these studies were done at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. In June. The temperature was quite warm, maybe around 80 degrees Fahrenheit, 25 degrees Celsius. Participants said, mark, I love the walk. I can't believe I was paid to go for a walk in nature. They showed healthy cognitive benefits, you know, directed attention benefits and healthy mood benefits. But we also had participants, some of them walk in January when it was around 0 degrees Celsius, you know, 32 degrees Fahrenheit. And participants said, I did not enjoy that walk in nature. But they showed the same directed attention benefits of the people that walked in June. And I found that to be pretty interesting and surprising. So you don't have to go in nature on the most perfect day. It could be rainy, it could be cloudy, it could be cold. As long as you're wearing the proper attire, you can still get these cognitive benefits. So I thought that was Surprising.
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B
You don't have to like it for it to be good for you.
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C
No, exactly. So it's kind of like spinach, maybe?
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B
Yes.
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C
Or exercise. Not everybody likes to exercise, but it's good for you.
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B
Right. One of the things that I enjoyed about your book and your work is that it's interdisciplinary. It intersects psychology, neuroscience, and urban planning. And I like it because I think life, unlike academia, is interdisciplinary. So which field, I'm curious to know, has been the most resistance to the idea that nature matters?
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C
It's a very interesting question, I might say. Psychology.
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B
Really?
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C
Yeah, in a sense, because I think at first, a lot of psychologists kind of viewed this research as being kind of flaky or fluffy, that it didn't feel like real hard science. And I think the urban planners had a lot of intuition that this was true, and I think architects had the intuition that this was true, and I think even engineers had the intuition that this was true. And they're actually designing these spaces and thinking, you know, how can we make these spaces more habitable? But I think for the psychologists, they thought, you know, for one, how are you going to test this stuff in a rigorous way? And then two, there's so many variables at play. How do you know what's really causing the effect? Is it just that people like nature more? Does it have to do with the color green? You know, what's. What's going on? And so I think that's why at first, I think psychology was more skeptical to it, but I think now they've come around. I think other fields that, you know, medicine is another one that I think is starting now to get more interested. In part, there were studies done in hospitals where they looked at the view out of the room in the hospital, out of a hospital room. And this was work done by Roger Ulrich, where he studied a single hospital corridor in a hospital in Philadelphia. And they're all in the same corridor. They're all in the same hallway. Some of the hospital rooms, by chance, just have windows to some modest nature, to some trees, some grass. Other rooms on the hospital corridor had views to, like, a brick wall. And what Ulrich was interested in looking at was recovery from gallbladder surgery. And Ulrich found that the patients who had the rooms with the modest nature view, they recovered from gallbladder surgery a day earlier, and they used less pain medication than the people who had the view of the brick wall. And what's interesting about this study, too, you might be thinking, well, maybe the wealthier people or the younger people, the more educated people had the nature views, but no, these patients are just randomly assigned to whatever room is available. And there was a significant effect. So that's pretty counterintuitive and amazing that even the view out of your window could change your recovery from gallbladder surgery. And so I think, you know, this is also kind of in line with this idea of holistic medicine. And you know, it's not just treating the individual the whole, but you also have to treat the individual and their environmental context as a whole. So I think this is starting to gain traction in medicine, but I also think we need this to gain traction in public policy and economics, that this is something worth investing in that.
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B
I'm really glad you mentioned that study because it's, it's classic, it's groundbreaking. It was done, what, back in the 1980s or something like that?
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C
Yes, yes. 84, yeah.
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B
And it should have led to a revolution. That's right, Healthcare. But it's not so easy to change.
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C
That's right. Right. That's right.
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B
Talk for a bit about the role of awe, that mix of humility and wonder in restoring the kind of attentional or mental balance we're talking about.
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C
Right. So there's been some really interesting work looking at how going into really beautiful nature can cause people to have like a sense of awe. And in some sense this kind of makes people maybe feel a little bit small, maybe even a little bit insignificant compared to the rest of the world. And that might sound negative, but it's actually thought to be a little bit positive that it kind of helps put things into perspective. And researchers have found that when people undergo these awe inspiring nature experiences, they can become more pro social and they can also see people as being more human. So, you know, you hear a lot in the news about dehumanizing or dehumanization here. People have found that being in nature or interacting with nature can actually cause people to humanize others more, which I think is a very, very powerful concept. The question is, is that, does it have to do with attention? And maybe it does, because we do think that your ability to direct attention underlies kind of self control. And I do kind of think that it takes mental energy often to be kind of more altruistic and not acting on impulses. But it could actually be a little bit of a different mechanism that kind of feeling a little bit small or being awe inspired in this beautiful nature kind of puts things into perspective and can help us to kind of value the environment more, but also to value other people more. Which I think in current Times is something that's hugely, hugely important.
