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The mindbodygreen Podcast
608: The ultimate guide to using nature for brain health & longevity | Marc Berman, Ph.D.
00:46:49
Marc Berman, Ph.D., environmental neuroscientist, professor and chair of psychology at the University of Chicago, and the founding director of the Environmental Neuroscience Lab, joins us today to dive deep into the powerful benefits of nature on our mental and physical health.
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- [00:00]
A
Welcome to the mindbodygreen podcast. I'm Jason Wakab, founder and co CEO of mindbodygreen and your host. What if the key to improving your focus, lifting your mood, and even boosting your heart health was as simple as stepping outside? Today's guest, Dr. Mark Berman, is here to show us how nature isn't just a nice to have, it's a biological necessity. Dr. Berman is an environmental neuroscientist, professor and chair of psychology at the University of Chicago, and the founding director of the Environmental Neuroscience Lab coordinator. Quite simply, he is the authority on the health benefits of nature. In today's show, we dive into the fascinating science behind how nature impacts everything from attention and memory to depression, stress, and even crime rates. Dr. Berman also shares actionable tips for incorporating more nature into your life, whether that's redesigning your workspace, changing your window view, or swapping your next doom scroll for a quick scroll. Whether you're navigating burnout, struggling to focus, or just want to feel more grounded in your daily life, this conversation will inspire you to rethink your environment and start using using nature as medicine. Let's dive in. So you coined the term environmental neuroscience to study how natural environments influence the human brain and behavior. So let's start there. What led you here to study the relationship between nature and the mind, and what surprised you most in your research?
- [01:28]
B
Yeah, it's a great question. And, you know, it's a little bit of a long answer. It wasn't a direct path. I think I've always been somebody who, who's been very interested in human psychology and the environment and how the environment could have a big impact on people's behavior, I guess, you know, a little bit. One of the reasons why I went into psychology is because my grandparents are Holocaust survivors. And I think as a kid, I kind of just always assumed, you know, oh, I guess Germans aren't just not such nice people that, you know, that they could do such bad things. But as I was learning in university, I saw, I was exposed to this Milgram study where Stanley Milgram, the psychologist at Yale, he was also interested in how something like the Holocaust could happen. And he basically did these studies where he found that you could get kind of regular, everyday people to do kind of bad things, to deliver electric shocks to other people just because they were deferring to authority, that they had created this environment where it was hard for people to say no. And I just thought that study was incredible. And I know that study seems like a long way far away from interacting with nature being good for our psychology. But it got me really thinking, you know, the environment that's around us really can have a big impact on us. And I, I started taking some different classes and I took this class with professor Steve Kaplan, who was a psychologist, but also in the electrical engineering department. I, I too was an engineer who was also interested in psychology. And when I took Steve Kaplan's class, he was talking about this idea that he had called attention restoration theory, where if people interacted with more natural environments, like walking through a park or being exposed to more trees, that that could actually change their behavior and improve their attention. And I just thought it just seemed like an amazing concept because at the time, a lot of psychologists and neuroscientists were very focused on the individual person and know, can you train your brain with different kinds of psychological trainings or can you use pharmacological interventions to change your brain and behavior? But here was this other idea where, you know, could you actually go into different environments and maybe more natural environments, you know, that the physical environment that's around us could change our behavior? And that was just such an interesting idea for me that I just thought, you know, I, I really want to research that some more.
- [04:20]
A
Well, you've definitely done your research. You are the authority in the field. And I'm a big believer in the power of nature. But wow, after reading your book Nature in the Mind, if anyone has any doubts the power of nature as a meaningful lifestyle intervention to create lasting change with their well being, wow. It's all there. And so I'm going to start with, with the book is filled with studies. I'm going to start with one of yours, the nature walk, which I believe happened in 2008. Could you walk us through the nature walk study?
