How Nature & Other Physical Environments Impact Your Focus, Cognition & Health | Dr. Marc Berman | Huberman Lab

Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science -based tools for everyday life.

I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.

My guest today is Dr. Mark Berman.

Dr. Mark Berman is a professor of psychology at the University of Chicago, where he directs the Environmental Neuroscience Laboratory.

His research focuses on how our physical environments, particularly natural environments, impact our brain function, mental health, and cognitive performance.

During today's episode, we discussed the fascinating and actionable science of how your physical surroundings indoors, and in particular, your relationship and interactions with nature, can shape your biology and your cognitive abilities.

Dr. Berman explains how exposure to very common features in nature, such as fractal patterns, increase your ability to focus, reduce your stress, and improve your mental and physical health metrics, and not just while you're in nature, but after you return indoors for many hours and even days afterwards.

words. During today's episode, you'll learn about something called attention restoration theory, which turns out to be very important for understanding how different types of indoor and outdoor environments either deplete or restore your cognitive resources.

We also discuss practical science -based strategies that anyone can implement regardless of where you live.

So if you're in an apartment or a house, if you have ready access to nature or if you don't, today's episode explains how to design your indoor space, the optimal duration and timing of nature exposure, and the the specific visual and auditory elements that will provide you with the greatest cognitive and health benefits.

So whether you're a student or a professional looking to enhance your learning capacity, focus, and reduce your burnout, or you're simply interested in optimizing your mental and physical health through exposure to different elements of nature, today's episode provides clear, actionable protocols based on rigorous scientific research. By the end of today's episode, you'll have a toolkit of evidence -based strategies that will transform your relationship with your indoor environment and outdoor environments, and you'll learn to harness those to improve your brain and body.

Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero -cost to consumer information about science and science -related tools to the general public.

In keeping with that theme, today's episode does include sponsors.

And now for my discussion with Dr. Mark Berman.

Dr. Mark Berman, welcome.

Great to be here, Andrew.

Drew? I love being out in nature, so I'm excited about today's conversation, which is taking place indoors, but we're going to talk about the relationship between the mind, the brain, nature, stress, rumination, and this incredible power that interactions with the natural world can have on our brain.

As we wade into this, I'd like to start with this issue of recapturing our our attentional abilities?

Because I think nowadays, everybody, whether they're clinically diagnosed with ADHD or they are just a human being on the planet, feels as if their attention is being pulled in different directions, sometimes without our awareness, sometimes without our awareness.

What is this notion of recapturing attention?

Yeah, I think it's a really fundamental fundamental concept.

And we think that attention, you know, maybe on the surface of it, people just kind of think about, oh, it's kids trying to pay attention in school or, oh, it's trying to pay attention at work.

But it's actually deeper than that.

We kind of think that elements of attention are sort of involved in controlling all of our behaviors.

And when our attention is depleted, We don't have as much impulse control.

We might behave more aggressively.

You know, we may not be able to achieve our goals.

And with a lot of things in the modern world, our attention is just being fatigued and we're depleted.

And it's really hard to recharge the battery or know what to do to recharge the battery.

And I think that's kind of the entry point why I sort of got interested in this.

And one of my mentors, Steve Kaplan, would talk about this directed attention fatigue problem that a lot of us are facing.

You know, our ancestors, you know, thousands and thousands of years ago, were not bombarded with so much information like we are now.

Now, the modern human has to sort of pick and choose what to pay attention to.

And it's kind of overwhelming.

overwhelming. And Steve Kaplan had this idea that humans kind of have two different kinds of attention.

So one kind of attention is called directed attention.

And that's kind of the attention that I've been talking about just recently here.

And that's the kind of attention where you as an individual person are deciding what to pay attention to.

So presumably, Andrew, you're deciding to pay attention to what I'm saying, even though there's many other things you could find that might be more inherently interesting than what I'm saying.

And this is kind of a very, you know, unique human capability.

There may be other species that can kind of decide what to pay attention to, but we're really good at it.

Humans are really, really good at being able to like focus on this lecture or focus on reading this paper or focus on trying to finish this math problem, but we can't do it forever.