- [25:58]
B
Yes. And. And with all the impact of nature, on. On mood, on attention that we've talked about, we haven't talked about other things like creativity, which you talk about in the book, too. Do you imagine there would be a time when a psychologist or even a physician would someday prescribe a walk in the park to deal with some imbalance or dysfunction like writer's block or a mood disorder?
- [26:32]
C
Absolutely. It's already sort of happening. So doctors in the UK and in Canada are already prescribing walks in nature, interactions with nature as sort of a supplemental therapy for people suffering from depression and anxiety. There's lots and lots of anecdotes of people who have writer's block or they're working on some difficult math problem or physics problem or chemistry problem, they can't figure it out, they leave their desk and they go for a walk in nature, and all of a sudden they can solve the problem. And so, you know, I think there's still a lot there. Definitely. You know, we can't say now we don't need pharmacological interventions or psychotherapy to treat depression and anxiety and adhd. You know, those are validated clinical therapies. And we don't know if interactions with nature are on par with those therapies. But there's been a lot of suggestive research that interacting with nature can certainly be an ancillary or supplemental therapy for a lot of these disorders. And I think what I'm hoping is that now we start sort of a. A nature revolution where we really start testing these things clinically to see what is their clinical efficacy. But definitely for people who are having writer's block or you're just mentally fatigued or you're not able to concentrate, you know, I feel very comfortable saying, yeah, try going for a walk in nature to kind of restore your directed attention, which I think should help you to solve the problem, help you to get some of those creative juices back. You know, it's. It's a lot better than going to your phone.
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B
And would you say that the walk part is an essential part of this prescription, in other words? I, I know there isn't research, as far as I know, on this, but we keep saying a walk in the park, a walk in nature, and after all, we are embodied creatures. Do you suspect that there's a difference between sitting still in a natural environment or walking, moving in that environment?
- [28:45]
C
I think it kind of gets back to soft fascination again and involuntary attention. You know, if you could Sit at your office and look out at a beautiful nature scene and, and feel like your involuntary attention could be captured long enough. You know, that that might be good, but my, my guess is that, yeah, that nature view will capture your soft fascination, capture your attention, your involuntary attention for, you know, maybe 30 seconds or a minute, but it might be hard to capture it for an hour. And so I think when you're able to go out into real nature and move, it's going to be more interesting. Another part of this has to do with a concept that my mentor Steve Kaplan used to talk about, which was that he thought that a restorative environment had to give you the sense of being away. And what he meant by that is like a sense from being away from your day to day activities. So getting away from your desk, maybe getting away from your house, because if you're in your house or you're in your office space, you're still going to have all of those tempting work distractions. So it might be important to actually get yourself out of that environment and kind of into a new physical space to get your brain into a different kind of mental space that actually might be more restorative. And I think there's a lot to that about actually getting away from your day to day.
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B
That's really a good point. And finally, Mark, you've said that cities can be designed to promote mental health. Tell us what a psychologically healthy city would look like.
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C
Sure. And I wouldn't want anybody to take away from listening to this program that, oh, we should all move into more rural areas or get out of cities. Absolutely not. Cities are great for a number of reasons. Like my colleague Luis Betancourtis showed that cities are more efficient. You need less road in cities per capita, less gas stations. You have more wealth in cities, more innovation, more patents. So cities are good for a number of reasons. We even find that larger, more populated cities have actually less depression per capita than smaller cities. They have less racial biases per capita than smaller cities. So cities are good, but cities can also be stressful. And so when I envision, you know, a future city that kind of takes on this nature revolution, we naturize these cities by putting more nature into the cities. We have more parks, we have more areas that are more secluded from car noise, they're more walkable. And maybe, you know, imagine that the skyscrapers had, you know, vines or trees growing out of them. We put nature and plants and green walls into our schools, into our offices, into our homes. And I think this is all things that we can do. So it's good. We want to keep a lot of the infrastructure cities, but we want to make sure that we get more nature to them so that people living in urban areas have access to these nature spaces. And there are a lot of cities that are doing things like this. Singapore does a really great job of this that when they destroy some nature by building a building, you have to put the nature back so that architects have an urban planners have to be creative by putting like terraces on buildings that have nature or even having, you know, nature kind of growing down the side of building. So I'm kind of optimistic that, you know, with a nature revolution, you know, we could kind of create these kind of utopian green, green cities of the future.
- [32:40]
B
Sounds good to me. The book is Nature and the the Science of How Nature Improves Cognitive, Physical and Social well Being by Mark Berman. Thanks for coming on the show today, Mark.
- [32:54]
C
Thank you so much, Renee. It was my pleasure.
- [32:56]
B
And thanks to our researcher, Bela Pasak.