- [04:51]
B
Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, after I took these courses with Steve Kaplan, Steve and I used to meet and I was very interested in testing this attention restoration theory. And at the time, a lot of other people were doing work looking at how interactions with nature could be beneficial to their cognitive functioning. But oftentimes what they did is they'd have people walk in a park and then kind of ask them afterwards, you know, did you feel like your attention was better after walking in the park? And people would say, yes, I felt better. And I thought those studies were interesting, but they were very subjective, you know, So I was really wondering, okay, people are saying that their attention is better, but is it actually getting better? So I really wanted to test this theory where instead of just asking people, hey, do you feel better? Do you feel like your attention is better after the walk in nature? I wanted to give them some objective measures, like, did their performance increase after walking in nature versus not. And so one of my other advisors in graduate school, John Janites, who was a very famous cognitive neuroscientist, doing a lot of brain imaging studies, very good experimentally. I kind of went to him because he was really good at designing experiments. And I said, you know, John, you know, what do you think? You know, let's try to do a study where we, you know, we test people and we test their attention to memory. Then we have them go walk in nature, or we have them walk in a more urban environment. Then we bring them back to the lab and assess their memory intention again. And John kind of looked at me with a kind of a funny look and said, you know, that. That sounds kind of crazy, Mark. It doesn't seem like, you know, it seems just too out there. But we kept talking and, you know, John was a very serious scientist, said, you know what? You know, it's worth testing. We'll never know if it really truly works unless we we test it very objectively. So we designed a study with Steve Kaplan where we brought participants into the lab. We gave them a very difficult memory and attention task. This task was called a backwards digit span task, where participants would hear digits out loud like 5, 6, 7, and then they need to repeat them back in backwards order. 7, 6, 5. At three digits. It's a pretty easy task. When it gets up to five digits, you know, you're ready to pull your hair out. It's a very difficult task, and we keep increasing the number of digits up to nine digits. So participants do this task, and then we had them either walk in a more natural environment, the Ann Arbor Arboretum, or we had people walk through a more urban environment through kind of Washtenaw downtown. Washtenaw Avenue, downtown Ann Arbor. Participants came back to the lab, and then we assessed their memory and attention again with that same backwards digit span task. We also did two interesting things. So one, we gave participants a map that kind of showed them the walk that they were going on. So everybody kind of more or less did the same walk. We also gave them a GPS watch so that we could actually track them to make sure that they actually went on the walk. They didn't just go to Starbucks. And we also did one other thing. We kept participants cell phones because we didn't want people to be chit chatting or texting while on the walk. We wanted them to be Engaged in the environment. So participants did this study. They went on the walk in either the nature environment or the urban environment. And then we actually brought participants back to the lab a second time. So if you walked in nature the first week, you walked in the urban environment the second week, or vice versa. And what we found was really incredible that people improved on this backwards digitspan task by about 20%. So that's like by a digit and a half after the walk in nature, but didn't really show any significant improvement after the walk in the urban environment. And people might be thinking, well, maybe this is because people just like nature more. And it was true that people did like the nature walk more than the urban walk, and their mood improved more going on the nature walk versus the urban walk. But when we looked at how much mood improved versus how much their attention improved, it, there wasn't a strong correlation. So it wasn't like, oh, the people who improved their attentional performance were the ones who increased their mood the most. So that kind of suggested, well, maybe it's not about mood. But an even stronger demonstration of this was that we had people walk at different times of the year. So some people walked in June when It was like 80 degrees Fahrenheit. People said, mark, I can't believe you're paying me to go for a walk in nature. Really healthy attention benefits, really healthy mood benefits. But we also had people walk in January when It was like 25 degrees Fahrenheit. And people said, mark, I was freezing my butt out out there. You know, I did not enjoy that walk. But the people that walked in January showed the same attention and memory improvement as the people that walked in June. So this was really a little bit counterintuitive. You didn't actually have to enjoy the walk in nature to get these cognitive benefits. Fascinating.
- [10:15]
A
And so there's, there's so much here. And what comes to mind immediately for me, I live in Miami, so we've got, I live in Coconut Grove. It's very lush and green. We've also got blue spaces. And so can you talk about the difference between green spaces like forest parks, trees, and blue spaces like oceans, rivers, bays, in terms of the impact?
