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The 1000 Hours Outside Podcast
1KHO 644: The Current Crisis in Human Attention | Dr. Marc Berman, Nature and the Mind
00:58:27
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- [00:01]
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Ginny Urch
Welcome to the 1000 Hours Outside podcast. My name is Ginny Urch. I'm the founder of 1000 Hours Outside and I have just read a book that everyone should read. You are going to absolutely love it. It is so important for you, but also for your children. It is called Nature in the Mind. The Science of How Nature Improves Cognitive, Physical and social well being. Dr. Mark Berman is here. Welcome.
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Dr. Mark Berman
Thank you for having me.
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Ginny Urch
What a book. I took so many notes. This is so timely because we are attention fatigue fatigued. We are going to talk about things that are so important today and you talk about how getting out in nature is one of the things that can help us to restore our attention. It's like only, you know, mostly we think only sleep does it, but if you get outside in nature, this is going to help with your actual cognition. There is so much to learn in this book about directed attention fatigue. Dr. Berman. We also live in Michigan and I went to the University of Michigan as well. So what a cool thing. So let's kick it off there. Let's kick it off with your childhood when you thought nature was not all that important. But you did love going to your grandma's house and her spruce trees.
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Dr. Mark Berman
Yeah, I, I, we spent a lot of time. My grandma Ruth had a, you know, four acres I think in Rockford, Michigan, so in the western part of Michigan. And we used to go there often to visit her. And on her property she had.
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These really large blue spruce trees in the front and you know, they were kind of majestic looking trees.
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And we used to play underneath them. Like, you know, they were so big you could kind of crawl underneath them and kind of hide, either be a little prickly, but you could get inside there and hide. It was almost like a little cave. And we really loved those trees a lot. And my grandma and my grandpa actually planted those trees when they built their house there. I think she had some intuition that, you know, it was going to be good for the family to have These really large trees there. And actually my mom had a really big affinity for those trees too. And when my grandma sold that house, my mom found a blueproof sapling that was nearby that just looked like a Charlie Brown Christmas tree. And she, she dug it up. And I remember driving back home to suburb Detroit, to our house, and she planted that blue spruce tree in our backyard. And it, it also grew into a huge, into a huge tree in our backyard. So it's always great, you know, when I go and visit my parents that, you know, I, I can kind of have this connection to grandma Ruth and to her, her property, you know, at my parents house now.
- [03:04]
Ginny Urch
Yeah. Reminiscent of your childhood. I love that the book includes your story in it. You know, a lot of times you read these sort of scholarly books and you learn a lot, but this, you know, you wove your story throughout the whole thing, talking about your childhood, talking about your whole career path. So you know, you start your career path thinking you're going is like a computer, a computer engineer. And you know, so you're working through that and then you have just these different touch points with different professors. You hear about different experiments that have been done and you're really drawn to those. And then you end up forming an entire new field of scientific inquiry called environmental neuroscience. Can you just give us a little bit of the cliff notes of your path? You know, you go to this intro of psychology class, it catches your attention, and then you have all these mentors and people along the way that are kind of partnering with you to be where you are, to get you to where you are today.
- [03:54]
Dr. Mark Berman
Yeah, absolutely. It was, you know, a kind of circuitous path. But I was fortunate to have a lot of great mentors and, and people in my life who kind of helped me find what I was passionate about. You know, I guess it kind of started a little bit. Why I kind of got interested in psychology was that my dad's parents are holocaust survivors. And it just, it was really hard for me to kind of understand, you know, how people could do such bad things to other people. I know it sounds very simple, but I just, I couldn't really wrap my head around it. And it kind of stuck with me. And I, you know, naively, I kind of just thought, well, you know, maybe, you know, Germans and some of these other Europeans are just bad people. That, you know, that's why it happened. But I remember taking a class in intro psychology when I was a freshman at Michigan and learning about this experiment called the Milgram Experiment by the psychologist Stanley Milgram at Yale, where he basically had normal people come into the lab and they were testing other people, and if the other person got test questions wrong, they were to give that person an electric shock. And it turns out, and you. And the more questions they got wrong, the more powerful the electric shock was. And it was kind of amazing that most people delivered, you know, really harsh electric shock to people. Now, it was all fake. Nobody was actually really receiving electric shocks, but the people that were the participants were. That were delivering the electric shocks thought that they were. And Milgram was interested in this because he wanted to know, like, why did so many regular people participate in the Holocaust? And what it seemed like what turned out is just that, you know, normal, everyday people in a bad situation can do bad things. And I remember thinking to myself, even with all of my experiences, I might be capable of doing something really bad like that. And that whole study was kind of based on obedience, like obedience to authority. You know, people didn't really necessarily want to give the electric shocks, but the experimenter told them, no, you must continue. You have to keep doing it. And people complied.
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Ginny Urch
And.
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Dr. Mark Berman
But I kind of viewed that whole thing as like an environmental situation, you know, that even elements of the physical environment that, you know, being at Yale in this laboratory setting might actually increase people's ability or willingness to obey, which other research actually found that that is kind of true. So that really stuck with me. But I was a computer engineer at the time, so that's very distant from that. And I didn't really know how to, you know, what to do with all this. And I wasn't really a happy computer engineer. But then I saw this really interesting talk by this biomedical engineering professor, Doug Knoll, where he presented this technology called functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fmri, where you could see people's brains when they were in action, almost like you could read people's minds. And I just thought, that is the coolest thing in the world. I have to do that. So I emailed him to get into his lab. But I was kind of working in his lab originally from the engineering side. Like, I was putting balls of gelatin with wires in there, and I was sending current into the wires and basically seeing. Can I pick up all the different signals that I was putting into the. These. What we called phantoms, these phantom kind of brains. It was interesting, but it wasn't really scratching my interest in psychology that I didn't really know about. And I think Professor Null knew Mark. You know, he seems to keep looking at all these psychologists that Keep coming in and doing experiments on people in the MRI scanner. So he organized me to meet with John Janitis, who was the other director of the neuroimaging center, who was a psychologist. And I met with John and he said, you know, Mark, you're not an engineer, you're a psychologist. Come and work in my lab.