And I think everybody kind of has had that sensation where at the end of a long workday, maybe three or four o 'clock, you might be just staring at the computer screen and you can't focus anymore.

And we call that a directed attention fatigue state where you can't really control your attentional focus anymore.

And I see this all the time when I'm lecturing at the University of Chicago.

And I think I'm a decent lecturer.

First five minutes of class, all the students' eyes are on me.

They're engaged. You know, know, I see they're nodding along with me and, you know, 45 minutes into my lecture, I kind of see people nodding back like this.

They're getting tired.

It's just hard for people to direct their attention for long periods of time.

So that's kind of the special attention, directed attention.

We think there's this other kind of attention that we call involuntary attention, and that's the kind of attention that's automatically captured by interesting stimulation in the environment.

So bright lights, loud noises, those things automatically capture our attention and we don't really have much control over it.

And we think that kind of attention, this involuntary attention, is less susceptible to fatigue or depletion.

So you don't often hear people say, oh, I can't look at that beautiful waterfall anymore.

It's just too interesting.

I got to step away.

Or, oh, I have to stop watching this movie.

It's just too interesting.

I'm too tired out. So that's a different kind of attention.

And we think what's happening in modern times is that our directed attention is being fatigued.

But maybe we can restore directed attention by going into environments that can softly capture our involuntary attention.

Do we know the basis of attentional fatigue?

I mean, I could imagine it's something in the noradrenergic dopamine, catecholamine world.

Listeners of this podcast will recognize those terms, at least crudely.

I could also imagine that it's literally a fatigue of the visual system and or the auditory system, you know, it's hard to maintain fixation as we say as visual neuroscientists to focus on a target.

Yeah. It's challenging, you know, if we allow our eyes to rest, it actually gets easier to look back at it and fixate on a target.

So, what is the basis of the attentional fatigue for this focused attention or what you call directed attention?

Yeah, it's a really great question.

I'm not sure sure I have a great answer yet.

Maybe you'd have some ideas, Andrew.

You know, one thing that sort of to me puzzles me a little bit about the brain is that from my understanding, it's kind of like brain metabolism is 20 % of overall metabolism, no matter what people are doing, except for really extreme exercise where brain metabolism goes down a little bit.

But if you're asleep or if you're doing a hard calculus problem, I think the brain is still using 20 % of metabolism.

So it's sort of this puzzle, why do we get this mental fatigue state?

It's got to have some kind of neurological component.

At this point, I can't point to it.

So I'm going to talk about it more at this psychological level.

It's a sensation that we have that we can't focus anymore.

If I was to talk about brain areas, I would say probably this ability to direct attention is most likely in frontal cortex, whereas this involuntary attention, sometimes we call it more bottom -up attention or exogenous attention where it's activated by external stimulation, I would say that's probably more activated by things in the parietal cortex or even occipital cortex or auditory cortex, depending on what that external stimulation is.

I'm not going to lean everything on the visual system, but I've been listening to this book that unfortunately is only available as an audio book called Daily Rituals, which it's got two -minute chapters, and it describes the the daily rituals of writers and artists and creatives.

And it's very interesting that across many of those chapters you find the same thing, which is that almost all of these people had a ritual of taking some stimulant, typically caffeine, sometimes more aggressive stimulants, but caffeine, and then something to restrict their visual world, make it more tunnel vision.

In fact, there are certain painters, I forget the particular painter that they described, who literally built cardboard blinders onto his glasses when things weren't going so well.

Now, the reason I bring this up is not as a suggestion, although I suppose it could.

I actually used to read papers.

Maybe I need to go back to this.

I'd put a baseball cap on, put a hoodie on, and restrict your visual world.

And it makes perfect sense if, in fact, involuntary attention, which presumably comes from the periphery, is inexhaustible.

Right. So, you know, I think what's interesting about the digital interface we exist in now is that the whole world is brought right in front of us.

Yes. So presumably we evolved to move through space and direct our attention to particular locations and let the rest of the world fall away.

And then involuntary attention could grab us to alert us to people showing up or danger or the smell of something wafting by, calling us for dinner.

But now it's all placed right in our central visual field.

So it makes sense that we would all be very challenged with maintaining directed attention within that small tunnel vision.

Yes. And I would say something else, too.