- [10:40]
B
Yeah, absolutely. So we definitely think you can get these benefits from blue spaces. You know, we tested these green spaces because they were convenient. It was pretty close to campus and easy for participants to get to. There's been a lot of research showing that being close to lakes or the ocean can be good for well, being. So the key element to attention restoration theory, which Is the theory that we're kind of working under for why interacting with nature is beneficial is that we think that humans have two kinds of attention. So one kind of attention is called directed attention. That's where you as individual person are deciding what to pay attention to. So presumably right now you're, you're deciding to pay attention to me and what I'm saying. But you could definitely find other things in the environment that are more interesting than what I'm saying. And the idea behind directed attention is that while it's this really incredible resource about our ability to sort of control what we're attending to, it's thought that that kind of attention is fatigable or depletable. So you can only really direct your attention for so long before you become mentally fatigued. And I kind of see this when I'm lecturing. So in the first five minutes of class, you know, people have got their eyes on me. They seem very engaged. But 45 minutes into a lecture, you know, people start nodding their head back. They're getting kind of tired. It's hard for them to direct their attention. And we all experience this, you know, three, four o' clock at the end of a long workday. It's just hard to focus. And we call that a directed attention fatigue state. That's a good time to take the nature break. That's different from involuntary attention, which 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 you don't really have control over it. And it's 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 look at that beautiful waterfall anymore. It's just too beautiful. I can't look at it anymore. Or oh, I can't watch this really interesting movie anymore. It's just too interesting. I have to shut it off. I'm getting too tired. So the idea behind attention restoration theory is that if you can find environments that don't place a lot of demands on directed attention while simultaneously having stimulation to activate the involuntary attention, you can restore or replenish this precious directed attention resource. And you can imagine walking through, you know, walking on a trail through a forest, having that meeting those criteria about not placing demands on directed attention while simultaneously having interesting stimulation to capture involuntary attention. You can imagine walking on a beach and seeing the waves kind of crashing through and maybe looking at the shoreline as also not placing a lot of demands on direct attention while also simultaneously having a lot of interesting stimulation to capture involuntary attention. Now, there's one other thing that I think is important to mention, which is we think the kind of stimulation that sort of captures involuntary attention needs to be what we call softly fascinating. So when I look at that waterfall, it captures my attention, but it doesn't really capture all of my attentional resources. I can still kind of mind wander and think about other things if I'm in Times Square.
- [14:00]
A
Wow.
- [14:01]
B
That also captures a lot of my attention. Very interesting stimulation, but it kind of does so in a very harsh and all consuming way. I can't really mind wander or think about other things. So we think it's important that the kind of stimulation that captures involuntary attention be also softly fascinating. And we think that a lot of natural stimulation in our environment is softly fascinating. Looking at trees kind of leaves moving in the wind, looking at waves crashing in, looking at ripples on a river. You know, all those things kind of capture our attention in a softly fascinating way.
- [14:38]
A
So would it not. Would it be considered. I'm assuming it wouldn't be considered softly fascinating if you're going for a hike and it's somewhat treacherous where you're very focused on every foot and every movement because you don't want to slip or fall. I'm assuming that has other benefits, but maybe not what we're talking about.
- [14:57]
B
Exactly. That. I would not put that in the category of being a restorative experience in nature. Just like one time we were hiking in the Smoky Mountains, we took a different path, different route down the mountain. It turned out that route was three times longer than the original one. So we started hiking in darkness. It was not restorative at all. It was, you know, I actually had this one gentleman, Nelson Dellis, contacted me. He's actually one of these guys, he's like a memory champion. He can memorize a deck of 52 cards in a minute, the order of all the cards. He's also an avid rock climber. He heard about my research. So he said, mark, you know, I find that as I'm summiting these mountains, my memory actually gets better. Is that because of attention restoration theory? And I said, I don't think so. Because I think as you're getting higher in the mountain, it's getting more dangerous and treacherous. You're going to have to use a lot more directed attention. So no, we're. The kind of interaction that we're in nature we're talking about is like a safe experience where, you know, you could just Kind of let your mind go. You don't have to be too vigilant. If you're worried that there's bears or alligators. If you're worried that there's going to be a forest fire, you know, we would not say that those would be restorative experiences in nature.
- [16:15]
A
And how do you think about minimum effective dose that people need to experience to realize benefits?