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Ginny Urch
It is new.
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Dr. Mark Berman
Come and work in my lab. And so that kind of put me on the path of psychology. And then I have to mention one other mentor. It's like, you know, how did this guy get to nature? Well, it was this other mentor, Steve Kaplan. I took a class with him in graduate school where he told me about this theory called attention restoration theory, and how interacting with different environments, in particular physical environments and in particular more natural environments, can actually sort of improve people's attention, which he thought could help people become, you know, better people. But they'd have more self control, they'd be more goal directed, they'd be more cooperative. And I just thought that was really, really fascinating because very few people at the time were thinking that you could improve performance by being in different environments. People thought about like taking some kind of pharmacological intervention or doing some kind of difficult cognitive training, but very few people were talking about the environment. And so then that kind of tied things together to, for me is that, you know, Milgram was showing that people can do really, really bad things because of a bad environment. And what Kaplan was showing me is that if you can make the environment really, really good, potentially you can improve a lot of human flourishing. And I think that's kind of how it all tied together. And, and then I started doing studies looking at how when people interact with more natural environments, how does that change their behavior?
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Ginny Urch
Goodness, I loved reading the book. You know, I've heard about a bunch of these studies, the ones that, you know, if you have 10 trees on your street, you know that, you know, it's like getting a raise or feeling younger. And I was like, oh, I'm like, this is the guy. And you know the guy and, and you've done all, all sorts of experience. So it was just actually a really cool full circle moment for me to read Nature in the Mind. I want to talk about this attention crisis. This is for adults, this is for kids. And you say our attention is in crisis. Virtually every one of us is, is the truth. It's feeling the effects of attention fatigue. And so you talk about the difference between hard fascination and soft fascination and directed attention and in voluntary attention, but for the sake of time, basically we're talking about, you know, when you're trying to, like, pay attention to things and it gets used up, and especially partially, I think a lot because of screens, and we just have a lot of.
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Ginny Urch
Can you talk why that's important? Because one of the things that you say is that it may seem like it's not very important, but the. But our directed attention affects so. So many things, like including our inhibitory in. That's how you say, right?
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Dr. Mark Berman
Yeah.
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Ginny Urch
Inhibitory control. Like, so we're not. It. It. It affects, like, do we act impulsively? How do we treat people? You know, we sort of run out of this directed attention and it affects so much.
- [10:39]
Dr. Mark Berman
Yeah, absolutely. So Professor Kaplan introduced this theory called attention restoration theory with his wife, Rachel Kaplan. And a main tenant of that theory is that humans kind of have two main forms of attention. So one kind of attention is called directed attention, where you as an individual person are deciding what to pay attention to. And this is the kind of attention that we use a lot in school or at work or even as you're listening to this program, know you're deciding to pay attention to what you know, Ginny and I are saying. Even if you could probably find something more interesting on your phone or on your screen, right. And it's thought that this kind of attention is fatiguable or depletable. So you can only sort of direct your attention for so long before you become mentally fatigued. And then it's really hard to focus. And we've all had that sensation, you know. You know, maybe you're reading something that's not so interesting or at the end of a long workday where it's just really, really hard to concentrate and you kind of start mind wandering. It's really hard to focus. That's what we call a directed attention fatigue state. And that's when we think it's a really good time to take a break and in particular take a break in nature. You also, when you're in this directed attention fatigue state, you might find yourself being a bit more impatient. You might feel yourself actually getting a little bit more irritable. Those are some other signs to look at that's different from involuntary attention. Involuntary attention is the kind of attention that's automatically captured by interesting stimulation in the environment. So bright lights, loud noises, those things automatically capture our attention. And it's thought that you don't have that much control over it. And it's also thought that that kind of attention is less susceptible to fatigue or depletion so you don't often hear people say, oh, I can't stand looking at that beautiful waterfall anymore. It's just too beautiful. I can't look at it. Oh, I can't watch this really interesting movie anymore. It's just tiring me out. I have to shut it off. The idea with attention restoration theory is that if you can find environments that don't place a lot of demands on directed attention while simultaneously having interesting stimulation to capture your involuntary attention, you can restore or replenish this precious directed attention resource. And we think interacting with many natural environments, we're talking about your local park, where you feel safe.
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That going in those kind of environments will be able to restore your directed attention.
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Ginny Urch
Okay, I never. I've never heard this phraseology, Dr. Berman, and I think it makes everything make so much sense. So you talk about this directed attention. It may seem that attention, our ability to notice things and focus for the desired or appropriate length of time, is important, but not wildly important. But attention actually governs much more than whether we can concentrate on a chalkboard. So you say, today we are pushing our directed attention. This is just really good verbiage, both for us and for our kids, because you also talk in this book about ADHD and that there's a lot of similarities here. So today we are pushing our directed attention to a breaking point. We're getting distracted when it's not necessary or adaptive, and our very ability to maintain our important relationships and live meaningful lives is at risk if directed attention is our human superpower. Modern life is filled with examples of our kryptonite. So this is depletable. Can you talk about what are some different directed attention costs, things that deplete it. So obviously it would be like paying attention to your work, paying attention. But you also talk about our phones. Like, simply getting alerts on our phones can deplete our directed attention.
