INV Nature Fixed Book Forest Bathing Discussion

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Nygfanv

Writing

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I’m studying for my Writing class and need an explanation.

after reading the book nature fixed 1. Briefly explain what Forest Bathing is.

2. Share at least two pieces of evidence that support Forest Bathing.

3. State your own position on Forest Bathing. 


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To my father, John Skelton Williams, for showing me the natural world in the first place. You always made it magical. CONTENTS Introduction: The Cordial Air PART ONE LOOKING FOR NATURE NEURONS 1. The Biophilia Effect 2. How Many Neuroscientists Does It Take to Find a Stinking Milkvetch? PART TWO NEARBY NATURE: THE FIRST FIVE MINUTES 3. The Smell of Survival 4. Birdbrain 5. Box of Rain PART THREE FIVE HOURS A MONTH 6. You May Squat Down and Feel a Plant 7. Garden of Hedon 8. Rambling On PART FOUR BACKCOUNTRY BRAIN 9. Get Over Yourself: Wilderness, Creativity and the Power of Awe 10. Water on the Brain 11. Please Pass the Hacksaw PART FIVE THE CITY IN A GARDEN 12. Nature for the Rest of Us Epilogue Acknowledgments Notes Illustration Credits THE Nature Fix INTRODUCTION The Cordial Air May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. —EDWARD ABBEY I was hiking in Arches National Park when the Mappiness app in my phone pinged me. Some people would be annoyed, but not I. Finally, I was somewhere outside and beautiful and could tell the app how happy, relaxed and alert I was. Very, very and very. I told it so by tapping on the screen. Then I victoriously took a photo of the smooth, salmon-colored cliffs in front of me. Small topographies of lichen poked through a crack. A few perfect white clouds pottered across a French blue sky. Let Big Brother, toiling away in some windowless university lab, eat that for lunch. After many months and 234 interactions with this app, I almost always got pinged when I was indoors and working, which didn’t seem very helpful to either the Mappiness project or to my own. (And it didn’t seem fair, because I was outside fairly often, wasn’t I?) Mappiness is in the midst of a multiyear big-data grab, asking tens of thousands of volunteers to record their moods and activities twice a day at random times. Then it matches those responses to an exact GPS location from which it extracts information on the weather, amount of daylight and other environmental characteristics. The aim is simple: What makes people happy? Does place matter, or not so much? Big Brother—or Big Scientist, really—is George MacKerron, a young and congenial economist at the University of Sussex. As he explained it to me, much of the happiness data out there involves relationships, activities and economic behaviors, and much of it is familiar: people are happiest when they are well enmeshed in community and friendships, have their basic survival needs met, and keep their minds stimulated and engaged, often in the service of some sort of cause larger than themselves. But MacKerron wondered about the people who already have these things going for them, or, for that matter, about the people who don’t; are there other factors that could make meaningful differences in the march of their days? To find out, he launched Mappiness in 2010 and within a year had gathered 20,000 participants and over a million data points (by the time I joined a few years later, he was up to 3 million). Here’s what the data shows: People are least happy at work or while sick in bed, and most happy when they’re with friends or lovers. Their moods often reflect the weather (most live in the UK, so that’s not surprising). But one of the biggest variables, the surprising one, is not who you’re with or what you’re doing (at least for this iPhone-using crowd, which tends to be young, employed and educated). It’s where you are. As one of MacKerron’s papers concludes: “On average, study participants are significantly and substantially happier outdoors in all green or natural habitat types than they are in urban environments.” (And, in case you’re wondering, the data didn’t just reflect a vacation effect, since he factored that in.) The difference in joy respondents felt in urban versus natural settings (especially coastal environments) was greater than the difference they experienced from being alone versus being with friends, and about the same as doing favored activities like singing and sports versus not doing those things. Yet, remarkably, the respondents, like me, were rarely caught outside. Ninety-three percent of the time, they were either indoors or in vehicles. And even the app’s definition of “outside” could mean standing at an intersection or collecting the mail. My own personal data was pretty pathetic. The app caught me exercising or relaxing outside only 17 times, or 7 percent of the pings over the course of a year. Most often I was working, followed by number two, doing childcare, followed by commuting, doing housework and eating (well, at least something was fun). In the midst of a flirtation with meditating, I was caught doing that exactly twice. What Mappiness reveals—our epidemic dislocation from the outdoors—is an indictment not only of the structures and habits of modern society, but of our self-understanding. As the writer Annie Dillard once said, how we spend our days is how we spend our lives. Why don’t we do more of what makes our brains happy? Are we just too knackered by life’s demands, too far away from greenery or too tempted by indoor delights, especially the ones that plug in? Partly, but not entirely. In a revealing set of studies at Trent University in Ontario, psychologist Elizabeth Nisbet sent 150 students either outside to walk on a nearby path along a canal, or underground to walk through the well-used tunnels connecting buildings on campus. Before they left, she asked them to predict how happy they thought they’d feel on their walks. Afterward, they filled out questionnaires to gauge their well-being. The students consistently overestimated how much they’d enjoy the tunnels and underestimated how good they’d feel outside. Social scientists call these bad predictions “forecasting errors.” Unfortunately, they play a big role in how people make decisions about how to spend their time. As Nisbet rather dejectedly concluded, “People may avoid nearby nature because a chronic disconnection from nature causes them to underestimate its hedonic benefits.” So we do things we crave that make us tetchy, like check our phones 1,500 times a week (no exaggeration, but I will point out that iPhone users spend 26 more minutes per day on their phone than Android users, which may be a good reason to marry an Android user), while often neglecting to do the things that bring us joy. Yes, we’re busy. We’ve got responsibilities. But beyond that, we’re experiencing a mass generational amnesia enabled by urbanization and digital creep. American and British children today spend half as much time outdoors as their parents did. Instead, they spend up to seven hours a day on screens, not including time in school. We don’t experience natural environments enough to realize how restored they can make us feel, nor are we aware that studies also show they make us healthier, more creative, more empathetic and more apt to engage with the world and with each other. Nature, it turns out, is good for civilization. This book explores the science behind what poets and philosophers have known for eons: place matters. Aristotle believed walks in the open air clarified the mind. Darwin, Tesla and Einstein walked in gardens and groves to help them think. Teddy Roosevelt, one of the most hyperproductive presidents of all time, would escape for months to the open country. On some level they all fought a tendency to be “tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people” as hiker- philosopher John Muir put it in 1901. Walt Whitman warned of the city’s “pestiferous little gratifications” in the absence of nature. Park builder and public-health advocate Frederick Law Olmsted understood. He changed the torso of my hometown and that of many other cities as well. The Romantic movement was built upon the idea of nature as the salvation of the mortal soul and the mortal imagination, with poets penning odes to high peaks just as industrialization was beginning to choke its way through Europe. Wordsworth wrote of a fusing of “the round ocean and the living air, / And the blue sky and in the mind of Man.” Beethoven would literally hug a linden tree in his backyard. He dedicated symphonies to landscapes and wrote, “The woods, the trees and the rocks give man the resonance he needs.” Both men were speaking of a melding of inner and outer systems. It sounds a bit woolly, but they were auguring the explorations of twenty-firstcentury neuroscience, of human brain cells that sense environmental cues. Our nervous systems are built to resonate with set points derived from the natural world. Science is now bearing out what the Romantics knew to be true. the dense, vertical habitat of a prewar apartment building, I was drawn to the verdant, magnetic acres of New York’s Central Park. Starting in middle school, I went there most days and every weekend, riding a rusty Panasonic bike or walking, skating or sunbathing while tethered to a Walkman. We are animals, and like other animals, we seek places that give us what we need. Given the opportunity, children will decamp to tree houses and build forts, wanting spaces that feel safe but with easy access to open run-around areas. We work hard to make our homes and yards a certain way, and when we can afford to, we pay considerably more for residences or hotel rooms right on the beach, or the pastoral ninth hole, or a quiet, tree-lined street. We all want our starter castles on the corner of GROWING UP IN Prospect and Refuge. Experts tell us these habitat preferences are remarkably consistent across cultures and eras. Yet until recently psychologists and neuroscientists didn’t take these affinities very seriously. “Studying the impacts of the natural world on the brain is actually a scandalously new idea,” Richard Louv, author of the 2008 bestseller Last Child in the Woods, told me. “It should have been studied thirty to fifty years ago.” So why now? Probably because we’re losing our connection to nature more dramatically than ever before. Thanks to a confluence of demographics and technology, we’ve pivoted further away from nature than any generation before us. At the same time, we’re increasingly burdened by chronic ailments made worse by time spent indoors, from myopia and vitamin D deficiency to obesity, depression, loneliness and anxiety, among others. In parts of East Asia, which suffers perhaps the greatest epidemic of indoor-itis, rates of nearsightedness in teenagers surpass 90 percent. Scientists used to attribute myopia to book-reading, but it instead appears to be closely linked to time spent living like naked mole rats, away from daylight. The sun primes the retina’s dopamine receptors, and those in turn control the shape of the developing eye. We are learning about what this rift from the outdoors is doing to our retinal cells, but what about our minds? We have gained much since the dawn of the Internet, but many experts argue we’ve also grown more irritable, less sociable, more narcissistic, more distracted and less cognitively nimble. We can’t blame all our malaises on a separation from nature, but our complaints reveal some fraying of psychological resilience. There are times when we could all be a little less reactive, a little more empathetic, more focused and more grounded. That’s where a nature dose can help, and many of the researchers in this book say they can prove it. It wasn’t apps or John Muir that compelled me to wonder about the relationship between nature and the human brain. For me, the exploration started when my husband accepted a job offer that would take us from an idyllic small mountain city to the hyper-urb of Washington, D.C. The summer evening we moved out of our house in Boulder, Colorado, was warm and clear. We stood on the curb watching the last of our dismayingly large pile of boxes, furniture and gear get tossed into an Atlas Van Lines truck. The kayaks were the last to go. Bright as jelly