- [16:23]
B
Yeah, it's an interesting question. There was a study that came out recently that said if you can get about two hours a week, that's a very good dose. You know, a lot of us don't have easy access to nature. So we've even found just looking at nature pictures for about 10 minutes or listening to nature sounds for about 10 minutes can have some, some benefits. Not quite as strong as the real nature, but you can still get benefits from the simulated nature. Watching nature videos can also lead to benefits, but I would say you would shoot for probably maybe 20 minutes a day, I think would be a good minimum dose. I think you also want to be vigilant for how things are going during your day. Like for example, if you're, if you have a lot of energy and you're really focused and you're getting a lot of work done, you're really productive. Maybe just keep working. If you find yourself at work or at school and it's really hard for you to focus or pay attention, I would say that's a good time to close a laptop, close the book and go for a, for a walk in nature to take a break.
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A
So you mentioned school and also more green space around schools and homes related to better school performance, reduced crime and improved working memory.
- [17:41]
B
Yes, it's pretty incredible. So there were, these are studies that were done in Barcelona where they found that more trees and green spaces around children's homes and around their schools was related to better school performance and better working memory and attention capacity in these kids, even when you control for the income of their parents and education of their parents. So the green spaces around improved school performance, which I think attention restoration theory would also hypothesize because you need a lot of directed attention to do well in school, to focus in school. The crime results are really incredible. So these were some studies done by Ming Kuo and Bill Sullivan in Chicago public housing projects in Chicago where they looked at the public housing projects and how much green space was actually in view from some of these different apartments. And one thing that's really interesting about these studies is that residents and families in these public housing projects don't really get to choose which apartment they're assigned to. It's kind of randomly assigned. And the families and residents that were randomly assigned to apartments that had modest views of nature, we're just talking about like a couple trees or some grass versus, you know, looking at asphalt or a brick wall. The families and the residents that had the modest views of nature, they had better attention scores, lower reported aggression. And when you look at the whole complex as a whole, there were lower rates of crime in the apartments that had more green space around them.
- [19:20]
A
Incredible. It reminds me of Ulrich's hospital window study. Surgical patients recovered faster and required less pain medication if they had views of trees instead of brick walls. We're talking about pain medication and recovery.
- [19:36]
B
Right. I know that study is amazing. And again too, it's, it's kind of have a nice experimental control where Roger Ulrich looked at a single hospital corridor. So it's the same floor, same hallway. Some of the hospital rooms just happen to have some views of nature, like some trees or some shrubs, some grass. Others had views of like a brick wall, like the other side of the hospital. And again, there, it wasn't the case that patients that were wealthier or healthier, more educated, got the nature views and those that weren't, didn't. The patients are kind of randomly assigned, and these were patients that were recovering from gallbladder surgery, and the patients that had the views of nature recovered from gallbladder surgery a day earlier and they used less pain medication.
- [20:24]
A
Incredible.
- [20:26]
B
Rei Co op knows when you're up at 4.30am on a Saturday for a long run and you're actually excited. Not everyone gets it, but we do at rei. We're here for people who get outside. Gear up for your next run in.
- [20:50]
A
Store or@rei.com and back to the city question. Another great study in Toronto, the Toronto health and tree census data. It wasn't a lot of trees. I think it was 11 trees per city block.