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Dr. Mark Berman
Yes, absolutely. So, you know, now we live in the information age, and there's so much information surrounding us, and there are so many things vying for our attention. And actually, other researchers have kind of shown that even, like our collective attention, our collective attention spans are actually getting shorter and smaller. So, you know, Twitter hashtags, you know, the popular ones maybe lasted, you know, for 50 hours. Now they last for 10 hours, you know, or blockbuster movies. They used to be, you know, movies where they were blockbusters for maybe six months. Now they're only blockbusters for two months. So, you know, so you can argue that sort of, you know, people now just can't focus as long. And I think anecdotally, you know, I noticed, you know, it's harder sometimes to have meaningful conversations with people. People cannot put down their phones and just focus on what you're saying. You know, students now have difficulty focusing. And the issue here too is not just that, okay, people aren't paying attention to me, and that's annoying. It's that this, we think that this ability to, to pay attention, to direct attention also is why humans can be able to control their impulses. Like maybe reaching for an apple instead of for the chocolate bar. Or how you might be more cooperative or more patient that you might not yell at somebody. You might control your impulse and not yell. And so there's actually research showing, for example, that spending too much time watching television and things like that can actually cause people to be more irritable, to be less patient. You know, it's possible that by not having as much attention, we might be more aggressive as well. So it's more than just kind of like paying attention at school or at work. It's also about that we need this attention to actually have good interactions with people, to uncover what's really meaningful in our lives and to keep trying to pursue our goals. If we're constantly being distracted, it's going to be hard to do all of those things. And that distraction is also robbing us of our, of our attention.
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Ginny Urch
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Dr. Mark Berman
Else I just want to mention briefly too is that there's a lot of different stimulation that can capture our involuntary attention. So one thing that we, we talk about is that it's important that the kind of stimulation that captures your involuntary attention be softly fascinating and not harshly fascinating. And what I mean by that is that if you're looking at a beautiful waterfall or if you're looking at a, at a river or bubbling brook, that captures your attention. It's interesting, but it doesn't sort of capture all of your attentional focus. You can kind of mind wander and think about other things when you look at the waterfall or you look at the river. If I'm in Times Square, wow, that's also super interesting. Lots of stimulation capturing my involuntary attention. But it kind of does so in a very harsh way, in an all consuming way where it'd be very difficult to kind of mind wander, think about other things in Times Square. So we think it's really, really important that the kind of stimulation that we think is going to restore directed attention has to be softly fascinating and not harshly fascinating. And we think that many natural environments tend to have this kind of softly fascinating stimulation.
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Ginny Urch
I find this verbiage to be very helpful because to me I think, okay, this is a different level of motivation. Now, Dr. Berman, you have a tank. You have a tank of directed attention. And people you talk about like maybe, you know, people have different, they're kind of born with different amounts or, you know, but regardless of like how much you have, there is a limited amount. You got a tank. And so it's draining. The tank is draining. And so it's a good reminder for us and for our kids to make sure that as much as possible we're not draining the directed attention on Things that are not worthwhile because you need it. You talk about like, okay, one example would be you go to try and clean your office. And for some, like, I'm not, I'm not. I'm like, I would go and try and clean my thing. I'm like, there's a mess. And it's hard to stay on focus and to stay on track for some people easier than others. But you have to use your directed attention for these types of things that are. Mike McLeod calls them non stimulating. I can't remember what the words he like talks about adhd, but it's like, like there's so many things in life that are not enjoyable and they're not stimulating and you still have to do them. And so if you depleted your directed attention, you are really going to struggle with these tasks that are not necessarily enjoyable, like studying or cleaning. We can only focus for so long before we come become mentally fatigued. But the good news here is, and you talk about the executive function which is like this, what's linked with adhd? You know, you say there's a, a slew of behaviors we call executive functions, self control, long term planning, cooperation that are tied to this directed attention. So first of all, you want to try and not deplete it. And you talk about the screens and the bings and the dings and all these things, they're depleting it. Watching television, you know, these shows, you think it's going to be relaxing, it's depleting it. You're on social media, you think you're going to relax, you're getting this directed attention depleted. So as a mother, I would have thought the only way for me to fix that is to take a nap. You see sleep, you know, you kind of wake up the next morning, hopefully you feel refreshed. But not everybody does. You may not have an opportunity to take a nap. You're just drained. And so the solution here is that you can go outside and for not even all that long and going outside can restore it, can fill that tank back up. This is an incredible message. You call it the 50 minute miracle. Okay, so let's talk, let's talk about that. Let's talk about then restoring it. Let's talk about from Stephen Kaplan. But then you, you know, you really explain it so well. In this book, what we're doing is we're filling that tank back up. So you do this experiment called a walk in the park. Statistically speaking, you say it was jaw dropping. Can you talk about the walk in the park? Experiment.