beans, scuffed by years of river rocks, they had no clue they were destined for a concrete parking pad in a big city. Our next-door neighbors came out. Their kids draped arms around our kids. Soon small children from our branch of dead-end streets wandered up with their scooters and dogs. At ten and eight, our kids had been the elders, leading the pack to plastic-cup boat races in the irrigation ditch, raccoon spotting, tree climbing, rock painting and general mayhem among the shrubbery. There were days when they’d be outside from after school until dinner time, and I didn’t really know exactly what they were doing. The sky was pinkish. Never does Colorado look as beautiful as when lit by a summer sunset. I’m sure I was crying before the doors on the truck slid shut. Then my neighbor started and we were a couple of fools sniffling against the ornamental sage. There were a lot of reasons I was sorry to be leaving the West, where we’d lived for two decades. Chief among them were my friends and colleagues, the kids’ school and pals, our woodsy house, the mountains themselves. The trails near our house were ribbons of delight, filled with surprises like the baby scorpion who skittered across to say good-bye, the changing parade of wildflowers and my voluble hiker buddies as we dodged the clench-faced triathletes. Even so, like a lot of people, I never really knew what I had until I lost it. What I didn’t fully realize that evening the semi slid away with our worldly goods was how much the mountains had become my tonic. Nearly every day I was in them or on them or looking at them, often alone. Unlike a lot of people in Boulder, I was neither a seeker nor a fitness freak, so I didn’t approach my walks with a quest for spiritual or material utility. And as a born and bred New Yorker, I don’t use words like “tonic” lightly. I’ve never worn a heart monitor and clocked sprints or downloaded playlists from Olympic coaches. I would just head outside, usually walking, and if I couldn’t get out, I’d get surly. When my feet were moving, I would think about whatever I needed to think about and the farther I went, the more I would space out. Sometimes I could by accident compose some writerly sentences in my head, or some insight might waft up, unbidden. I’m not a wannabe mountain sprite. There’s a lot I love about cities, like great cheap tacos and smart people in fantastic eyewear. It’s just that I noticed some dramatic things about my mood, creativity, imagination and productivity in different environments, and I started to ponder it. pointed itself toward that anti-Arcadia that is the nation’s capital, and we reluctantly followed. It was 104 degrees when we arrived, and my hair shriveled up into a pile of Brillo. This surely wasn’t the East Coast; this was Manaus with suits. I ventured out to explore a nearby park early in the morning, and found that to get there, I needed to sprint across a highway and bushwhack along some bridge pilons to find the words “Pussy Fudge” waiting for me in spray paint. Our house was near a river but also near a major airport. Jets passed low overhead every sixty seconds. There was the noise, the smog, the gray, the heat. (To be fair, nature as well as civilization could wreck you here: the nonnative tiger mosquitoes as big as my thumbnail, the nymph deer ticks smaller than freckles. Both are capable of giving you diseases that can damage you neurologically and for life. Washington had names for weather events I’d never heard of or had to think about: derechos, polar vortices, level 4 THE MOVING TRUCK hurricanes, heat-index advisories.) I yearned for the mountains. And yearning is a devastating thing, because it is defined by loss. As the months ticked by, I realized that if I was going to explore what nature offers our brains, I also had to acknowledge what its absence means. I felt disoriented, overwhelmed, depressed. My mind had trouble focusing. I couldn’t finish thoughts. I couldn’t make decisions and I wasn’t keen to get out of bed. I was perhaps, at least in part, suffering from what journalist Louv calls nature deficit disorder. (The DSM hasn’t added it, but presumably they’d want to treat it with a pill.) Louv defines it as what happens when people, particularly children, spend little or no time outside in natural environments, resulting in physical and mental problems including anxiety and distraction. He also coined the toothsome term “nature neurons” to highlight the essential link between our nervous systems and the natural world they evolved in. Was the breakage of this link really happening? Is there science supporting the notion of nature deficit disorder? If so, how much nature do we need to fix ourselves? Do we need to move into a hemlock tree like in a Jean Craighead George novel, or will looking out the window do? If I was going to do more than merely survive in my new urban habitat, the type now shared by most people on earth, I was going to have to figure some things out. What was it about nature that people seem to need? How could we get enough of it in our lives in order to be our best selves? In the course of trying to answer these questions, I came to consider the human-nature connection on a neural level. Some weeks after we rolled into town, I left on assignment for Japan to write about an obscure and somewhat embarrassing Japanese practice called forest-bathing. There, I started to learn the science behind what I was experiencing at home. The Japanese researchers weren’t content to leave nature to the realm of haikus—they wanted to measure its effects, document it, chart it and deliver the evidence to policy makers and the medical community. What the Japanese didn’t really know, though, was why nature seemed to be helpful in alleviating so many things that ail us. And there were a lot of other things they didn’t know: who was best helped, by what mechanisms in the brain and body, what was the right dose, and, moreover, what qualified as “nature”? I personally like Oscar Wilde’s broad definition: “a place where birds fly around uncooked.” Many scientists the world over are trying to find answers. My exploration of these questions would send me down a river in Idaho with a boatload of women veterans, to South Korea, where grown firemen hold hands in the woods, to sound labs measuring stress recovery, to treadmills in 3D virtual-reality rooms and to downtown Edinburgh, Scotland, where I’d walk around with a brain-measuring EEG unit wrapped around my scalp like a postmodern crown of thorns. I’d measure black carbon and my own blood pressure, pulse rate, cortisol and facial responses to “awe.” I would meet researchers convinced that the secret to nature’s power lies in its geometric fractal patterns, or its particular sound vibrations, or the aerosols from trees. It was a sensory extravaganza. Scientists are quantifying nature’s effects not only on mood and well-being, but also on our ability to think—to remember things, to plan, to create, to daydream and to focus—as well as on our social skills. There were times when I was skeptical, and times when I believed. I spent time with people who were trying to get well, people who were trying to get smart, people finding the best ways to educate young children (who are, by nature, exploratory, kinetic and full of wonder, all qualities enhanced by time outside) and people who were merely trying, like me, to stay sane in a frenetic world. Because of the two years I spent researching this book, I would emerge feeling better myself, and much more aware of the surprising science behind why I was feeling that way. And while “well-being” may sound like vague psychospeak, its impact is real. Enhancing it has been shown to add years to your life span. I’ve divided the book into five parts to help make sense of the material, and to make it useful. The first part sets up the two dominant theories that attempt to explain why our brains need nature and that drive much of the research: the first chapter takes us to Japan, where researchers are quantifying nature’s role in lowering stress and boosting mental health using a framework based on the biophilia hypothesis, the idea that we feel most “at home” in nature because we evolved there. The second chapter swerves over to Utah, where American neuroscientists are more interested in how nature helps restore our attention-addled brains to a state of sharper cognition. I’ve organized the rest of the book by nature dose. I explore the immediate effects of quick bursts, or “nearby nature” on our three main senses—smell, sound, sight. Then I look at what happens to our brains and bodies when we hang outside a bit longer to approximate the Finnish recommended nature dose: five hours a month. In Part Four, I take a deeper, longer dive into the wilderness, where really interesting things happen to our brains. This is where, in the words of neuroscientist David Strayer at the University of Utah, “something profound is going on.” Finally, we’ll look at what it all means to the way most of us live, in cities. Throughout, there will be insights into how we can better construct our days, lives and communities so that everyone gains. Don’t worry; I’m not going to tell you to pitch your smartphone over a waterfall. The world we live in is fully plugged in. But it’s important to call out just how radically our lives have shifted indoors —and what those changes mean for our nervous systems—so that we may hope to ease and manage the transition. My move to the city is a micronarrative of the demographic and geographical shifts occurring on a global scale. Homo sapiens officially became an urban species sometime in 2008. That’s when the World Health Organization reported that for the first time more people throughout the world live in urban areas than rural ones. Last year in the United States, cities grew at a faster clip than suburban regions for the first time in a hundred years. Looked at another way, we are in the middle of the largest mass migration in modern times. Yet as humans shift their activities to cities, astoundingly little planning, resources and infrastructure go into making those spaces meet our psychological needs. In Istanbul in the spring of 2013, eight people died and thousands were injured in protests stemming from the proposed paving-over of one of the last parks in the city, Taksim Gezi. Over 2 million of the region’s trees had already been cut down to make way for a new airport and a new bridge over the Bosphorus Strait. The park was slated for a new shopping mall and luxury apartments. As bulldozers entered the park to mow down the urban forest, citizens blocked their way. They were willing to die for the last tree. “We will not leave until they declare the park is ours,” said one twenty-four-year-old. (As of this writing, the trees still stand, but their fate remains uncertain.) Taksim Gezi became a symbol not only of the importance of nature to city life, but to democracy itself, just as Frederick Law Olmsted knew all along. “A sense of enlarged freedom is to all, at all times, the most certain and the most valuable gratification afforded by a park,” he wrote. Yet we think of nature as a luxury, not a necessity. We don’t recognize how much it elevates us, both personally and politically. That, ultimately, is the aspiration of this book: to find the best science behind our nature-primed neurons and to share it. Without this knowledge, we may not ever fully honor our deep, cranial connection to natural landscapes. Not far from where I sent my lichen-rock photo into the Mappiness ether, two mighty rivers merge: the Green and the Colorado. It makes me happy to think of this geography because of a story of two goofy brothers I know, who, in college, built a raft out of inner-tubes and pallets, twisted out of their clothes, and pushed off the bank of the Green, heading to the confluence. They had baggies of gorp, a couple of jars of peanut butter, some water jugs. The water was calm on this stretch, and they were living the life. Just a couple of hours into the three-week trip, they got pulled over by a ranger. Fortunately, this was before the days of a required permit, fire pan and chemical toilet. But the naked boys were short one lifejacket. They were so busted. The ranger hauled them off to a county judge, who fined them, made them buy a lifejacket, and sent