- [21:03]
B
Right. So in that study we had a pretty interesting data set. So we thought, you know, so as we're kind of, you know, building all this evidence, we're seeing that, that there are mental and physical health benefits to interacting with nature. Now, I guess I think some people might be surprised by that. But again, you know, mind and body are, are united, so maybe we shouldn't be so surprised. But yes, you get, you get these mental health benefits from interacting with nature and these physical health benefits from interacting with nature. So we, we had access to a pretty interesting data set in Toronto where we had health data from about 30,000 people in Toronto. And then we also had this really interesting tree data set in Toronto, where the University of Toronto Forestry department had cataloged every single tree on public land in the city of Toronto. So these were like the trees on the easements. That's like the space between the sidewalk and the street. So we had data from 580,000 trees in the city of Toronto. We knew where each tree was, we knew the species of each tree, and we knew the diameter of each tree at breast height, which actually tells you how old the tree is. One of my students, Omid Cardan, he basically took all that information and could quantify how much tree canopy each individual tree provided in the city of Toronto. We also had another data set that was from satellite imagery that could quantify, like, all the trees in people's backyards. And basically then we just did a regression where we were interested in relating the tree data to the health data. And we found some interesting findings. So one was just health perception. How healthy do people perceive themselves to be? And we found that you could get a 1% increase in people's health perception by adding one more tree of average size per city block. So that sounds pretty modest, and 1% sounds pretty modest. But to get that 1% increase in health perception, economically, you'd have to give every household on that neighborhood block about $10,000 and have them move to a neighborhood where the median income was $10,000 wealthier, or also make people seven years younger. So it's very hard to increase people's health perception. It's incredible that just increasing tree canopy by one, like going from nine trees to 10 trees, you got this 1% increase in health perception. But that's just health perception. We also looked at objective health. So cardio metabolic disorder, so stroke, diabetes, and heart disease. We found that if you added one more tree per city block, that was related to a 1% reduction and cardiometabolic disorders, to get that equivalent benefit economically, you'd have to give every household about $20,000 and have them move to a neighborhood where the median income was about $20,000 wealthier or make people about one and a half years younger. So it's hard to change people's health. But it's really interesting that just increasing the chi tree canopy pretty modestly, you can get these pretty significant benefits in health.
- [24:24]
A
What do you think is happening there?
- [24:26]
B
So, for. For the Toronto tree study, I think there's a couple different things that could be happening. So we definitely think that when you have more trees in the neighborhood. It encourages people to kind of go outside and maybe walk more in the neighborhood. So we think that might be part of it, that people are maybe exercising more in neighborhoods that have more green space. We also think it might have to do with air quality, that having more trees in the neighborhood will lead to better air quality. But we also think it might have to do with the aesthetic of nature and that our brain somehow evolved. You know, we evolved in nature, and maybe we've. We evolved to process this nature stimulation more fluently. And maybe there's just some health benefit to just seeing nature. And I think that's really interesting when we think back to the Roger Ulrich study in the hospitals, because I don't think those patients that had the nature views were exercising more. I don't think they had better air quality. I think it was something about the aesthetic of nature, the sights, the sounds of nature that might be leading to these health benefits.
- [25:38]
A
So you mentioned aesthetic, and I mentioned I live in Coconut Grove, and here where I live, there's beautiful. Banyan trees are just massive, and there's canopy. So I can't help but think, are all trees created equal here? Is bigger, better, or some trees have, you know, a better aesthetic in your words, or, you know, more potential for healing than, say, others?
- [26:02]
B
Yes. Yeah, it's a good question. I would say. Yes, probably. I think it's probably good to have a diversity of trees, too. So maybe you wouldn't want to have only banyan trees, but have some mix. But like, in the Toronto study, we actually found a slightly stronger benefit for evergreens, so pruces and pines. And I think part of the reason for that is because in Toronto, in the winter, all the deciduous trees lose their leaves, but the evergreens keep their leaves and keep that color. And I think that leads to, like, maybe a better esthetic, which might continue to have its sort of healing power.
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A
So building off of that, you know, we've had, unfortunately, natural disasters have been fires. You lose. We've. We lose trees, or you lose leaves in the change of seasons. What have you learned there?
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B
I mean, yeah, it's a big. It's a big problem. Just anecdotally, it's kind of interesting. I was just recently in Malibu, and, you know, I. They still have a lot of the destruction from the wildfires there, where all these homes on the ocean were burned down. It's kind of interesting. Some of the palm trees were still standing. So nature can also be kind of resilient. But, of course, we're losing a lot of Trees in these, you know, hurricanes and wildfires and things like that. It's a huge problem. So, but I don't think that means we should be, you know, saying, well, we're going to lose in nature, so it's not that important. I think it's just the opposite.
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A
But does it have a negative impact in the same way that lots of trees? Losing trees.
- [27:35]
B
Losing trees has a huge negative impact. So another interesting study that was done in the Midwest had to do with the emerald ash borer bug, this invasive beetle that basically killed all the ash trees in the Midwest, like in Michigan and Ohio and Illinois, Wisconsin. And what these researchers found is that years later, there was an increase in mortality.