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Dr. Mark Berman
Yeah, that was one of the first studies that we did in this area. And it was an important study because there, there had been work done examining, you know, how interacting with nature can make people feel like they're more mentally recharged or that they have more attention. But very few studies had actually tried to measure or quantify did it actually cause people to have better attention. So we designed a study where we brought people into the lab and we gave them a very difficult directed attention task called the backwards digit span task. What happened in that task was participants would hear digits out loud like 5, 7, 3, and they would need to repeat them back in backwards order. So 3, 7, 5. And at three digits, the task is not too hard, but we keep increasing the number of digits up to like nine digits. At around five digits, you're ready to pull your hair out. It's very challenging. So you come into lab, you do this backwards digits, fantastic kind of measure. What's your baseline? Directed attention. And then what we do is we give people a map and we say, now we want you to go for a 50 minute, 5, 0 walk in nature and, or a 50 minute walk in a more urban environment. And then you're going to come back to the lab and then we do two other important things. One, we give participants a GPS watch that they wear so that we can track them so that we know that the participants actually went on the walk. They didn't just go to Starbucks. That was one thing. And two, we took participants cell phones away. Why did we do that? Because we didn't want participants chit chatting or texting while on the walk. That would use directed attention. That would distract them from the actual environment. We wanted people to be engaged with the actual environment. Okay, so participants go on this walk in nature or the urban environment, they come back to the lab and they take that backwards digits, fantastic again to see was there any change, objective change in their performance. And then Ginny, a week later, we invite those participants back, they repeat the whole procedure again. If they walk the nature the first week, they walk in the urban environment the second week, or vice versa. So everybody did both walks. And what we found is that people improved by about 20% on this backwards digit span task after the walk in nature versus the walk in the urban environment. So that was a very big, big effect. And some of the listeners might be thinking, well, Mark, maybe it's just liking people just enjoyed the nature walk more. They felt better and that's why they got these benefits. And it's definitely true that Most people like the nature walk more and it improved their mood. But we didn't see a really strong correlation between improvements in mood and improvements on this backwards digit span task. And an even stronger demonstration of this is that we had people walk at different times of the year. So some participants walked in June. It was like 80 degrees Fahrenheit. People said, mark, I can't believe you're paying me to go for a walk in nature. This is amazing. You know, they showed really healthy mood benefits, really healthy, you know, directed attention benefits as measured with this backwards digit span task. We also had people walk in January, 25 degrees Fahrenheit. People said, mark, I was freezing my butt off out there. I did not enjoy that nature walk. But the people that walked in January showed the same cognitive improvement, the same directed attention improvement as the people that walked in June. And I think this is really important because it suggests that you don't have to necessarily like the nature interaction to get these cognitive benefits. So I think that's a really, really important concept and that you don't have to go out in nature when it's a perfect sunny day or it's really, really warm, it's important to go out all the time. If it's snowy, if it's cold, if it's rainy, you want to continue to be going out into these natural environments because it will restore your directed attention.
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Ginny Urch
This is a really interesting. Just because, you know, I grew up in this Ann Arbor area. I grew up in Canton. Now we live in a little town called Pinckney, which is on the outskirts of Ann Arbor. And I always said it is the one of the coolest towns because it's got the city, you know, it's got all these, like, downtown, you can go to cool restaurants. And then it's got all of these nature spots. There is a spot along the Huron river where, and I'm not sure if you've ever done it, Dr. Berman, but the Army, Army Corps of Engineers took one part of the Huron River.
- [28:16]
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- [28:17]
Ginny Urch
And it's, you know, it's like right near downtown. You're not that far from downtown Ann Arbor, but you can ride. The Army Corps of Engineers took the river and like, made these little waterfall drops. I think there's eight or nine of them. And so you can rent a tube or bring your own tube, or you can kayak. And you go down these little drops. And if you're tubing or our kids just wear life jacket, they just swim it. You can get out and walk to the top and do it again. You know, when you're four minutes from, you know, Zingerman's in Delhi, and it's just, it's a cool place. So you got these people, they're out walking. And you, you wrote in Michigan, I mean, it gets mix miserable. Changing seasons didn't matter. Overcast skies didn't matter. People bring that up all the time. Like, well, I would go out and it's not sunny, it doesn't matter. Bare trees, a birdless river, bitter cold, wind, rain or snow, none of that mattered. Whether people relished or resented their forced march through the park, it did not matter. Even if we don't enjoy nature, it restores our directed attention. It fills your tank back up. It is pretty much the only other thing that's going to do it besides sleep. So if you are a mother or you've got kids, they come home from school, of course their directed attention tank is probably almost completely empty. You're going to try and do homework, you know, it's like, well, no one can just like go to bed. You've got other things that you have to do. And so this is such a huge solution. And the verbiage just makes it make so much sense. So let's talk about a couple specifics. One of the things you talk about is boredom. Now, we talk a lot in here about how boredom is good. But what's interesting actually is that, like, boredom is good. I think when you have freedom. To me, boredom's not good. Like when you're sitting in a church service and like, I have a really hard time with that. So you say boredom can be quite fatiguing, like when you're stuck, you know, like, I'm stuck here for 50 minutes and I gotta listen. I, like, I really struggle with that. And I would not have put those words together, boredom and fatiguing. But that makes a lot of sense. I mean, when I would leave church as a kid, I would be like, starving and exhausted. You know, by noon I'm like, I'm done. You know, I. I have a really hard time with that. So can you talk about, you know, kids spend a lot of their days bored. They're in school is the long days, they're bored. We, maybe we as adults spend a lot of our days bored. We're stuck in an office, we're doing all this work. So can you talk about then? Obviously, nature is the solution here, but I want to talk about some of the specific things that people may not think about. That are fatiguing them and taking away their directed attention. Take boredom is one.
- [30:48]
Dr. Mark Berman
Right. And so, and I think this is part of the reason too. People don't like being bored, which makes sense. And I think that's why they reach for the device or the phone so quickly because it, you know, it kind of prevents boredom, but it's not restful. It's actually continuing to fatigue. And you know, boredom is fatiguing is, you know, one of the examples that I give is, you know, if you're listening to a teacher or a professor or a co worker, that's not that interesting. It's very hard to continue paying attention.
- [31:19]
Ginny Urch
That's right.
- [31:21]
Dr. Mark Berman
It starts to tire you out versus like listening to a teacher or a professor or a coworker who is more engaging that where it seems more effortless to pay attention. And that's because, you know, I talked about directed attention and voluntary attention being separate. But there's kind of a continuum, you know, and you know, activities that are more inherently interesting are not going to fatigue directed attention as much. Activities that are more boring, they are going to rob directed attention more quickly. So you want to be mindful of that. And one thing too, I want to mention too, is that, you know, we also have to think about the difference between mental fatigue and physical fatigue. So when I'm tired after a long day at work, it's hard for me to mentally concentrate anymore, but I could still play basketball. So it, you know, taking a nap and walking in nature is kind of a little bit different. You know, you need to sleep in part, you know, for mental fatigue, but also for physical fatigue. We become physically fatigued and the body just needs to rest. The kind of fatigue that I'm talking about is more like a mental fatigue. You're mentally drained, you can't focus, but you can still move the body.