them back down the river (always better than being sent up the river). Those two guys are my brothers-in-law. This story has entered our sizable family canon of misadventures-by-uncles. But it seems ages ago that such a story would even be possible. Two college boys alone in the wilderness, having the time of their lives, able to make it weeks without civilization, minus a trip to a judge. Yet these two barely have gray hair; it was only a generation ago. The dramatic loss of nature-based exploration in our children’s lives and in our own has happened so fast we’ve hardly noticed it, much less remarked on it. “We evolved in nature. It’s strange we’d be so disconnected,” said Nisbet. Most of us don’t know we’re missing anything. We may have a pet and occasionally go to the beach, so what’s the big deal? Well, what is the big deal? That’s what I wanted to find out. And if something serious is missing, how do we recapture it? As a journalist who writes frequently about the environment, I often end up writing about the way environment hurts our health, from flame retardants getting into human tissue to air pollution’s effects on the developing brain. It was both a pleasure and a revelation to consider how, instead, our surroundings can also help prevent physical and mental problems and align us with the World Health Organization’s definition of health: “a complete state of physical, mental and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.” The former health minister of Scotland calls this health-making “salutogenesis,” inspired by the mid-twentiethcentury sociologist Aaron Antonovsky, who asked, if the world is so crazy, what makes us able to keep sallying forth? My city hair flattened to my scalp with gelatinous product, gulping vitamin D, I decided the answers are worth pursuing. PART ONE LOOKING FOR NATURE NEURONS 1 The Biophilia Effect In short, the brain evolved in a biocentric world. —EDWARD O. WILSON There is nothing you can see that is not a flower; there is nothing you can think that is not the moon. —BASHO When I pictured shinrin yoku, “forest bathing,” I conjured Sleeping Beauty in her corpse phase, surrounded by primordial trees, twittering birds and shafts of sunlight. You just knew she was somehow taking it all in, and she’d awake refreshed, enlightened and ready for her hot prince. But this was wrong on so many levels. First off, Japan doesn’t have a lot of primeval forest left, and second, you have to work at this, although corpselike moments are not discouraged. In ChichibuTama-Kai National Park, a ninety-minute train ride from Tokyo, I was supposed to be concentrating on the cicadas and the sound of a flowing creek when a loud Mitsubishi van rumbled by. It was disgorging more campers to a nearby tent village where kids were running around with their fishing poles and pink bed pillows. This was nature, Japan-style. The dozen others with me on our shinrin yoku hike didn’t seem to mind the distractions. The Japanese go crazy for this practice, which is standard preventive medicine here. It involves cultivating your senses to open them to the woods. It’s not about wilderness; it’s about the nature/civilization hybrid the Japanese have cultivated for thousands of years. You can stroll a little, write a haiku, crack open a spicebush twig and inhale its woodsy, sassy scent. The whole notion is predicated on an ancient bond that can be unearthed with a few sensory tricks. “People come out from the city and literally shower in the greenery,” our guide, Kunio, explained to me. “This way, they are able to become relaxed.” To help us along, Kunio—a volunteer ranger —had us standing still on a hillside, facing the creek, with our arms at our sides. I glanced around. We looked like earthlings transfixed by the light of the mother ship. Weathered and jolly, Kunio told us to breathe in for a count of seven seconds, hold for five, release. “Concentrate on your belly,” he said. We needed this. Most of us were urban desk jockeys. We looked like weak, shelled soybeans, tired and pale. Standing next to me was Ito Tatsuya, a forty-one-year-old Tokyo businessman. Like many dayhikers in this country, he carried an inordinate amount of gear, much of it dangling from his belt: a cell phone, a camera, a water bottle and a set of keys. The Japanese would make great boy scouts, which is probably why they make such great office workers, working longer hours than anyone else in the developed world. It’s gotten to the point where they’ve coined a term, karoshi—death from overwork. The phenomenon was identified during the 1980s bubble economy when workers in their prime started dropping dead, and the concept reverberated into the future and throughout the developed world: civilization can kill us. Ito and I breathed in the pines and then dove into our bento boxes full of octopus and pickled root vegetables. Kunio was moving around, showing people the astonishingly twiggy walking-stick insect. Ito’s shoulders seemed to be unclenching by the minute. “When I’m out here, I don’t think about things,” he said, deftly scooping up shards of radish while I splattered mine onto the leaf litter. “What’s the Japanese word for ‘stress’?” I asked. “‘Stress,’” he said. concentration of giant trees in Japan, this park is an ideal place to put into practice the newest principles of Japanese wellness science. In a grove of rod-straight sugi pine, Kunio pulled a thermos from his massive daypack and served us some mountaingrown, wasabi-root-and bark-flavored tea. The idea with shinrin yoku, a term coined by the government in 1982 but based on ancient Shinto and Buddhist practices, is to let nature into your body through all five senses, so this was the taste part. I stretched out across the top of a cool, mossy boulder. A duck quacked. This may not have been the remote and craggy wilderness preferred by John Muir, but it didn’t need to be. I was feeling pretty mellow, and scientific tests would soon validate this: at the end of the hike, my blood pressure had dropped a couple of points since the start of the hike. Ito’s had dropped even more. We knew this because we were on one of Japan’s forty-eight official “Forest Therapy” trails designated for shinrin yoku by Japan’s Forestry Agency. In an effort to benefit the Japanese and find nonextractive ways to use forests, which cover 68 percent of the country’s landmass, the agency has funded about $4 million in forestbathing research since 2003. It intends to designate one hundred Forest Therapy sites within ten years. Visitors here are routinely hauled off to a cabin to stick their arms in blood pressure machines, WITH THE LARGEST part of an effort to provide ever more data for the project. In addition to its government-funded studies and dozens of special trails, a small number of physicians in Japan have been certified in forest medicine. It’s hard to overstate how unusual this is. “The Japanese work is essential in my mind, a Rosetta stone,” Alan Logan, a Harvard lecturer, naturopath and member of the scientific committee of the International Society of Nature and Forest Medicine (which is, naturally, based in Japan), had told me. “We have to validate the ideas scientifically through stress physiology or we’re still at Walden Pond.” The Japanese have good reason to study how to unwind: In addition to those long workdays, pressure and competition for schools and jobs help drive the third-highest suicide rate in the world (after South Korea and Hungary). One-fifth of Japan’s residents live in greater Tokyo, and 8.7 million people have to ride the metro every day. Rush hour is so crowded that white-gloved workers help shove people onto the trains, leading to another unique term, tsukin jigoku— commuting hell. urban life is of course not unique to Japan. I now reflected the nature-deprived trends myself. I spend too much time sitting inside. I maintain multiple social-media platforms that attenuate my ability to focus, think and self-reflect. Since moving to D.C., I’ve had crying jags in traffic jams, and at times I’ve been so tired I’ve had to pull over and nap on MacArthur Boulevard. When I do get out “in the woods,” I seem to be doing it all wrong, forgetting or unable to hear the birds or notice any dappled anything. Instead, I grumble and obsess over my fate, my relationships and my kids’ new schedules, which require military precision and Euclidean traffic calculations. A couple of months after I moved, I told my new doctor I was feeling depressed. She did what general practitioners everywhere are THE CIRCUMSCRIBED, doing and sent me off with a script for Zoloft. One in four middleaged American women takes or has taken an antidepressant. One in fourteen children takes a drug for emotional or behavioral problems, reflecting about a fivefold increase since 1994. For me, as for a sizable percentage of others with mild depression, the meds didn’t seem to work, and I hated the common side effects, which include everything from headaches to insomnia to low libido. Moving on, I tried to grasp the destress crowd’s favorite darling, meditation. The science is very convincing that it changes your brain in ways that make you smarter and kinder and generally less ruffled by life. The problem is, as with antidepressants, meditation doesn’t work for many of us. Only 30 percent of aspirants are “fully adherent” after a standard eight-week course, according to Joshua Smyth, a biobehavioral psychologist at Pennsylvania State University. It has a high threshold to enlightenment. But pretty much any slouching screen fiend can spend time in a pocket of trees somewhere. If there was one man who can demonstrate how forest therapy works, it’s Yoshifumi Miyazaki. A physical anthropologist and vice director of the Center for Environment, Health and Field Sciences at Chiba University on the outskirts of Tokyo, he believes that because humans evolved in nature, it’s where we feel most comfortable, even if we don’t always know it. In this, he is a proponent of a theory popularized by the widely revered Harvard entomologist E. O. Wilson: the biophilia hypothesis. It’s been more or less appropriated by environmental psychologists into what’s sometimes called the Stress-Reduction Theory or PsychoEvolutionary Restoration Theory. Wilson didn’t actually coin the word “biophilia”; that honor goes to social psychologist Erich Fromm, who described it in 1973 as “the passionate love of life and of all that is alive; it is the wish to further growth, whether in a person, a plant, an idea or a social group.” Wilson distills the idea more precisely as residing in the natural world, identifying “the innately emotional affiliation of human beings to other living organisms,” as an evolutionary adaptation aiding not only survival but broader human fulfillment. Although no specific genes have been found for biophilia, it’s well recognized—ironically, some from studies of biophobia or fear—that even today our brains respond powerfully and innately to natural stimuli. One powerful example: snake! Our visual cortex picks up snake patterns and movements more quickly than other kinds of patterns. It’s likely that snakes even drove the evolution of our highly sensitive depth perception, according to University of California anthropologist Lynne Isbell. She discovered special neurons in the brain’s pulvinar region, a visual system unique to humans, apes and monkeys. Primates who evolved in places seething with venomous snakes have better vision than primates who didn’t evolve in those places. But survival wasn’t only about avoiding harm. It was also about finding the best food, shelter and other resources. It makes sense that certain habitats would trigger a neural bath of happy hormones, and that our brains would acquire the easy ability to “learn” this in the same way we learn to fear snakes and spiders. Going beyond that, our ancestors also had to learn how to recover from stress, Pleistocenestyle. After they were chased by a lion or dropped a precious tuber over a cliff, they had to get over it in order to be welcomed back to the tribe, without which there was little survival. The biophilia hypothesis posits that peaceful or nurturing elements of nature helped us regain equanimity, cognitive clarity, empathy and hope. When love, laughter and music weren’t around, there was always a sunset. The humans who were most