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A
Wow.
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B
And likely. And part of it was driven, they think, by cardiovascular disease. And there were. There were no other significant events except for the loss of all these ash trees. So that there was kind of this provocative headline, when trees die, people die. And so, yeah, it's very serious. And. And kind of, again, back to the Toronto Green Space study. More trees was related to better cardiovascular health. If you have some kind of natural disaster that comes in that kills all the trees, that's going to be bad for cardiovascular health. So, yeah, the trees are vital to our physical health.
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A
So you've advised city planners, architects. How should we rethink the design of our environments, schools, workplaces, so that they're better for our wellbeing?
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B
The quick and dirty answer is just more trees. You want to have. You want to increase tree canopy around your home, around your office, around your schools?
- [29:07]
A
Are there diminishing returns when you have so many trees and you create darkness?
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B
We haven't seen it yet. I would. I would bet that, yes, there's, you know, going from 10% tree canopy to 20% tree canopy is going to probably have a bigger effect than going from 80% tree canopy to 90% tree canopy. But. But in our cities, we're not even getting close to that. You know, the cities that have the most tree canopy, you know, they have like 30% tree canopy. So for sure there'll be some. Some diminishing returns. But I think. So the short answer is, yeah, we want to get more trees in the environment. You want to get more usable green space, too. You want to have more parks. And I think I would advocate for parks where you can actually do some hiking, not just ball fields, soccer fields, things like that.
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A
So are there any urban areas or cities in the United States that you think have really done a good job here?
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B
Yeah, I think there's a. There's A. A lot. And I think there's a lot more that can be done. So we. We definitely. We can see cities, for example, that have, like, more green space than you would expect by their size. So there is kind of this relationship between how big a city is and how much green space a city will have. There are some outlying cities, like, I think San Francisco has probably more tree canopy than you would expect by its size. And when you do that, you actually see better health. So lower obesity, you know, other diseases. You see lower rates of that by having more green space. You know, Chicago has a lot of green space, too. But the problem in Chicago is that sometimes a lot of the green space, either people don't feel safe in the parks or they have, you know, car traffic, too much car traffic near the parks, which I think limits the capacity of the parks to. To do well. So I think just. Just saying, oh, we have a park. There isn't enough. You need to assess, well, do people feel safe in the park? Is the park too noisy? You know, for example, Jackson park, the Midway Plaisance that connects Jackson park to Washington Park. So you have these three parks in Chicago on the south side designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, the same urban landscape architect, to design Central Park. It does not have the same impact on Chicago that it does in New York. And I think, you know, so why. And I think part of that is because, well, in Chicago on the Midway, cars can go 45 miles per hour right through there, which kind of ruins a lot of the aesthetic. There's also, you know, issues about economics and what's built around the parks. But I'd say. So the short answer is we need more green space. We need more parks that are accessible, safe, usable. But all of this is related to this other concept that I think a lot of Americans and people in general just think of nature or trees as an amenity, but not a necessity. You say, oh, you know, if we could, you know, oh, it's for rich people, or, oh, you know, yeah, it'd be nice to have, but we don't really need it. And I think what we're trying to say is, no, we need it because it has physical health benefits, mental health benefits. It might reduce aggression, it might increase cooperation. So all these things likely will save money. And, you know, like, those studies show that when you don't have the trees, you can have really, really negative health impacts. So these green spaces, trees are not an amenity. They're a necessity.
- [32:44]
A
Let's talk more about mental health. We've Got a crisis. Let's talk about mental health, stress, anxiety. What should we be prescribing in terms of nature?
- [32:54]
B
Well, I mean, we found really, really strong benefits for participants who are suffering from depression. So we actually did a study where we had participants come into the lab, they had been clinically diagnosed with depression, so they met criteria for clinical diagnosis of depression. And then we actually induced them to think about a negative thought or memory to induce depressive rumination. And we did that because we were kind of interested to see maybe going for a walk alone. If you're suffering from depression and you're actively ruminating, maybe that's going to worsen depression, not alleviate it. But we found just the opposite. We actually found effects that were much stronger for the participants who are suffering from depression. Their attention and memory increased by more going for the walk in nature compared to the non clinical sample. So we think interactions with nature are an incredible useful supplement for people suffering from depression. And also, you know, anxiety is very comorbid with depression. That'll be very beneficial for participants with anxiety as well.