- [32:35]
You still can be alert and awake. So I think many of us kind of understand that difference. And it's when we feel that mental fatigue that that's really the great time to take the nature break. And you might also feel like you're getting a little bit irritable, you're more impatient. Those are also telltale signs that you're in sort of a directed attention fatigue state. And it's a good time to take a break. And as I mentioned too, again, there's a lot of these different activities like streaming shows, scrolling your social media feed, maybe playing video games that maybe feel passive and feel relaxing. But people are suggesting that, no, those can actually be quite taxing they might actually drain your battery even more, drain your tank even more. So we have to be really, really careful. And I'm not somebody who's against technology and you know, we have iPads and screens in the house, but we try to be really careful not to use them too much and to try to get outside and get into nature as often as we can. Because that's definitely been shown to be a great way to refill the direct attention tank.
- [33:52]
Ginny Urch
Yes, this could, I think this could.
- [33:54]
Podcast Sponsor Voice
Be a kids book.
- [33:54]
Ginny Urch
I mean, this is such an incredible way to explain it to parents and to children and it gives you such a good mental picture. Your directed attention is fatiguing, it's running out and you know, it's interesting. I. Boredom. I guess there are two types of boredom. You know, there's a type of boredom, like my daughter yesterday had her friend over there, nine and they're playing and then they come every, you know, here and there and be like, mom, we're bored. You know, I don't know what to do. And that's the type of boredom that is open ended and is kind of exciting, you know, then you're going to go figure it out. But there really is a totally different type of boredom which is like when you're sitting in a class or you're stuck in a waiting for something and like, you know, that's a different type of boredom because we always talk about boredom is so good for kids. But, but I never have differentiated between the different types of boredom. So to know that, I mean, if a kid sat through all these classes all day, they may come home and be very fatigued. And maybe that's why they're snapping at you or snapping at a sibling because now they have no impulse control. And so what you can do to help them to restore that, people talk about like when school gets out, stay at the playground for a little bit, go on a walk, you know, this is going to help to fill that tank back up.
- [35:08]
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This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. The holidays are full of traditions. Some of us grew up with dozens of them, and some of us are just beginning to create our own. In our family, we've been slowly rewriting a few traditions, like perfecting a new hot chocolate recipe with the kids or dropping letters to Santa at the same place each year. And every year, I'm reminded that traditions don't have to be inherited. We can shape them, refresh them, and make them meaningful for the season we're in. One tradition I've personally been thinking more about is carving out space for myself, especially during a time that's joyful but also busy, emotional and sometimes lonely. And that's where therapy can become a part of the rhythm. This season, setting aside time to reflect, to process, to breathe, it can help rewrite the holidays into something clearer and calmer instead of chaotic. And BetterHelp makes that so accessible. Their therapists are fully licensed here in the US and follow a strict code of conduct so you know you're in good hands. They do the matching work for you too. After a short questionnaire, BetterHelp uses over 12 years of experience to pair you with someone who fits your goals and preferences. And if the first match isn't quite right, you can switch therapists anytime based on their tailored recommendations. With more than 30,000 therapists and over 5 million people served, BetterHelp is one of the world's largest online therapy platforms. And it works. So maybe this December, the new tradition is taking care of you. Our listeners get 10% off@betterhelp.com 1,000 hours that's BetterHelp. H E-L-P.com 1,000 hours let's talk about some specifics.
- [37:53]
Ginny Urch
So one, you talk about depression. Okay. Also related to directed attention fatigue. A directed attention fatigue is characterized by an inability to focus, which is also a feature of depression. Few realize how closely linked depression is to attention. So one of the things that you talk about is how the worse off we are, the more dramatic these results might be.
- [38:15]
Dr. Mark Berman
Yes. And you know, you can imagine, you know, a lot of people have, you know, suffered from a depressive episode in their life. And you know, depression is kind of characterized by what's called rumination or just repetitively thinking about negative thoughts and feelings. And when you're engaged in that process, it's really hard to pay attention to anything else. It's like, it's like overwhelming. It's draining that, that battery. And you know, people have found, psychologists have found that unfortunately, individuals that are going through a depressive episode do have a lot of problems with attention. There's a lot of problems trying to, trying to focus. So we did a study where we had participants who had been diagnosed with clinical depression. And we weren't sure, you know, if you're in a state of depression, you know, is a walk in nature going to exacerbate that? Is it going to give you sort of more alone time to ruminate and to, and to go down kind of that negative rabbit hole of depression, or is it going to be beneficial? And to test this. So we had these participants who had been diagnosed with clinical depression and we kind of did something that was kind of mean, but we actually induced them to think about a negative thought or memory that was bothering them before they went on the walk in nature or the walk in the urban environment. And so this was kind of just like the walk in the park study, except now we've got participants who have been diagnosed with clinical depression and we're inducing them to think about a negative thought or memory before they go on their walk in nature and before they go for their walk in the urban environment. And what we found was actually that the results were even stronger for these participants that the walk in nature was actually more beneficial to them than it was for our non clinical sample, suggesting that the walk was really beneficial for these participants with clinical depression who have a lot of trouble focusing. And now it's pretty cool that in the UK and in Canada, doctors are starting to prescribe walks in nature for people that are suffering from depression and anxiety. So as I mentioned before, you know, again, Attention is not just about kids squirming in their chairs, not being able to pay attention to the teacher. Attention is related to all of these different things and might be very, very related to our mental health. And that if we can increase our ability to focus, maybe we can actually break some of these repetitive mental habits that we might get in from from depression and anxiety.