attuned to the cues of nature were the ones who survived to pass on those traits. Biophilia explains why even today we build houses on the lake, why every child wants a teddy bear, and why Apple names itself after a fruit and its software after noble predators, surfing spots and national parks. The company is brilliant at instilling biophilic longing and affiliation at the very same time it lures us inside. It should come as no surprise that crosstalk operates between the brain and nature, but we’re less aware of the ever-widening gulf between the world our nervous systems evolved in and the world they live in now. We celebrate our brains’ plasticity, but plasticity goes only so far. As Miyazaki explained it, “throughout our evolution, we’ve spent 99.9 percent of our time in nature. Our physiology is still adapted to it. During everyday life, a feeling of comfort can be achieved if our rhythms are synchronized with those of the environment.” Of course, he’s talking about the nice parts of nature found in the hillsides of Japan, not the pestilential scum ponds or barren terrains of the globe that also constitute nature. Stick an office worker there, and relaxation will likely not be happening. But Miyazaki points out that naturalistic outdoor environments in general remain some of the only places where we engage all five senses, and thus, by definition, are fully, physically alive. It is where our savannabred brains are, to borrow from John Muir, “home,” whether we consciously know it or not. By contrast, Muir wrote of time not in the wilderness: “I am degenerating into a machine for making money.” Make that a machine with clogging pipes. To prove that our physiology responds to different habitats, Miyazaki’s taken hundreds of research subjects into the woods since 2004. He and his colleague Juyoung Lee, then also of Chiba University, found that leisurely forest walks, compared to urban walks, deliver a 12 percent decrease in cortisol levels. But that wasn’t all; they recorded a 7 percent decrease in sympathetic nerve activity, a 1.4 percent decrease in blood pressure, and a 6 percent decrease in heart rate. On psychology questionnaires, they also report better moods and lowered anxiety. As Miyazaki concluded in a 2011 paper, “this shows that stressful states can be relieved by shinrin therapy.” And the Japanese eat it up, with nearly a quarter of the population partaking in some shinrin action. Hundreds of thousands of visitors walk the Forest Therapy trails each year. Miyazaki at the country’s newest proposed therapy site, Juniko state park on the edge of the Shirakami Mountains in northern Japan. He was swatting mosquitoes from his face and neatly trimmed gray hair. He wasn’t looking relaxed at all. It had rained recently, and he was worried the trail might be too muddy for his upcoming walking experiment. He was kicking some rocks out of the way and overseeing the setting-up of a netted, canopied minilab. The next morning, Miyazaki and Lee would be bringing twelve male collegestudent volunteers here, measuring various vital signs after they walked and sat and generally forest-bathed. Then they would repeat the experiment the next day in downtown Hirosaki, a city of 100,000, two hours away by car. I would join as one of Miyazaki’s guinea pigs. The trail deemed walkable, several of us retired to a quiet restaurant in Hirosaki. We took off our shoes and sat cross-legged on the floor while Miyazaki ordered and then distributed a baffling array of dishes involving goopy eggs, gelatinous balls and surf-and-turf combinations. “Why do the Japanese think about nature so much?” I asked Miyazaki, who was preparing to eat a manta ray. “Don’t Americans think about nature?” he asked me. I considered. “Some do and some don’t.” But I was thinking, an amazing amount of us don’t, given our downward trends in outdoor time and visits to parks. “Well,” he mused. “In our culture, nature is part of our minds and bodies and philosophy. In our tradition, all things are relative to something else. In Western thought, all things are absolute.” Maybe it was the sake, but he was losing me. I MET UP WITH “The difference is in language,” he continued. “If I ask you, ‘Is a human a dog?’ you say, ‘No, a human is not a dog.’ In Japan, we say, ‘Yes, a human is not a dog.’ The great sensei of nature research peered at me over his chopsticks. I was reminded of the story of the Zen student who asks his teacher, “How do you see so much?” and the teacher responds, “I close my eyes.” Miyazaki’s answer, I understood, was like a koan, tantalizing and confounding at the same time. But you had to trust the guy was onto something. the college boys and I took turns sitting in the mobile lab at the trailhead. We placed hard cotton cylinders under our tongues for two minutes, then spit them out into test tubes. That would record our levels of cortisol, a hormone made in the adrenal cortex. We got hooked up to probes and devices. The team was inaugurating a brain-measuring, battery-powered, near-infrared spectrometer that, when deployed, gave me a sensation of leeches sticking to my forehead. We’d repeat all these measurements at the end of the walk and again in the cityscape. To gauge our physiological responses to these environments, Miyazaki and Lee look at changes in blood pressure, pulse rate, variable heart rate, salivary cortisol and, new this year, hemoglobin in the brain’s prefrontal cortex. When aggregated, these metrics paint a picture of our bifurcated nervous system. When we are relaxed and at ease in our environment, our parasympathetic system—sometimes called the “rest and digest” branch—kicks in. This is why food tastes better in the outdoors, explains Miyazaki. But the demands and constant stimuli of modern life tend to trigger our sympathetic nervous system, which governs fight-or-flight behaviors. And trigger it, and trigger it. We suffer the consequences: a long trail of research dating back to the 1930s shows people who produce chronically high cortisol levels and high blood pressure are more prone to heart THE NEXT MORNING, disease, metabolic disease, dementia and depression. More recent research shows that the steady stress of urban living changes the brain in ways that can increase our odds of schizophrenia, anxiety and mood disorders. When it was my turn to wander through the forest for fifteen minutes, I was happy to break free from the wires. The loud pulse of cicadas echoed through the woods. Light filtered gently through the beeches and Japanese horse chestnuts and the earth smelled like good damp dirt. An elderly couple ambled by, assisted by walking sticks and a bear bell. I was briefly mesmerized by a yellow butterfly. I could see why Juniko, a leafy network of trails and lakes, is a candidate for the country’s next forest therapy station. Local and park officials are seeking the designation because where there’s forest therapy, there are tourists and their yen. Miyazaki may have a mystical side, but what drives him is more data. It’s a convenient arrangement. The Japanese work on physiology and the brain takes advantage of new tools of brain science, but it builds on decades of psych-talk about the health benefits of being in nature. Miyazaki wasn’t the first to record physical stress recovery in nature. A young psychologist named Roger Ulrich was curious why so many Michigan drivers chose to go out of their way to take a tree-lined roadway to the mall. In 1986, using the expensive and cumbersome equipment of the time, he hooked up an electroencephalograph (EEG) unit to the heads of healthy volunteers while they viewed slides of nature scenes or utilitarian urban buildings. The subjects assigned to nature showed higher alpha wave activity, a wavelength associated with relaxation, meditation and increased serotonin. In another experiment, he stressed out 120 students by showing them movies of bloody accidents in a woodworking shop. He knew they were distressed because he measured their sympathetic nervous activity—the sweat glands on their skin, their heart rates and their blood pressure. Afterward, some students were assigned to watch a ten-minute video of nature scenes and some to watch videos of urban scenes, from a pedestrian mall to cars on a road. The results were dramatic: within five minutes, the brains-on-nature returned to baseline. The brainson-built-environment recovered only partway—as indicated by those nervous system measures— even more than ten minutes later. Despite early promise, the study of brains-on-nature went fairly dark for a couple of decades. It was considered soft science, much of it based on qualitative measures in a medical world dazzled by genetics and modern chemistry and funded by pharmaceutical companies that didn’t stand to make a profit from houseplants or garden views. The renewed interest of late represents a convergence of ideas and events: the relentless march of obesity, depression and anxiety (even in affluent communities and despite more medication), the growing recognition of the role of the environment on genes, and the growing academic and cultural unease with our widening breach from the outdoors. urban peregrination wasn’t quite as pleasant as the soft green trail of Juniko. Downtown Hirosaki is far less green than D.C. There are transit stations, shops selling basic goods, and people on the go. In the height of summer, the asphalt was baking. Shoppers rushed in and out of a department store whose busy windows advertised “spaghetti with tomato cream.” I passed four parking lots, two taxi stands, a bus station, and two loudly idling buses belching fumes. My nervous system responded. My systolic blood pressure had dropped six points after walking in the forest. It went up six points after walking in the city. Which of course begs the question: How long do the feel-good effects of nature last? Do they just get wiped out by the first traffic jam or cell phone tone? Miyazaki’s sometime collaborator, an immunologist in the department of environmental medicine at Nippon Medical School in NOT SURPRISINGLY, MY Tokyo, wondered the same thing. Qing Li is interested in nature’s effect on mood states and stress as manifested in the human immune system. Specifically, he studies natural killer immune cells, called NK cells, which protect us from disease agents and can, like cortisol and hemoglobin, be reliably measured in a laboratory. A type of white blood cell, they’re handy to have around, since they send self-destruct messages to tumors and virus-infected cells. It’s been known for a long time that factors like stress, aging, and pesticides can reduce your NK count, at least temporarily. So, Li wondered, if nature reduces stress, could it also increase your NK cells and thereby help you fight infections and cancer? To find out, Li brought a group of middle-aged Tokyo businessmen into the woods in 2008. For three days, they spent a couple of hours each morning hiking. By the end, blood tests showed their natural killer cells had increased 40 percent. Moreover, the boost lasted for seven days. A month later, their NK count was still 15 percent higher than when they started. In contrast, during urban walking trips of the same duration, NK levels didn’t change. Since then, Li has published results from similar studies with male and female subjects in half a dozen peer-reviewed journals. In one, Li was curious to know if a one-hour trip to a city park would have a similar effect, since most of us can’t spend three days a week walking in the woods. It did, although the immune surge didn’t last quite as long. What was going on? Li suspected the trees. Specifically, he wondered if NK cells are boosted by “aromatic volatile substances,” otherwise known as nice tree smells, and sometimes called phytoncides. These are the turpenes, pinenes, limonenes and other essential oils emitted by evergreens and many other trees. Scientists have identified over a hundred of these phytoncides in the Japanese countryside, and virtually none in city air that’s not directly above a park. This wasn’t a totally left-field idea. Since at least 2002, studies have attributed healthful properties to soil compounds like actinomycetes—which the human nose can detect at concentrations of 10 parts per trillion—and of course we harvest mold spores to make critical antibiotics like penicillin. Dirt can heal: in two separate experiments in England and the United States in 2007 and 2010, the mice lucky enough to be exposed to a common soil bacterium, Mycobacterium vaccae, performed better in a maze, showed less anxiety and produced more serotonin, a neurotransmitter many scientists think is associated with happiness. To test the phytoncide theory, Li locked thirteen subjects in hotel rooms for three nights. In some rooms, he rigged a humidifier to vaporize stem oil from hinoki cypress trees, which are common in Japan; other rooms emitted eau-de-nothing. The results? The cypress sleepers experienced a 20 percent increase in NK cells during their stay, and they also reported feeling less fatigued. The control group saw no changes. “It’s like a miracle drug,” said Li, when I interviewed him at his university lab in Tokyo. It sounds totally hokey, even unbelievable, that evergreen scents —not unlike the thing that dangles from taxicab rear-view mirrors— could help us live longer. But Li found similar results with NK cells exposed to phytoncides in a petri dish. The cells increased, and so did anticancer proteins and proteases called granulysin, granzymes A and B and perforin, which cause tumor cells to self-destruct. It’s unclear whether there’s something magical in the aromatic molecules or if the smell simply makes people feel good, reducing stress. Li’s olfaction theory is unconventional, but it contains some of that zen five-sense wisdom. While American researchers are mostly showing people pictures of nature or sending them out for loops around the campus green, the ones in Japan are practically pouring it into every orifice. Li, the chairman of the Japanese Society of Forest Medicine, uses some of his insights in his own life. “In fact,” he said, “I use a humidifier with cypress oil almost every night in the winter!” You don’t need to harvest your own; he said standard health-store aromatherapy oils should do the job. “What else do you recommend?” I asked the middle-aged man with the bowl haircut. Clearly, Li gets asked this a lot. He had a small list. “If you have time for vacation, don’t go to a city. Go to a natural area. Try to go one weekend a month. Visit a park at least once a week. Gardening is good. On urban walks, try to walk under trees, not across fields. Go to a quiet place. Near water is also good.” I could see my morning walk back in D.C. transforming before my eyes. wondering, though, if having more data on how nature changes our brains and immune cells would actually lure more of us into the woods. We also know we’re supposed to eat more leafy greens, but most of us don’t. The kale analogy is pretty apt, because it turns out that even when we don’t like nature, such as during lousy winter conditions, it ends up benefiting us. At least that’s what University of Chicago professor Mark Berman found when research subjects took walks in an arboretum during a blustery winter day. The walkers didn’t enjoy themselves, but they still performed better on tests measuring short-term memory and attention. We’ll learn more about his work in the next chapter. While the Japanese researchers understand our draw to nature, many American ones seem preoccupied with our pull away from it, our distractions, inertia and addictions. They want to know if resisting that pull and turning toward nature can enhance our productivity. Perhaps this cultural difference is what Miyazaki was explaining over his plate of sting ray: oneness versus me-ness. Americans want to know what can nature—that stuff over there— do for us? More Beowulf than Basho, the Americans want to slay the dragon and get back to the mead hall. They prefer to use delineated spurts of nature I COULDN’T HELP to optimize their success. Maybe they can even use digital nature and forget the bugs and rain altogether. I would head back to the States, to Utah, to see what some American researchers were up to and how they were preparing to tackle the research. Their inquiries, geared to cognition and creativity, provide the other main theoretical framework for understanding how nature acts on our brains. In the meantime, I would be scratching and sniffing some pinecones. The bark tea? Not so much. Running my hands through the moss, sure. Why not? After all, yes, I am not a dog. 2 How Many Neuroscientists Does It Take to Find a Stinking Milkvetch? We used to wait We used to waste hours just walking around —ARCADE FIRE When you head for the desert, David Strayer is the man you want behind the wheel. He never texts or talks on the phone while driving. He doesn’t even approve of eating in the car. A cognitive psychologist at the University of Utah’s Applied Cognition Lab, Strayer knows our brains are prone to mistakes, especially when we’re multitasking and dodging distractions. The country’s foremost expert on this topic, he frequently briefs Congress on the dangers of cell-phone use, which his research has shown to be as detrimental to driving ability as alcohol. He has recently begun to take on voice-recognition technology, like Siri and the computers that come with virtually all new autos. “I talk to Siri all the time!” I said from the backseat of Strayer’s 4Runner, my phone and its riveting Mappiness app in my pocket. “Don’t talk to Siri!” He implored me and the others in the SUV. Apple is very miffed at Strayer. So are GM and Ford. For all his expertise with automobiles, Strayer has taken on their opposite in his latest line of inquiry: nature. As a longtime river rafter, backpacker and hiker, he knows he gets his best ideas in the wilderness. Now he wants to know why. Buddha, Jesus, and Reese Witherspoon all went to the desert to seek wisdom. David Strayer was following the pattern, and bringing a half-dozen neuroscientists with him. Their plan: to figure out how to study the effect of something as beautiful and complex as nature on something as beautiful and complex as the human brain. While the Japanese begin with the premise of biophilia—our innate emotional connection to living things—and Mappiness assesses feelings, this group was all about cognition. Strayer’s team was less interested in amorphous concepts of well-being and more interested in watching and measuring how nature helps us think, solve problems and work together. Results should be controlled, imaged, measured, charted, recrunched, replicated, regressed into chi squares and attacked in multiple studies from unexpected angles. On this retreat, they would need to come up with questions and experimental designs that could pass muster with their peers, and with themselves. But for now, it was time to engineer some decent hiking. Strayer had invited the group to Moab, a scruffy town of mountain bikers and river runners in southern Utah named after an ancient kingdom. With its proximity to outrageous scenery—as well as to purveyors of decent 3.2 ale—it seemed a fitting place to discuss and plan experiments for assessing nature’s impact on the brain. Strayer was the George Clooney to this Ocean’s Eleven of nerds trying to crack a scientific problem. He had the maps, the supplies and the funding from the National Academies of Science. For my part, I wanted to understand where the neuroscientists were coming from theoretically and to learn about their doubts and biases as I set off on my own exploration about nature and health. Sitting in the car with me that first day were Lisa Fournier and her husband, Brian Dyre, psychologists from two universities near Pullman, Washington. Dyre was the biggest doubter in the group. “I’m a skeptic about the restorative effects of nature,” he told me. “I believe people feel good but I wonder about the mechanism—is it that you’re just away from daily cares and is the benefit that you’re in a new mind-set? Is it just a cheap and easy way to get to a new mindset?” Dyre thinks being in nature might be no different from playing music or visiting a museum. The experience is diverting, pleasant and sometimes social. Period. And in fact, science has shown that those things—music, friends, cultural events—are good for our mental health. Why should there be something superior about nature? Maybe a bunch of tree huggers just want that to be the case. It would be more fodder for their progressive agendas—more parks and wetlands, fewer paved megadevelopments and corporate theme parks. Museums, bands, legions of friends: they tend to be found in cities. Skeptical or not, Dyre liked the scenery. We started out in Arches National Park, walking toward a landform called the Double O Arch via a series of red, slickrock fins characterized by steep sides and expansive views. It was a bit like walking on a dragon’s back. A wooden sign warned CAUTION: PRIMITIVE TRAIL DANGEROUS HIKING. I was loving it. To arrive here from D.C. and inhale the desert was like climbing out of a basement. Everywhere was sky and light and the unlikeliest colors and collections of wind-worn twisted rock. It was a visual feast. After picnicking on a narrow tongue of rock, we found the remarkable double-decker arch, which looked something like a giant bracelet of rock set atop a lifesaver. A few of us gingerly climbed atop the delicate upper bracelet. From the top, the world fell away on two sides. It felt treacherous, in a good way. Below us we could see a reclining Adam Gazzaley, who is an avid photographer when he’s not authoring lead neuroscience articles for the journal Nature. We posed for some snapshots and got out of there. “I just had this amazing thing happen,” said Gazzaley when we reached him. “I was lying there, trying to get a shot of my feet and the rock and the sky, and all of a sudden I figured out something I never figured out before. I could take a vertical panorama! From bottom to top!” Gazzaley was now giggling. He showed us the tiny vertical panorama on his phone, but between the glare and the size it was not much to see. “Half a day in nature and you’re already more creative!” I said. “I know, right?” Strayer’s third neuroscientists-in-the-desert confab. The first took place in 2010, a thirty-two-mile backpacking trip in Grand Gulch. After that came a five-day river trip with a slightly larger group. A canoe tipped over, two esteemed neuroscientists fell out, and a photographer from the New York Times caught it on camera. It was all a little embarrassing. The point of that river trip was for Strayer to infect his colleagues with his somewhat eccentric ideas having to do with the creativity and peace that are unleashed when you take off your watch, turn off your devices, and head into the wild. Of this group, Strayer is the one who buys most into the Power of Nature. But he knew he needed the street cred and technical lab expertise of the others. The plan worked well enough. After five days, the scientists were uncannily relaxed, some more so than they had been in years, and they agreed to test Strayer’s ideas. They came up with a pilot study to measure the creativity of fifty-six Outward Bound participants. Half took a test called the Remote Associates Test before the trip; half did so after three days of hiking. A fun and challenging measure of THIS WAS DAVE intuition and “convergent creativity,” the RAT gives you three words and asks you to come up with a word that links them (like water/tobacco/stove: answer—pipe. Here’s a harder one: way/ground/weather: answer is in the footnote.