I guess if you felt like you had to create an isolation kind of chamber sort of thing to focus your directed attention, that's where we would say it's probably time to take a break, that that's when, you know, we might recommend that you go for a walk in nature to recharge this kind of precious directed attention resource.

So that might be a signal.

If you're just having a really hard time focusing, yeah, you can try to power through, but I think that might not be the most productive.

That might be a signal to you to say, hey, maybe I got to go take a break.

And the break better not be scrolling on social media.

We're saying a really good break is actually a walk in nature or some kind of interaction with nature.

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I want to talk about interaction with nature.

I just want to – it's not a pushback on what you just said, but maybe just a probe a little bit deeper.

I think a lot of people struggle with getting into a focused state at the outset.

Yeah. And I myself am familiar with the sitting down to do some work and it taking some time to kind of warm up and that agitation.

I always think about it as literally climbing over or through barbed wire.

Sometimes it actually feels like that, right?

And then either side of the barbed wire is a steep slope.

On one side is distraction that can come from surfing the web or social media, and then on the other side is any sort of drama.

And then, of course, our mind starts creating all these things that we think we need to do, and the idea is to get through the barbed wire.

And then on the other side of it is that focused state.

For most people, I think what I described is not terribly different from that.

I'm making a lot of assumptions here, but I don't know many people that can just sit down to work and just drop in, you know, like a trench. That's right.

Can you do that? No, but I can do it better after a walk in nature.

So I think almost like the walk in nature is sort of like a preparatory kind of process.

Just like, you know, think about like lifting weights or something like that.

You wouldn't start off a workout and say, oh, let's put 250 on the bench and start going.

You warm up. You got to wake up your nervous system a little bit.

And I think that's kind of a little bit what we think interacting with nature is kind of doing.

I mean, it's not a passive process.

We're not saying go and sit in a dark room for 30 minutes and then start to go to work.

No, we're saying we want you to be interacting with nature.

We want you to notice nature.

We want your involuntary attention to be automatically captured by the stimulation in nature.

And then after you've kind of been sufficiently recharged, then we think you're going to be able to go back to your desk and be able to direct attention and be able to focus.

So let's talk about some of the data around what walks in nature and interactions with other components of nature can do for our cognition and our level of focus.

focus. I think intuitively people will appreciate, okay, a nice walk in nature, not looking at one's phone.

It's very pleasant.

It's relaxing. And then you get back to your desk and you can really focus.

What about the laboratory data that support this or out of laboratory data that support this?

Maybe you could describe a few of the incredible studies that you've done because they are really incredible and they're very pioneering in the way that you've brought real laboratory technology into nature as well.

So pick your favorite study about this, and then I'll ask you about a few others as well.

Sure, thanks. Well, I think the kind of the seminal experiment that we did was back in, you know, 2008.

And at that time, when people did these sort of nature walk studies, they would ask people, how do you feel after the walk?

And it was very subjective, and I'm not not against subjective accounts and people reported, yeah, I feel much more refreshed after the walk in nature.

But I always felt a little bit dissatisfied by that.

I wanted to see, well, does objective performance change?

Just like we would probably be dissatisfied if I gave you a pill and I said, this pill is going to get you stronger.

You're going to be able to lift more weight.

And if we just had people say, yeah, I feel like I can lift more weight.

I don't think that'd be satisfying.

We'd actually want to see, can people actually lift more weight?

And so what we did is we designed a study that was experimentally controlled that would have objective measures.

How do people perform cognitively before and after going on a walk in nature?

So what we did is we brought people into the laboratory and then we gave them some challenging working memory and attention tasks.

So one of the tasks was called the backwards of course, a digit span task where you would hear digits out loud at a pace of about one digit per second, and then the participant would need to repeat them back in backwards order.

So if I said 5, 6, 7, the participant would have to repeat back 7, 6, 5.

Pretty easy task at three digits, but we keep increasing the number of digits all the way till about nine digits.

At about five digits, you're ready to pull your hair out.

It's a challenging task.

So we gave participants this this backwards digispan task.

And then we gave them a map of a walk.

It could be the first studies were through the Ann Arbor Arboretum, which was a nature walk kind of by the psychology building at the University of Michigan.