- [40:53]
Ginny Urch
You call it a 50 minute miracle, a therapy with no known side effects that's readily available and can improve our cognitive functioning at zero cost. So you relate this to a lot of different things. You're talking about grief. Let's talk about adhd. That's one of the things that you talk about. A couple of things that you say, though people routinely underestimate how much they enjoy being in nature. You talk about inertia like it's easier to stay inside. This man, Alistair Humphreys, he's a National Geographic Explorer of the Year. He calls it the doorstep Mile. Like it's. And I don't know if he coined that, I don't think he coined it, but he wrote a book called that. It's like hard to get over the doorstep because you just underestimate even us. Like, we've been outside, we're going outside all the time. It's like you, and you're like, I don't really want to put on, you know, the hat and all these things. But then you get out there and you feel so much better and you talk about that. It gets you away from the demands of the day to day. You know, you were talking about how you would go walk at the arboretum, which is so cool. Ann Arbor is so cool. You know, you go for a 15 minute walk and you just, you've exited, you've exited your messy home, you've exited your messy kitchen, you've exited your messy office, you've exited your computer and you have distanced yourself. And that just does a lot for you. So in this book, which is a phenomenal book, it's called Nature in the Mind, you talk about the impact of green space on kids with adhd. Lots of findings here, a short stroll. Can you talk about the huge findings on how getting outdoors can help kids with adhd?
- [42:19]
Dr. Mark Berman
Yeah, absolutely. And this is work done by Ming Kuo and Andrea Faber Taylor. And one of the first things that they kind of looked at was rates of ADHD and kind of where people lived and how much green space was around their home or around their schools of these kids. And they found this correlation that kids who had more nature around their homes or More nature around their schools sort of had, there was less incidence of adhd, but that's just correlational. Maybe there's other factors that could be in play. So they followed up that work where they actually had children who had been diagnosed with ADHD and they took them on like a 20 minute walk in nature or a 20 minute walk in a more urban environment and measured their potential performance. And it turns out that when the kids went on a walk in nature, some of their ADHD symptoms reduced to levels that were like similar to taking a dose of Ritalin. And so that's just really amazing. And I think again, we can't get rid of Ritalin yet. Or you know, it's too early to say that nature can replace pharmacological interventions for adhd. But it's very suggestive that being in different environments and getting kids, kids particularly who have attentional problems, getting them to interact more with nature can be really beneficial to them and their attention. And so, you know, I think, you know, I write in the book about trying to start a nature revolution that we want to get this everywhere. And I think schools is one of the first places that we want to get this to because like, for example, the kid, the school that my kids go to, you know, they're trying to reduce outdoor time and reduce recess time and even they were showing shows on TV when the kids were eating lunch and I was just pulling my hair out. So we did get them to remove that. They're no longer watching shows during lunch, but it's still been very difficult to get them to like increase the amount of time that the kids can go out and be in nature. And I think that's something that as parents we should really be trying to argue for that. You know, I write in the book and this is just me speculating, I don't have evidence for this. But it's possible that in an eight hour school day, if there was six hours of instruction and two hours of a nature break, kids might learn more than just eight hours of instruction. Because in eight hours of instruction the kids are going to get mentally fatigued and they're, and they're just not going to be able to absorb as much of the information. So sometimes less can be more. If you can fill the kids directed attention tank up to full, they're going to be able to absorb more of that material. So I think this is a huge issue. And you know, you imagine to workplaces you got to let your employees have breaks in nature. And, and the thing is though, it's difficult is that this is going to require a revolution because a lot of schools don't have access to nature. And so what do you. What do you do there? And, you know, the good news is that we do find that you can get some of these benefits just looking at pictures of nature or listening to nature sounds or even like, the plant behind me is a fake plant. There's been evidence that having fake nature can be good, or even bringing nature, real plants indoors could be beneficial, and we should do all of those things, but none of those things are as good as actually going out into real nature. So I really hope that with this book that we're going to inspire people to take this work more seriously and that we will try to change how. How our built environment is and that we will make access to nature easier for everybody, particularly for kids.
- [46:09]
Ginny Urch
Yes. The verbiage is so impactful because it just makes you totally understand it. I think kids are acting out, you know, they. They're throwing things or they're, you know, whatever. They're getting in trouble in the classroom. And instead of being like, that's a bad kid, it's like, well, they're. They're depleted, their tank has been depleted. And so they just lose all of their impulse control. And we. And what's interesting is that this is really. I mean, this is adults. This is all of us, us. So attention is what helps us with our inhibitory control, meaning not active, impossible, impulsively controlling rash impulses becomes much harder when our attention is under fatigue. This is like what's happening all across culture. And so for kids that have adhd, you write it's possible that environmental interventions could someday replace pharmacological ones, especially for patients where the drugs are not effective.
- [47:00]
Podcast Sponsor Voice
Or have serious side effects.
- [47:02]
Ginny Urch
And I think if we understand it, that tank analogy, it really gives us more compassion for children for what they're going through. There's this program, I think you'll think this is interesting. It's called Timber Nook, founded by this woman named Angela Hanscom, who wrote a phenomenal book called Balanced and Barefoot. And so she has a Timbernook program in some schools, Dr. Berman, where on certain days, the kids, like, half their day is outdoors, half. And there's this man named Dr. Peter Gray, who wrote a book called Free to Learn. He talks about how when he was a kid, because he's in his 80s, that the school day was only six hours and two hours of it was recess and actually they could roam. It wasn't within. They would go sledding they would walk home. You know, they had an expansive period of time. It was a third of the school day. And so if you look at that with the tank analogy, you can see why it just so clearly explains why it matters and why it works.
- [47:56]
Podcast Sponsor Voice
It's so good.