* If you can’t guess it, go stare at a tree and try again. Hint: it is not “under”). Although it was a small study, the results (published in PLoS ONE) blew the researchers away: a 50 percent improvement in creativity after just a few days in nature. Fifty percent! Who wouldn’t want to harness that power? But it needed to be replicated and teased apart. So Strayer chased down a new grant, enough money to bring everyone together here and eventually run a couple of larger, more ambitious studies with the input of the group. On this trip, the scientists were staying in a hotel, albeit with a fire pit on a roofdeck. It was a compromise between convenience and cave-dwelling. The plan was to hike and run rivers during the day, sit around the fire at night and brainstorm experimental design. Drinks included. Even though the Outward Bound study was intriguing, there were a lot of variables going on and plenty of reasons to be wary of the findings. Was it “nature” that improved performance, or was it hanging out socially in a stimulating group for several days? Was there simply a brightening of mood that made people sharper, perhaps caused by better sleep, or the surprisingly good powdered lentils (okay, unlikely), or a flirtation with the rock-climbing instructor? The notion of “nature experience” could be exceedingly difficult to unpack. “I think there’s a recalibration of your senses, of seeing and noticing,” said Strayer. “I’d like to have empirical data to assert or refute that hypothesis.” grant money, the scientists were able to dine a few steps up from freeze-dried hummus. The first night after Arches, they headed to Moab’s finest (and only) Thai restaurant. Art Kramer, a THANKS TO THE neuroscientist, had arrived from the University of Illinois, where he directs the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology. In his early sixties, he’s clearly the senior yoda of the group. He greeted us and dove into the pad se. Smallish and solid, he’s a man who gives the impression of intensity in all pursuits. “He talks at squirrel speed,” one of the others had warned me. At one time or another, nearly everyone here (except Gazzaley) studied with him or worked in his lab. Strayer was his first doctoral student, back when they were studying pilot error. Kramer has always been fascinated by how humans learn skills and what makes them screw up. He’s consulted for the military, NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration, among others. But what Kramer is really known for—indeed, famous for, in the world of neuroscience—is showing how exercise protects the brain from cognitive decline in aging. Among his dozens of influential studies are those showing that exercise causes new brain cells to grow, especially in areas related to memory, executive function and spatial perception. Before Kramer’s work, no one really believed physical activity could lead to such clear and important effects. Now people everywhere are routinely told that exercise is the single best way to prevent aging-related cognitive decline. Kramer’s studies helped change the way the profession and society think. They are what scientists dream of. “In 1992, the exercise/brain literature was where the nature literature is now,” said Strayer. “My goal in the next ten years is to do for nature what he did on exercise and cognition.” If you draw a Venn diagram of the scientific interests of everyone around the vinyl-draped dinner table, the circles would overlap over one central theme: attention. Other scientists studying the effects of nature may be interested in other things, like emotional regulation, or stress, or the immune system. But in Team Moab’s worldview, attention is the lingua franca from which all mental states spring. I’d be hearing a lot more about it. Kramer sipped a lassi and briefly checked his phone. I asked him if he would be following Strayer’s advice and taking a three-day tech break while in Moab. He peered at me rather severely. “I brought four computers.” He paused. “I can do it though. I lived in a snow cave for a month.” Several heads swiveled his direction. “He’s a sensation-seeker,” Strayer explained. “Definitely,” Kramer said. “Do you still have your Harley?” someone asked. “Yep.” Kramer pulled up a photo of a red motorcycle on his phone. “Still wearing leather?” asked Strayer. “Yeah, a jacket.” “No pants?” “Well, I always wear pants.” to experience some of the benefits of tech withdrawal in a place with no cell service. For the next day’s hike up Hunter Canyon, Gazzaley planned to ditch his phone altogether, pulling out a beloved Real Camera. I expressed an interest in identifying wildflowers. Without the Internet, I’d need to go old-school: a laminated flower guide presented to me that morning by Ruth Ann Atchley, a psychologist from the University of Kansas. It’s worth noting that she and her husband, Paul Atchley, who is another expert in distracted driving, managed to hold off owning smartphones until several weeks earlier, and then only to help manage email while traveling. These two are definitely not playing Crossy Road. As we waited for the others to gather in the lobby, Paul Atchley wondered aloud if the restorative benefits of nature might in fact spring from what’s not outside: the pings and dings and mental disruptions of a wired life. It was part of the ongoing conversation about which factors to isolate in upcoming studies. WE WERE READY “Is the explosion of attractive technologies that give our brains social interactions negatively impacting us, and is the cure to go back to an environment that our brain resonates with?” He answered his own question. “Tech is leading us in a negative direction and nature may prevent that.” Both Paul Atchley and Strayer have been heavily influenced by the research of the late Stanford sociologist Clifford Nass. His well-regarded studies show that heavy media multitaskers have an impaired ability to focus on cognitively demanding tasks. Furthermore, his study of 2,300 preteen girls showed those with the highest rates of media use were less developed socially and emotionally than their peers. (Sadly, for Nass, healthful nature was not the antidote; the fifty-five-year-old died just after taking a hike.) “Remember that guy at the Met who was talking on his cell phone and actually leaned against a Jackson Pollock?” continued Paul Atchley, shaking his head. “Does less nature and more technology change who we fundamentally are?” asked Strayer. “Hey, I’m alive because of technology,” interjected Kramer. “I take statins, and I’m alive.” “I really mean phones, TV, digital media,” said Strayer. “They’re stimulating and flashing and probably addictive.” Paul Atchley was warming up. “Thirty-six percent of people check their cell phones while having sex. Seventy percent of people sleep with their phone.” Strayer: “The average person looks at their phone 150 times day. The average teen sends 3,000 text messages a month. These are hallmarks of an addictive, compulsive personality. We’re wired to have social connection, to sit around the campfire, face-to-face. Social connection is like sugar.” Ruth Ann Atchley felt the need to reel them in. Passing out sunscreen, she was part hostess, part mediator. “Yes but what is it about nature?” she asked her husband. “You see,” she explained, looking at me, “he argues about getting away from tech and I argue about being in this space. I’m all Disney movies and he’s House of Cards. He thinks people’s nature is negative.” Paul shrugged but didn’t disagree. “My hypothesis,” she continued, “is when you’re engaged in nature, it leads to mindfulness. It’s passive, the world is coming and going. It’s so good for depression. When you walk out in nature, it’s like wearing rosecolored glasses. In nature everything is a little more positive, there’s a little more connectedness. This is the world in which we are supposed to be. Plus, most of us have positive memories of childhood in nature.” Gazzaley, having arrived, now jumped in. “Well, in nature I do feel more relaxed more quickly than anywhere else, but I didn’t spend time in nature as child.” He grew up in Rockaway, New York, riding the subway four hours a day to and from the Bronx High School of Science. “By lunch yesterday, I was definitely relaxed.” Lisa Fournier, who had also joined us, roused: “That’s affirming the consequent. We’re biased, we’re just affirming our beliefs, and the experiments reflect that.” Ruth Ann Atchley: “You don’t go onto Outward Bound unless you already believe it’s helping you. But they had no idea what we were looking for (in the cognitive tests).” Fournier: “The placebo effects are so strong.” Kramer: “We’re all skeptics.” Paul Atchley, hoisting his daypack: “I’ll cite the X-Files. I want to believe.” skeptics and the believers marched out of the Best Western. I drove to the trailhead with Paul Atchley and Strayer. As the strange, folded landscape revealed itself, I found myself wondering about the significance of attention, and its role in why nature makes us smarter, as Strayer contends. Psychologists have AND SO THE been fascinated by the concept of attention for a long time, although it’s now enjoying a resurgence in our age of distraction, or what Paul Atchley has called “the attention economy.” Attention is our currency, and it’s precious. William James, the philosopher, pioneering experimental psychologist and brother of Henry James, devoted an entire chapter of his classic The Principles of Psychology to attention, published in 1890. In it, he writes, “Every one knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind. . . .” and “My experience is what I agree to attend to . . . Without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos.” Notably, James divided attention into two basic types that continue to define the way we think about it: voluntary, active attention (such as when we attend to tasks) and involuntary or reflex attention, as when something demands our focus, like a noise or sound or play of light or even a wayward thought. Decades before text alerts, philosophers were concerned by what James refers to as the “confused, dazed, scatterbrained state which in French is called distraction.” (Before I leave James, I can’t resist mentioning that he suffered from depression and experienced a transformative experience while hiking in the Adirondacks in 1898. As he wrote to his wife, he “got into a state of spiritual alertness of the most vital description.” Emerson was his godfather, so perhaps he was primed to attend voluntarily to this possibility.) James knew that staying on task was hard, hard work, and that without this ability, as Nass confirmed, we become dumber, at least by certain measures (by other measures, the distractions of the digital age may be a reasonable trade for what our brains gain in access to more information and more memory storage). But interestingly, we’re also limited in our ability to take in our surroundings, because otherwise our brains would be overwhelmed by stimuli. Our field of vision is surprisingly narrow; our hearing isn’t great either, and most of what we hear and “see” we don’t actually process at all. We get on in the world because our brains are pretty good at automatic triage. “Most of the time your brain can filter things out,” said Strayer, driving the black 4Runner over an increasingly rough dirt road. “It’s a strategic process. If traffic is heavy, your brain literally stops listening to NPR. Radio is a passive signal, but talking is a whole different thing, and if you’re on the phone talking to your spouse, that’s more difficult to shut out.” Hence your inability to respond as quickly as you should to traffic signals, signs and pedestrians. Social information, as all Tweeters, texters and emailers know, draws our attention and is tough to shut out. I was reminded of a funny automated email response sent by a scientist on vacation (which I learned about through, of course, Twitter): “I am away from the office and checking email intermittently. If your email is not urgent, I’ll probably still reply. I have a problem.” “Attention is everything,” explained Paul Atchley, pivoting around in the front seat. “Without it, we don’t see, hear, taste. Your brain keeps track of about four things at once. How do you prioritize what’s important and what’s not? Through inhibition. I’ve always found it interesting that most connections in the brain are inhibitory functions. We have far more information than we can deal with. Most of what the brain is doing is filtering, tuning stuff out so we can focus in on things that are relevant.” Because of this interplay of observation, selective attention and inhibition, humans are able to achieve higher-order cognition, which includes creative problem-solving, goal-following, planning and multitasking. The problem is that all this inhibition and filtering uses up cognitive fuel. It wallops us. As Stanford neuroscientist Daniel Levitin points out in The Organized Mind, our brain’s processing speed is surprisingly slow, about 120 bits per second. For perspective, it takes 60 bits per second just to understand one person speaking to us. Directed attention, or voluntary attention, is a limited resource. When it flags, we make mistakes; we get irritable. Moreover, task- switching, which is something we do an awful lot of these days, burns