Or participants went for a walk on busy Washtenaw Street in downtown Ann Arbor.

The walks were both about 2 .6 miles.

So it took people about about 50 minutes to do the walk.

We also took participants' cell phones because we didn't want them texting or chit -chatting on the walk.

We wanted their attention to be fully focused on the environment.

And we also did one other thing.

We also gave them a GPS watch. Why did we give them a GPS watch?

Well, we did it for two reasons.

One, we wanted to make sure they went on the walk.

They didn't just go to Starbucks.

And two, we wanted to see, did people get lost?

Because if people got lost on the walk, maybe that wouldn't be restorative.

Okay, so people do the backwards digit span task, we send them on a walk in nature or we send them on a walk through an urban environment.

They go on this 50 -minute walk.

They come back to the lab.

We give them that same backwards digit span task again to see if there is any performance change or not, measure that.

Then we have people repeat the whole procedure again.

They come back to the lab a week later.

So if they walked in nature the first week, they walked in the urban environment the second week or vice versa.

So it was all within subject, very tight experimental control.

And what we found was pretty incredible that people's working memory capacity and their ability to direct attention improved by about 20 % after the walk in nature versus the walk in the urban environment.

And people might be thinking, well, maybe it's just because the nature walk was just more pleasant.

They just liked the nature walk more, and people did tend to like the nature walk more.

And we did measure improvements in mood.

How much did mood improve on the walk?

We didn't find very strong correlation between improvements in mood and improvements in the working memory and directed attention performance, suggesting that people weren't just getting better because they were getting into good moods.

But the even stronger demonstration that this wasn't mood -driven is that we had people walk at different times of the year.

So some of our participants walked in June when it was like 80 degrees Fahrenheit.

People said, Mark, I can't believe you're paying me to go for a walk in nature.

Really healthy mood benefits, really healthy working memory and attention benefits.

We also had participants walk in January, 25 degrees Fahrenheit.

People said, Mark, I was freezing my butt off out there.

I did not enjoy that walk.

But incredibly, the people that walked in January when it was freezing cold and they they didn't enjoy the walk, obtained the same working memory and attention benefits as the people that walked in June.

So you didn't even have to like the nature interaction to get this directed attention benefit.

So that I thought was pretty interesting and counterintuitive, that this isn't just about liking or pleasantness.

There's something deep about processing auditory, visual, maybe even tactile stimulation of nature that somehow is good for our brains and restores as our ability to direct attention.

Super interesting findings.

And it leads me back to this finite resource of directed attention, whatever the underlying networks and chemicals happen to be.

Could we speculate what might be occurring in the nature walks that is enhancing or allowing restoration of directed attention?

And I guess the neurobiologist in me wants to say, okay I'm walking in nature that probably means some greenery some dirt maybe some water and I could imagine one hypothesis that it's the kind of irregularity of nature environments right I mean maybe trees are spaced out you know in perfect spacing like on Palm Drive at Stanford it's like it looks like a it speaks to the engineering department that they're set at That's such even intervals, right?

But typically when you're in the forest or in nature, there's also things to break up that regularity.

Whereas indoor environments and city environments tend to have a lot of right angles.

Buildings can be different sizes.

But city blocks are pretty fixed for a given neighborhood in terms of their size.

So that's just one hypothesis.

I'm coming up with this off the top of my head.

Do we have any data or do you have any preferential speculation as to what it is about nature in terms of its physical structure?

And as a corollary to that, is it that nature is relaxing people and therefore they're not having to use their directed attention and therefore directed attention capability comes back or is set at a higher level?

I realize this is two questions kind of braided together, but that's what I'm curious about.

Yeah. And I think both elements are placed.

So maybe I'll start first with kind of the resting directed attention element.

So let's pretend we're on these walks in nature or the walk on the urban environment.

And I'll start with the walk on the urban environment.

The walk in the urban environment required people to cross a lot of streets.

So you had to be vigilant.

So you still had to use directed attention.

Also had a lot of car traffic.

So you're hearing the noise of cars whizzing by at probably, you know, 40, 45 miles per hour.

There's also advertising.

You're going by shops and billboards.

That kind of requires some directed attention.