- [47:57]
Ginny Urch
The book is called Nature in the Mind. Can you talk about grief? You say how all of your beloved grandparents. You talk wonderfully in here about your grandparents on both sides. They all passed away within four months of one another. So you're going through this time of deep grief and you talk about stage theory. I've never heard anybody talk about this, Dr. Berman. I've heard about stage theory. Just like acceptance and denial. And you're like, that didn't really work for me. But you talked about how nature, because you have to fundamentally change your brain now you're doing life in a completely.
- [48:29]
Podcast Sponsor Voice
Different way without these people.
- [48:31]
Ginny Urch
How nature helps. And I'd love if he would tell people about the wind phones.
- [48:35]
Dr. Mark Berman
Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, that was a. That was a very tough time for me. Yeah. To have all three of my living grandparents die within four months of each other.
- [48:46]
Yeah. And again, you know, a grief state is going to be. It's very hard to focus on.
- [48:53]
Woom Bikes Advertiser
Yeah.
- [48:54]
Dr. Mark Berman
Because my attention just kept going back to how sad I was about the death of my grandparents and not being able to talk to them anymore or see them anymore. And, you know, we all go through it, and it's very, very difficult. And again, kind of inspired by my mentor, Steve Kaplan. You know, when I feel in those tough, you know, mental spots, I try to seek refuge in nature and to go for walks in nature. And I should mention, too, that, you know, to get the most benefit, we think, you know, you don't want to be on your cell phone, obviously, you don't want to have your earphones in. And I also think oftentimes you want to go alone so that you can be alone with your thoughts and just let the nature be around you. You know, get. Get processed by our brains. And so too, you know, when I take my kids out in nature, that's great for them. I don't count that as my nature break. That's for them. I'm often having to use a lot of attention with them. I have to find time for me to go on the walks alone. And I did find going for those nature walks, you know. You know, obviously I was still sad. It's. It's not going to solve all the grief, but I did find a lot of solace, you know, Being in nature. And then as I was doing research for the book, I ran across this idea of a wind phone where I forget. I forget exactly who the first person was, but they. I think it was somebody in Japan, actually, where they had a cousin that had passed away, and they were upset that they'll never be able to talk to their cousin again. So they built this kind of like, almost like a toll booth with a phone that wasn't connected to anything, but that was his phone that he could talk to his cousin, basically. And it was interesting that a lot of these wind phones were in nature, that people were not putting them into their basement. They were putting them in these places in nature where they could go out and walk in nature and maybe even pick up the phone and just imagine talking to their loved one who had passed away on this wind phone out in nature. So I think there's something too, that people have this intuition that being in nature is going to be soothing and that can help us with grief. And, you know, that materials also tend to be very natural places with lots of trees and. And things. And, you know, I don't think that's necessarily an accident that people kind of have this intuition that nature can be pleasant and it. It can maybe help you in a really, really tough time.
- [51:33]
Ginny Urch
You brought up something, I think that's so critically important that I wouldn't have thought to say. You talk about when you're outside with your kids. I'm trying to find in my notes here, and I can't find it. But one of the things that you said is you don't actually have to be walking. And we've talked a lot about the walk in the park and different things like that. But it's just being out there. It's the exposure to nature.
- [51:50]
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That's what's really.
- [51:51]
Ginny Urch
Because it's that soft fascination that's really restoring the attention. And so when it comes to kids, your part that you brought up actually was. I'm so glad that you said it, because we've done, you know, especially when our kids were little, like, nature was a saving grace for me. And you talk about that in this book. You say our children need Mother Nature to help them with their development, and parents need Mother Nature as a support system, too, because nature is restoring our attention. And it actually does matter, I think, what you do, because if you've got little toddlers and your nature walk is near a busy road or you take them to swim, I mean, that is going to take all your attention. But we used to try and find. We were really specific about the areas that we would find. Like we would try and find big open fields where the kids could kind of run and roam or crawl for quite a while before you had to get up and go run after them. And that allowed for the mothers to relax. You know, often the only time during that day that you're relaxing, but it did matter where you were. And we were pretty picky about, you know, finding the right spots that allowed for relaxation for the parent.
- [52:59]
Dr. Mark Berman
Absolutely, yeah. So again, if you're worried, you know, that there's a potential that your kid could drown or get hit by a car or something like that, again, you're going to have to be using a lot of directed attention. So. And what you're saying really resonates with me is that, you know, some natural areas, they're kind of secluded from some of those dangers and then you can kind of relax and let your kids just kind of go out and, and explore. And I think that's, that's another thing we have to think about too with the nature revolution is that in order for it to, to be a true revolution, you know, it's going to have to be not taxing on us also. And so that means trying to, to bring in safe natural spaces where you can just let the kids kind of go out. And you know, even in where we live, there aren't so many of those kind of spaces where I can just let my five year old go roam around without having a lot of supervision. So it, again, it means we need to let our kids go and do that, but they need some supervision. But if we can think about ways to engineer these spaces where the parents or the caregivers or the guardians don't also have to use so much directed attention to watch these kids, that's going to be really, really beneficial.
- [54:16]
Ginny Urch
I love this. I love this book. There's so much in here for parents. You talk about affordances, which is when you think about your toys, how many different things can you do with them? Kids can do a lot of things with the sticks and rocks and the open ended toys like that. You write the more time kids spent in green spaces, the fewer or behavior problems parents reported playing in grass and forest undergrowth like blueberries planted in daycare playgrounds, significantly improved preschoolers immune Systems within just 28 days. You talk about the campfire being nature's TV. Just fantastic information in this book. I want to hit one more topic before we wrap it up because what you say actually is that we still do spend the majority of our time inside and you talk about, you can take nature's design principles and nature itself, even if it's, it's fake. You say, you talk about like these micro doses, basically micro restorative impact of plants. Real is best, immersion is best. But reasonable imitations of nature are better than no nature at all. Can you talk about the two different libraries? I thought that that was a really good example of the spaces that were in when we're indoors. And can we design them to make.