- [34:04]
A
And it feels like no matter what you're doing where you are, you should try to incorporate nature. Whether it's you don't have access and you get a plant or you listen to nature sounds or. I can't help but think of driving like if you, if you have two routes and it's 10 more minutes to drive in, nature versus the highway, take the longer, take the longer walk, drive through nature.
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B
Absolutely.
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A
Yeah.
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B
So that's kind of this concept that we talk about in the book about sort of naturizing our spaces, bringing more nature in. Even like the plant behind me is a fake plant, people found benefits of even fake nature. So yes, we want to bring more nature into our homes, into our schools, into our offices. You know, you want to be mindful of what view you have out of your window. And like I said, the simulated nature, just looking at pictures of nature, even nature sounds can have these benefits. But I don't think of that as being a replacement for the real thing. I think of it more as something that if there's not easy access, that's something that we can all do.
- [35:12]
A
You can get creative. Not everyone has to live in a rural area with access to, you know, abundant forests. You could be an urban dweller and figure out how to make it work.
- [35:22]
B
Exactly. And even, you know, I would say that even in a lot of rural parts, while there is hypothetically a lot of nature, oftentimes the nature in a lot of these rural Areas is not really usable for the kind of restoration that we're talking about. It may be very agricultural or it might be such wild forest that you can't really hike through it, you know, and as we talk about in the book, too, cities are fantastic. We would never advocate for people to leave cities. Cities are bastions for creativity and innovation. We actually find that cities, bigger cities, have lower rates of depression than smaller cities. But we want to kind of naturize these cities. We want to incorporate more green spaces, more parks into our cities.
- [36:09]
A
So I absolutely love walking. If I don't get my 10,000 plus steps a day, I am a grumpy dinosaur, as my children would say. And I love exploring. I'm more of an urban dweller than rural dweller. I'm curious, with that said, what are your favorite places in America to go visit and go for a walk and get all the benefits?
- [36:31]
B
Yeah, so there's lots of great places. So for example, near my office in Chicago, on the campus of the University of Chicago in Jackson park, there's a Japanese garden that's like right almost on Lake Michigan, right by the Museum of Science and Industry. It's not a really huge space, but it's got this red clay path that kind of winds. There's a waterfall, little bridges that you can walk over. I love. I love going to the Garden of the Phoenix in Chicago. In Toronto, where I spend a lot of time, there's Hyde Park, High park, this humorous park again with lots of trails. In the spring, they have the cherry blossoms bloom. It's beautiful. Fantastic place to go. In San Francisco, I love going through the Presidio. Fantastic park there. Of course, Central park in New York. I'm trying to think in Miami, I remember just going to the Everglades was just a, you know, a fantastic place to go. So there you have some national parks to go to internationally. I don't know if you've ever been to Stockholm. Stockholm, they really know how to incorporate the nature in with the built environment. It's like the city's almost like a continuous park. It's just. It's just gorgeous. I've never been to Singapore, but they do a lot of creative things with nature and actually incorporate the nature on the buildings. Like they'll have these terraces with kind of like little parks on the buildings. It's just fantastic. There's a lot of creativity with architects doing different things. And here's some kind of interesting thing too. If you look at a building, sometimes buildings kind of mimic patterns in nature. So, like the architect Gaudi, in a lot of his buildings, he was mimicking the patterns of nature. And we actually find that people almost see nature in these buildings, even though there isn't any nature there. So some of this architecture that maybe costs a little bit more, that has a little bit more intricate designs, we actually think might also have some benefits versus kind of the more modern kind of boxy architecture that a lot of designers are doing now.
- [38:47]
A
Sure.
- [38:48]
B
So I'm curious.
- [38:50]
A
I know you're not done. There's a lot more research to be had. What's next for you? Are there areas where you're, what, you want to push the boundaries in terms of what we know about the nature and the mind. What's next?