up precious oxygenated glucose from the prefrontal cortex and other areas of the brain, and this is energy we need for both cognitive and physical performance. It’s no wonder it feels pretty good to space out and watch a butterfly. Of course, that requires brain real estate too, but it’s different real estate, and that’s a key point. As we neared the trailhead, the brilliant sky contrasted dramatically with the red cliffs through the front window. A corridor of green creek bed emerged from a seam in the landscape. “From my perspective,” Atchley continued, sweeping his hand across the view, “what this environment is doing to us right now is giving us fewer choices. And by having fewer choices, your attentional system functions better for higher-order things. In the office environment, you’ve got emails, alerts, sounds. That’s a lot of filtering and so it’s harder to think deeply. Here the filtering requirements are not demanding so you have the capacity to focus on deeper thought.” project, I believed that being in spectacular or even just pleasant natural environments helps me destress, think more clearly and feel grounded in a way that made me a better person. But I found myself resisting the idea that our Pleistocene ancestors had it so much better. Here in Moab were a bunch of middle-aged scientists who disliked their cell phones and saw the effect phones were having on their undergraduates, many of whom were distractible, listless and anxious. But it seemed too convenient and ahistorical to think that our modern stressed-out lives are somehow worse than the stressed-out lives of our forebears. I worried that the nature justifiers might be overly romanticizing cavemen (especially the men) who presumably got to skip across the veldt stalking game, building up their deltoids and engaging in bro rituals by the light of a crackling fire. But, hello. Hunter-gatherer child mortality rates alone would have sent most families into extreme grief, not to mention the dire uncertainties of COMING INTO THIS food, weather and territorial warfare. Humans have brains that are sensitive to social and emotional stress and we always have. Perhaps what matters is not the source of the stress but the ability to recover from it. This is a key point, because it’s perhaps what we’ve lost by giving up our connection to the night skies, the bracing air and the companionate chorus of birds. When I’m walking across a pleasant landscape, I feel I have time and I feel I have space. I’m breathing deeply things that smell good and seeing things that bring delight. It’s hard not to feel the pull of a grounded reality when you’re dipping into a muddy trail or a flowing river. Speaking of which, we finally parked the vehicles and formed into loose walking pairs as we joined up with the creek path. The trail was sandy, the sky blue, and a gentle breeze rustled the sedges and stalks at our feet. Up ahead, I came upon Kramer. His life of adventure had caught up with him. He wore a brace on his left knee (a high-speed skiing accident) and walked with a limp, but he walked fast. He will never be the type to watch the moss grow. He told me stories of nearly succumbing to dehydration in the Tetons and braving treacherous river crossings in Alaska. When he was ten years old and growing up in New York, he was conscripted into an elite division of scouts called the Order of the Arrow. He was given a knife, one egg and a fire-starting kit and sent off to the woods, alone, for three days. He has no doubt these experiences have helped him in life, but for him, it wasn’t by lowering his blood pressure or providing opportunity for contemplation. “Look, I used to be a serious climber. When I came off a big wall like El Capitan, I felt quite relaxed and it also felt good to be alive. It didn’t feel restorative at time, but it was. I behave differently for weeks after coming off a climb.” It makes sense that going into a totally different, novel environment, be it an ice cave or a Club Med, can be a great antidote for day-to-day stress or drudgery. That’s the recovery piece. But what about the source of stress? Compared to our ancestors, there’s no doubt that modern life does challenge us with unique attention loads, and most of us have not figured out how to thrive under them. Levitin writes: “The average American owns thousands of times more possessions than the average hunter-gatherer. In a real biological sense, we have more things to keep track of than our brains were designed to handle.” The fact is, there’s generally not a lot we can do about the stressor side of the equation. And this, as Strayer explained to me, is part of our problem. “We are products of our evolutionary environment. We create artificial environments. Primates are good at being able to manipulate our environment and adapt, but that’s not necessarily most consistent with the way we think.” In other words, the world of office towers, traffic lanes and email isn’t ideally suited to our brains’ perceptual and cognitive systems. So what exactly are those systems? It’s worthwhile taking a moment to lay them out, because they get to the crux of the nature-brain connection and the best ways to salvage it. The way Strayer sees it, moving through any environment engages three main networks in the brain. There’s the executive network, which includes the intellectual, task-focused prefrontal cortex and does most of that stimulus and behavioral inhibition. There’s the spatial network, which orients us and does what it sounds like. Then there’s the default network, which kicks in when the executive network flags. They are yin and yang, oil and water, working only in opposition. You can only engage one or the other at any point in time. The default network is our free-ranging, day-dreaming, goalsetting, mind-wandering white noise that James so bemoaned for luring us from the real work to be done. But it is also the charismatic, elusive flower child of the brain. There’s much discussion these days about whether the default network is profligate, undisciplined and troublemaking, or the very stuff that poetry and human nature is made of. When people are overly ruminative, depressed, self-involved and self-critical, the default network is blamed by psychologists. Yet it is also credited with producing empathy, creativity and heights of insight. Attention scientists worship at the altar of this network, because “it gives us our most human experiences, our deep aesthetic sense, our ability to do the deep things that are unique to us,” as Atchley put it. That sounds exalted, but there’s another important and more pragmatic reason they like it: it allows the executive office of the brain to rest, all the better to rebound at top performance. One of the compelling theories about nature is that it acts like an advanced drug, a sort of smart pill that works selectively on the default network in the way new estrogen therapy makes bones stronger by targeting some estrogen receptors in the body but not others that might increase cancer risk. It would appear that when we have a positive nature experience, it engages what’s good in the default network without allowing us to wallow too much in what’s problematic. Studies show that when people walk in nature, they obsess over negative thoughts much less than when they walk in a city. Although we can’t always do much to turn off the barrage of stressors in our lives, we can try harder to get the restorative reprieves —from quick nature doses to longer ones—that give our thinking brains a chance to recover. In Utah, I was beginning to feel it. Once I started thinking of the brain’s oppositional parts, it was easy to watch the default network kick in on Hunter Creek. At first, I was all executive. Sunscreen? Check. Water bottle, bee sting meds, jalapeño potato chips? Check. Am I hungry? Of course, but I must wait until it becomes socially acceptable to eat. Do not think about the potato chips. Stop that. Chocolate nibble? Nope. I walked along, feeling the sand move beneath my boot. Tamarisk branches brushed against my leg, opening up to reveal small, brackish pools of water. The birds were singing; the flowers were outrageous. It was impossible not to notice them. I was beginning to become more sensory and less analytical, or what neuroscientists call bottom-up instead of top-down. The older parts of my brain were reasserting themselves over the chatty neocortex. It simply doesn’t usually require intense concentration to walk across a landscape, one foot in front of the other, at the speed of human locomotion. This is a speed our brains naturally understand. During lunch atop warm boulders near the creek, I pulled out my flower guide. We lumbered down to gather around a white blossom on a stalk. Turns out there were quite a few of these on the laminated card, and this one didn’t quite fit. “I think it’s a buckwheat,” said someone. “No, look at the leaves. They’re pointy.” “That’s gotta be this one, a milkvetch,” said Atchley, pointing to the card. “Actually, it’s a stinking milkvetch.” It was natural history by committee: educated guesses, disputes and confident pronouncements that turned out to be wrong. It was probably a lot like doing brain science. nature as a kind of orchestral conductor of attentional resources isn’t all that new. Remarkably, Frederick Law Olmsted wrote of exactly this phenomenon in 1865, arguing that viewing nature “employs the mind without fatigue and yet exercises it; tranquilizes it and yet enlivens it; and thus, through the influence of the mind over the body, gives the effect of refreshing rest and reinvigoration to the whole system.” Slowly, slowly, academia started to catch up. Beginning in the early 1980s, Stephen and Rachel Kaplan at the University of Michigan noticed that psychological distress was often related to mental fatigue. They speculated that our constant daily treadmill of tasks was wearing out our frontal lobes. This part of the brain got exercised in premodern life too, but the difference is it also got more rest, said the Kaplans. Before coming to Moab, I had spoken with Rachel Kaplan, who THE IDEA OF works from her plant-filled university office in Ann Arbor. She and her husband are still revered within the world of environmental psychology, and together their mentorship has spawned dozens of leading researchers around the world whose work crops up across these pages. What leads to brain-resting? I had asked her. “Soft fascination,” she’d said. That’s what happens when you watch a sunset, or the rain. The most restorative landscapes, she said, are the ones that hit the sweet spot of being interesting but not too interesting. They should entice our attention but not demand it. The landscapes should also be compatible with our sense of aesthetics and offer up a little bit of mystery. You can find these conditions indoors if you’re lucky, but they spring easily from natural environments. The Kaplans called their hypothesis the Attention Restoration Theory, or ART. They tested it qualitatively at first, finding that their subjects expressed clearer thinking and less anxiety after viewing nature photographs or spending time outdoors. In 2008, Stephen Kaplan teamed up with one of his graduate students, Marc Berman, for more empirical testing. They found that short sessions of natureimage viewing (compared to pictures of urban setting) allowed subjects’ brains to behave as if at least partly “recovered,” specifically in measures of cognitive performance and executive attention. Rachel Kaplan thinks these effects will only get bigger as time in nature increases. One of the Kaplans’ early students was Roger Ulrich, the EEG researcher we met briefly in the last chapter. While the Kaplans promulgated the idea of attention restoration, Ulrich instead argued on behalf of the Stress-Reduction Theory, or SRT. It’s worth pointing out the main difference between ART and SRT, and it’s mostly a question of timing. Both propose that nature makes us happier and smarter. In the Kaplans’ ART theory, the first stop is the brain’s attention network. Nature scenes, like my walk up Hunter Creek, lulls us with soft fascination, helping to rest our top-down, direct-attention faculties. With that restoration, we become more relaxed, and then can perform thinking tasks better. SRT and Wilson’s biophilia, on the other hand, posit