So, you can't really just mind wander and let your mind kind of go in those environments.

You still have to be vigilant.

You still have to use directed attention.

The walk through the Ann Arbor Arboretum, you didn't have a lot of those distractions.

So, I think you only had to cross one or two streets and then you're You're kind of getting towards the arboretum.

You don't have to cross any more streets.

There's no advertising there.

And then, and this is the thing I want to talk about too, this idea of soft fascination.

There's all the colors, fractalness, curved edges of nature that we think sort of captures our involuntary attention in what we say is softly fascinating ways.

and we think that in combination with not placing a lot of demand on directed attention is why nature is able to restore directed attention.

So what do I mean by softly fascinating stimulation?

So let's pretend we're looking at a waterfall and the waterfall is really beautiful.

You can hear the rush of the water going down.

You can see all the like the bubbles and maybe some of the froth of the water going down.

It captures our attention, but we can still kind of mind wander and think about other things at the same time.

So it doesn't really harshly capture all of our attentional resources.

If we're in Times Square, also super interesting, lots of interesting stimulation to look at, but it kind of captures all of our attentional resources in an all -consuming way that doesn't allow for any reflection or mind wandering or anything like that.

So while Times Square does capture our involuntary attention, we say it does so in a very harshly fascinating way, whereas the waterfall captures our involuntary attention in a softly fascinating way.

And we think that's the way that's going to be restful eventually of directed attention.

So we think two elements created why the nature walk was restorative.

One, it didn't place as many demands on directed attention.

And two, it had this softly fascinating stimulation that activated this involuntary attention, but not in an all -consuming way.

So we think those two things are critical.

The other point that you bring up about, okay, well, what causes soft fascination to be captured or why does something capture involuntary attention in a softly fascinating way?

And that gets really interesting where we think it could be elements of the structure of nature.

So it's interesting, Andrew, that we can get these effects of nature improving cognitive performance, people just looking at pictures of nature versus looking at pictures of urban scenes, listening to nature sounds versus listening to urban sounds, watching nature videos versus watching urban videos.

So there you don't have to worry about getting hit by a car.

There's something about the visual aesthetic of nature that we think is producing some of those benefits that somehow our brain maybe processes that fractal stimulation in more efficient or easier ways than kind of what you were talking about, the 90 degree angled built environment that we've constructed.

it. I have to ask, if you are exposing people to nature images versus urban environment images in the laboratory and seeing some of these same effects, are you presenting that on a typical small screen right in front of somebody, or is it in panorama?

I'm headed in a particular direction with this question because I have a pet hypothesis as to what nature could be doing um to not deplete directed attention uh but before i ask you about that i'm just curious what the experimental setup is yeah i'm also asking because i'm a little concerned that people are going to hear oh great i can just look at a picture of a forest i don't have to get outside and as you mentioned there's so many things in a in an actual nature environment that provide a rich experience of soundscape etc but uh what's the format yeah so it's uh basically the same format as

the walk, the walking study that I described.

So people come into the lab, we give them the backwards digital span task, but then we take them into a room in the lab where they just have a computer screen that's flipping through nature scenes or urban scenes.

They look at the scene for a couple seconds.

We also have them rate the scene on a scale of one to three for how much they like it, just to make sure that they're awake and they're engaged with the environment uh that whole procedure takes about 10 minutes they come out of the laboratory room that had the pictures and then they take the backwards digit span task again to see if there are changes in uh performance and then we'd have them come back to the lab a week later repeat the whole procedure again if they saw the nature pictures the first week they see the urban pictures the second week or vice versa and they're even just seeing the pictures

of nature, we see improvements in working memory and directed attention.

However, I would caution that the effects are not as large as they are for the actual walk.

So it's harder, or I would say, I guess, the intervention is not as strong as actually walking in nature, right?

Just seeing 10 minutes of nature pictures, it's incredible that it works.

You can get some of these benefits, but the benefits are not as strong as they are for the real thing.

And the same procedure happens when we test sounds of nature versus urban sounds.

We test people with the backwards Digispan task, then we put headphones on them, play a series of nature sounds or play a series of urban sounds, then they do the backwards Digispan task again.

And we find that when people listen to nature sounds, they also show improvements on working memory performance and directed attention.