- [39:01]
B
Yeah, I think there's a few things. So, one, I'm very interested in brain imaging, but it's. If you've ever been in an MRI scanner, it's a very artificial environment. It's very constraining. You're in this small tube. If you've got claustrophobia, you can't really go in these things. It's very noisy. It's hard to give people a pleasant nature experience while they're in the MRI scanner. So I've been kind of frustrated because I want to know what's kind of going on directly in the brain when people are having these experiences. But now there's this new technology called functional near infrared spectroscopy, where people can wear this little cap that shines infrared light into the brain that can actually measure brain activity. So now we can actually send people on real walks in nature while simultaneously measuring their. Their brain activity. So I think that's super, super exciting. I'm also kind of excited to try to understand more about soft fascination. Like, why does looking at nature kind of softly capture our attention? And we think one reason might be that our brains process that information more fluently. So we're trying to quantify that in different ways. And one way that we've kind of tried to quantify that is with something called JPEG compression. So this is going to get a little bit technical, but, you know, images on our computers or on our phones, we typically don't store them at their full resolution. We kind of compress them down to lower resolution, and our eye doesn't really notice it, but it saves a lot of memory on our computers and our phones. Well, it turns out nature images get compressed down into fewer bits, less information than urban images. So that has us thinking maybe our brains are actually doing the same thing. Our brains maybe can compress down this nature stimulation into less information and that's why it might be less taxing for our brains to process. So that's also been kind of an exciting avenue of research.
- [41:00]
A
I love it. Fascinating. Please keep us posted. Everyone should buy the book. It's called Nature in the Mind. I'm going to hold it up. In addition to buying the book, what else should we know? What do you want? The takeaways for our audience. What should we incorporate into our day to day? Effective immediately.
- [41:15]
B
Okay, so I think one that is one that we touched on. Whereas you don't have to like nature to get the benefit. So now there's a threshold. Like I said, you know, if you're so freezing cold or if it's so unbearably hot, I think it's probably going to be hard to get the benefit. But if it's a rainy day or a cloudy day or a little bit of a cool day, it's not a perfect ideal conditions to go for a walk in nature. It doesn't matter. Still go out there, go out there, put on your boots, take an umbrella, go out and walk in nature. So that's number one. The, the conditions don't have to be a perfect weather day to get to get these benefits. You can get these cognitive benefits even on a cloudy day or a rainy day. The second thing I would say is be very mindful. When you're having a hard time focusing. That's when we think you're going to get the most benefit from this nature break. So I think a lot of us, when we're kind of tired, maybe we'll scroll social media, surf the Internet, text. We think that those activities are not actually restorative of our attention. They actually might deplete us more. So if you need to take the break, don't do those activities. Go for the walk in nature. So those are kind of what I say, like the simple things. Then I would say if you have time, start thinking about redesigning your interior spaces, getting more nature in. Maybe it can be fake nature. Maybe think about how you what you're putting on your walls or paintings on your walls or the even like the texture of your carpet, the patterns on your carpet, if they mimic the patterns of nature, we think that's going to have benefits. Get your kids out in nature. And we unfortunately we're finding that kids don't automatically love nature. They kind of learn to like nature. So it's important to get the kids out in nature which will help them with school performance and things like that.
- [43:10]
A
Well, fantastic advice.
- [43:12]
B
And then I'm hoping that we can kind of start sort of like a nature revolution where this instead of thinking about nature as being an amenity and not a necessity, then we think about as a necessity and we start acting on that. Okay, now we need to increase more trees in our city or town. We need to get more trees around our schools. We need to have more parks around our schools. Maybe in our schools, you know, they're saying, oh, we're going to get rid of recess. No, maybe we need more recess and have the resource recess be out in nature. That might actually lead to more learning rather than less learning. And then if we want to bubble up even more, you know, getting cities to really take this seriously, that humans need nature to reach their full potential. And we're not going to be able to reach our full potential unless we have more nature in our daily lives and in our daily activities.
- [44:04]
A
I'm sold. Mark, thank you so much.
- [44:07]
B
Oh, thank you.