that nature exposure can immediately lower our anxiety and stress levels, and then we can think more clearly and cheer up. Ulrich explained the intellectual split with the Kaplans to me: “After getting my Ph.D. our paths diverged with respect to conceptual thinking and research methods. Their work continued to evolve around cognition. Mine turned in the directions of emotional, physiological, and health-related effects of nature.” Ulrich influenced the Japanese with their blood-pressure cuffs and mood scales, while the Kaplans’ attention framework has generally held more sway with the Americans. “How could we have possibly imagined where all this would go?” asked Kaplan, marveling at the long tail on the creature she and Stephen birthed. Both ART and SRT still leave plenty of room for investigation: What constitutes soft fascination? Through which sensory systems do we register the scenes that change our moods? How do you define nature and how quickly do these responses occur? Here’s Team Moab’s overarching hypothesis: After days of wandering in a place like this, resting the executive branch and watching the clouds drift across an endless sky, good shit happens to your brain. “After three days, there’s just this feeling, ooh, something changes,” said Paul Atchley. Added Strayer: “We’d be foolish to ignore it. By the fourth day, you’re more relaxed, you notice details. In the wilderness, there’s a novelty effect for the first few days, you’ve got a new backpack on, there’s all this equipment. But then the novelty wears off and that novelty was attracting your attention, so now your attention is not grabbed. There’s a capacity to use other parts of your brain. It’s like when Michael Jordan had the flu when the Bulls played the Utah Jazz. You can’t write him off because he plays well like that. He scored thirty-eight points in a row. He was mindless.” His executive network was not in the house. He performed better, flying on pure intuition. We’ve known for a long time that athletes and artists can easily access flow states; the idea that the rest of us can touch that zone through nature is tantalizing. “Down with the frontal lobe!” said Atchley, bounding back down the trail after lunch, his hydration-pack tube trailing behind his neck. “Up with the cerebellum!” Gazzaley mixed martinis by the rooftop fire pit. If Kramer is the senior member of Team Moab, Gazzaley is its boy wonder. At forty-six, his premature bright white hair belies his youthful face. It’s so incongruous that people sometimes ask him if he dyes his hair. “Dye it this color?” he pointed to his head, barking a laugh. Extroverted and optimistic, Gazzaley is refreshingly unapologetic about his affection for technology. He believes it is not our curse but very possibly our salvation. He employs his gadgets with ease and fluency, from his cameras to the brain-wave monitoring machines and 85-inch high definition screens in his multimillion-dollar laboratory at the University of California, San Francisco. There, he is designing and testing “neurological” video games built specifically to increase cognitive performance in adults. The games, he believes, can help prevent dementia, treat ADHD, and even make us all better multitaskers, and he has data to back it up. This is the world we live in. We might as well get better at it. Still, as a nature photographer and adventurer, he is loving the desert. He had his vertical-panorama revelation yesterday, and he had another spark of insight today in Hunter Canyon. “I had such a rich experience of flow today,” he told us around the fake campfire. “I was walking in the sandy canyon. Dave took off in front of me, and I found myself alone taking pictures of desert flowers. I made myself LATER THAT NIGHT, receptive to the stimuli around me. It was so bottom-up, moving through the environment and it was all fitting together. I usually have trouble not being top-down, but without trying to, I was picking up things that were beautiful and salient. I realized how natural and comfortable and smooth it felt to do photography. I’m always thinking about top-down versus bottom-up, and I usually present it as conflict, basically, over cognitive control, but the insight was as it relates to flow and it’s that maybe it happens when these parts of the brain are in perfect balance. I hadn’t felt it in years and it felt really good.” There was more, because his analytical top-down mode was in full force now. Gazzaley the neuroscientist was back. He had, essentially, experienced Kaplan’s theory about attentional restoration. The Queens techie was drinking the Kaplan Kool-Aid, along with the martinis: “Nature is restorative because it frees up the top-down part of your brain in a way that allows it to recover. I don’t think you have to be in nature for this to happen, but I think there’s something special about nature. It’s what makes it interesting. Nature has this not totally unique but more powerful ability to capture your attention in a different way. Evolutionarily, nature is a powerful bottom-up experience for us.” He paused and then laughed. “Although a lot of people freak in nature. I’ve seen it countless times.” Ruth Ann Atchley piped up. “I was not restored while hiking the fins yesterday. I do not like heights.” Lisa Fournier apologized for the route. Strayer: “There are always going to be individual differences.” Here I couldn’t help thinking of Woody Allen: “I love nature, I just don’t want to get any of it on me.” Fournier was thinking. “Nature is pretty novel in lots of ways. You’re immersed and enriched.” Dyre, the skeptic: “Maybe it’s the active exploration that’s important.” “Yes!” said Jason Watson, a young researcher and associate, another attention scientist who’d become captivated by the nature effect and whose shyness dissipated under the night’s half-moon. “It’s what Kaplan calls mystery.” Watson told us about a recent study he’d done that largely confirmed Kaplan’s mystery element. He and his colleagues showed a couple hundred subjects images of nature scenes, some with flat, predictable trails and some with winding or partly obscured scenery, the kind of images that compelled the viewers to want to peek around the corner. Even though the subjects saw the images very briefly, just a matter of seconds, they remembered the mysterious scenes better. In other words, there was something about mystery that improved cognitive recall. Ruth Ann Atchley saw a good transition point. “Okay, I have one question: what kind of studies should we do now?” “What I’d like to know more about is creativity. We can do cognitive tests, but we also need biomarkers,” said Strayer. Art Kramer had helped find a beautiful biomarker, the neural growth factor BDNF, which spritzes the brain like Miracle-Gro during exercise. Could nature exposure unleash some similar, visible molecule? Until recently, it’s been hard to see inside the brain in realworld settings or under more sophisticated lab conditions. Some studies show a drop in hemoglobin levels (a proxy for blood and oxygen) in the prefrontal cortex during time in nature. It’s still debatable where the blood is going instead. At least one MRI study (using photographs of nature) shows it’s going to parts of the brain like the insula and the anterior cingulate that are associated with pleasure, empathy, and unconstrained thinking. By contrast, when those same subjects viewed urban pictures, more blood traveled to the amygdala, which registers fear and anxiety. Strayer would like to know what a brain looks like as it’s getting restored. Can you see it? Does it look different in the real world compared to in a lab that uses photographs? After some discussion, Gazzaley proposed they use EEG—electroencephalography—to measure brain waves, specifically one called frontal midline theta, which his lab has found to be a reliable measure of executive-center engagement. If it quiets down in nature, that could be evidence of what he experienced on the trail: less top-down, and more bottom-up, less executive network, more default network. It would indicate a rest break for the frontal lobes. “I love it!” Gazzaley said. They discussed the complications: Strayer prefers field data and not lab data. He wanted people wearing the caps in real nature, not just looking at pictures of it in an air-conditioned room. But Kramer and Gazzaley prefer the controlled environment of the lab. Kramer would leave Moab with a plan to study whether creativity differed for people walking on a lab treadmill looking at virtual-reality city images versus nature images. I made a note to check back. “It is messy, no doubt about it,” said Strayer of working outside. “You can study this in the lab, but for the effects to be there, you have to be in nature. People said we couldn’t measure the effects of driving and distraction in the real world, because there are so many variables, but we did it.” Strayer would leave with several experiment ideas: a walking study in an arboretum measuring creativity, and another using the EEG on a group in the wilderness. This I would have to see. Gazzaley had a plan for yet another study. Nature, he saw from his own Kaplanesque moment of “flow” out on the trail, could be useful. It could improve not the way we enjoy nature but the way we use technology. “My practical desire is to understand how to maximize our brains,” he said. “If I’m going to build software to enhance cognition, what if I routinely inserted recovery periods in virtual nature? I’m a fitness buff. You have to rest between sets. Everyone knows you can’t just blast your brain for hours with video games or you get diminishing returns. Are all breaks equal? I’m going to try nature.” The Atchleys, for their part, would also soon run an experiment to see if group problem-solving improved among workers outside versus workers inside. I’d have to stay tuned. The trip had crystallized for me some critical questions to keep in mind as I moved ahead. If nature environments have the potential to change both our emotional brains and our cognitive brains, how would different doses of nature affect us? How much of the benefits of nature are really because of what’s in nature versus simply leaving behind the bad stuff of cities and workplaces? And, based on what I would learn about our perceptual systems, how could we improve our normal lives back at home? For science, I was learning, you have to be patient. But maybe you can draw a payoff like Gazzaley’s pursuit of an American three-toed woodpecker in Rocky Mountain National Park. Before the moon set, he pulled up some of his photographs on his laptop and scrolled through them for us. The bird was coy, finally poking his spectacular black-and-white-striped head out of a hole in a tree. But Gazzaley was ready, camera in hand. “I had to wait six hours for this fucker,” he said. Together and apart, the group would be looking at the puzzle of nature and the brain from many angles. As Paul Atchley put it at the end of the evening, no doubt inspired by the night sky, the beverages and a new laser focus in his attentional network, “It’s many fingers pointed at the moon. If you look at all the different fingers, eventually you can see where the moon is even though every perspective is different. There won’t be a single piece of evidence. Science doesn’t work that way.” These and other emerging studies would make up the next frontier in understanding nature’s role in optimizing human potential, many aided by brain imaging. With more clues about what makes our brains happy and keeps them running smoothly, that information can be fed into public policy decisions, urban planning and architectural design. The research has profound implications for schools, hospitals, prisons and public housing. Imagine bigger windows, more urban trees, mandated lie-on-the-grass sessions, ...
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Forest Bathing
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Forest bathing, also known as Shinrin yoku, is a term coined by the Japanese
government, with a basis on ancient Buddhist and Shinto practices in 1982 (Williams, 2017).
Forest bathing is a practice of allowing nature into your body through all the five senses of the
body. It is showering i...

Qbpgbe_ZvxrXney (20396)
University of Maryland

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