- [55:20]
Podcast Sponsor Voice
Us feel a little bit better?
- [55:22]
Dr. Mark Berman
Yeah. So there's a, there's even two. There's one I remember when I was an undergraduate at Michigan and maybe you remember this too, Jenny. Like the undergraduate library is kind of playfully called the ugly.
- [55:35]
It's a very 60s, it's kind of building very square, very plain, not very interesting to look at from the outside or the inside. There are two other libraries on campus that are very, very different. One is the, the graduate library, which has a reading room that has, you know, like 30 foot ceilings and kind of intricate wood carving on it. The tables are very intricate with wood. It's, it's a very interesting place to be in. Or even more so is the law library on the University of Michigan campus had a similar kind of feel as a graduate library, but even better, you know, more magnificent with a lot of stained glass, you know, these chandeliers that had this, all this intricate patterning to it. And you just, you kind of felt like awe when you went into those spaces. And it was also very softly fascinating. And I, I found them to be places that I enjoyed studying more than in the, than in the ugly. And, and the University of Chicago has a similar kind of thing. They have one kind of library called the Reg or the Regenstein Library that's very brutalist architecture, almost no windows, very square and boxy. And you know, I don't want to be too mean, but whenever I ask my students, you know, what's the ugliest building on campus, they point to that building versus Harper Memorial Library, which again, high ceiling, stained glass, incredible chandeliers, lots of intricate architecture. And a lot of that architecture actually mimics the patterns of nature. So nature has a lot of, of interesting pattern to it. First, nature has a lot of curved edges. Another element of nature is called fractalness, that a lot of natural patterns, they repeat at different scales. So if you can imagine a snowflake, it might have a shape and if you put that snowflake under a microscope and zoom in, it kind of has the same shape. And if you zoom in some more, it kind of has the same shape that it doesn't matter what spatial scale you look at. The snowflake, it's got the same characteristic shape, and that's called. Called fractal. And trees have a similar kind of pattern. Like, a tree has a big trunk that then branches out into big branches that branch out into little branches, as a branch out into smaller branches that branch out into leaves, and the leaves have veins that have this branching pattern. So, so what it means that, you know, even if you look at different parts of the tree, like, zoomed in on the leaf, it's still kind of got that same tree shape as looking at the tree from, like, 10ft away. And humans really like looking at fractals. They prefer them. They find them more comforting. They find them to be more natural. And it's possible that our brain is sort of more tuned to process that fractal stimulation. So that also might mean, too, that in thinking about your home, you might want to have fractal patterns in your carpet, fractal patterns on your wall, fractal patterns on your table that our eyes and our brains kind of like to process that kind of fractal stimulation. Sometimes it can be overwhelming. I've seen studies that say it's good to fill your space with greenery and plants, but maybe up to 15 or 20%, you don't want to have your home become a jungle. There are some limits to some of these things, but I think it's really interesting that in nature, there's a lot of these fractals we evolved in nature. Maybe our brain is geared to process this fractal stimulation. And a lot of the built environment doesn't have that. Like, there's no such thing as a straight line in nature. Humans made straight lines. And so I think, again, you know, through architecture, and we find that people prefer buildings that have more of this fractal patterning. They find it more comforting. They find it more natural.
- [59:32]
Ginny Urch
Oh, I love it. I love it. It's like you talk. You call it the nature design principles. And so people can read more about that in the Nature in the Mind book, too, for your classroom, for your home. Lots of ideas in. Lots of really cool things coming out of Michigan, because I've had Ethan Cross on several times. I know you're friends with him, so. And then you talked about. There was a study out of Michigan State talking about the water, the blue water, like, over at the Great Lakes. So I do love all these incredible things. Are coming out of Michigan. That's where the studies about how kids are spending their time came from. I'm almost, I'm pretty close to positive like you know that kids are spending hardly any time outside and they're on screens for so many hours. So there's been a lot of studies I'm pretty sure through the University of Michigan about where kids time's going. So I love that there's so many different studies that you've been a part of that you can read about in this book. What an honor. I love it is the verbiage is, is life changing this whole directed attention tank thing. And it's going to help you understand yourself better and your kids. The book is called Nature in the Mind. The Science of How Nature Improves Cognitive, Physical and social well being. Dr. Bremer, we always end our show with the same question. What's a favorite memory from your childhood that was outside?
- [60:44]
Dr. Mark Berman
There's a lot of good ones.
- [60:47]
I think actually one of my favorite ones is this is also in Michigan, but there are these Silver Lake dunes that are in Silver Lake, Michigan. That's kind of by mirrors. And I remember I must have been in like, like fifth grade. Like the first time that I saw them, I couldn't believe it. Like I remember driving down, I can't remember what road it was. And like I just saw this huge mound of sand just off in the distance and it was just, it was like there's a desert in Michigan. It was just, it just was incredible. And then I remember we would hike on those dunes and it was just so amazing. You could see like Michigan from the dunes. You could see Silver Lake from the dunes and then you could like run down the dunes and it was just, it was unbelievable. I still love doing it. If you're. If, if you want it to be a little bit easier, go. When it's just rained, you can climb up the dunes a little bit easier. But I, I just remember that just being so, so awestruck by those dunes and, and feeling really fortunate to be able to kind of. Of interact with nature in that really deep way.
- [61:59]
Ginny Urch
Michigan is majestic with its nature. It is a slog to get up those dunes. But then he would run down so fast, so fast and then right into the water. Doctor, thank you for this fantastic book. I highly recommend it. Nature in the Mind. Really appreciate your time.
- [62:14]
Dr. Mark Berman
Thanks so much for having me. I really, really enjoyed it.
- [62:21]
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Dr. Mark Berman
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Ginny Urch
Is that guy with the binoculars watching us?
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Dr. Mark Berman
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