We don't do anything special in terms of having it being a panoramic view.

It's basically just looking at a slideshow of nature pictures or urban pictures on a computer screen.

So I'm hearing this, I'm starting to wonder whether we have brain areas and or circuits that are devoted to nature, which first pass seems like kind of a crazy idea because visual perceptions and auditory perceptions are built up from their sort of elementary units, which is just nerd speak for, you know, your eye and low level visual system cares about circles and angles, and then your higher level cortex puts it into the recognition of a person or a building, etc, is literally built up from elementary units.

You know, in the sound domain, it's built up from different frequencies, et cetera.

But, you know, there's something about this problem.

Here's what's on my mind here.

If I walk through a neighborhood, an urban neighborhood where it's a bunch of warehouses with some cyclone fence and some signs and it's a weekend, maybe it's a Sunday and they're all closed.

There aren't trucks coming in and out and not a whole lot's happening.

This reminds me me of uh like west oakland near the shipyard on a sunday yep right not a place i recommend people go unless you really like kind of bland urban environments on a sunday because not much is happening to shipyard sunday it's closed versus a trail in yosemite i used to work up in yosemite in the summers but it's not one of the most magnificent trails uh meaning it's not yosemite Falls, Half Dome, or Clouds Rest, my favorite trail.

It's a kind of barren environment, but there might be a meadow and there might be a mountain.

You would never say, you know, this trail up in Tuolumne that I'm on right now is, it's kind of boring.

It's not as interesting as the peak of Clouds Rest. And arguably it's not.

I mean, when you get to the top of Clouds Rest, it's like, whoa.

I mean, it's a spiritual experience.

Okay. But when we are in nature, we don't tend to think oh this is boring there's nothing here yeah even if it's fairly sparse visually right so as we dissect this it can't just be density of visual stuff no there must be something additional even and we could say well maybe it's the greenery but you know I was out in the Utah desert not that long ago and it wasn't arches or you know the beautiful uh you know landscapes that definitely exist out there yeah it was just kind of like horizon sky some sand And maybe a cactus or two, some rocks.

But it's beautiful.

Yeah, right. And you would never say, oh, this is boring because it doesn't have arches.

Right. When you get to arches, you're like, it's that much better.

Right. You get the point here.

Yeah. So it can't be density of visual objects.

Right. And it's pretty quiet out there in the desert.

Right. Except at night when it's really quite noisy in the desert, actually, with animals and stuff, if you're lucky.

So what's the deal?

Part of it could be evolution to some extent.

I mean, our brains evolved in nature, right?

So is it possible that our neural machinery is just more tuned to that kind of stimulation?

I mean, there's no natural right angles in nature.

We created right angles.

I mean, that's pretty speculative, right?

And I'd want to dig in a little more about that, but I can't ignore it, that there's just something maybe fundamental with how our brains evolved.

evolved um and we evolved in nature that there's just something maybe about we just maybe more fluently process natural stimulation and we and maybe we like that but we started to have some ideas you know soft fascination i i love it um as a concept but it still is a little bit squishy i kind of wanted to get some kind of quantitative parameters around it so one idea that we were thinking about was that maybe nature scenes are actually more compressible than urban scenes.

Now what do I mean by that?

So what I mean by that is that maybe they just there's because there's repeated patterns in nature I don't need to store all of the information.

I can kind of smush it down into fewer bits and that might be easier for my brain to process whereas in a lot to urban scenes, it's not very fractal.

And maybe I have to store all of that information.

So we actually, this is one of my students, Nakwan, we actually did, we ran a JPEG compression algorithm on thousands of nature and urban scenes.

And it turns out nature scenes get compressed down into fewer bits.

So we should, no pun intended, unpack a little bit of what you just said, because I I think for people that are not familiar with thinking about neural processing and JPEGs versus TIFF files, if I may, I'm just going to give my crude rendition of this because I was very interested in this and did some work related to this years ago.

But just to keep it brief, people are probably familiar with the idea that some electronic files are larger than others.

So if you have a picture that you take on a camera or your phone and you want to email it to somebody, nowadays you would just text it, but you might want to email it to somebody, you can send them the TIFF version or the Photoshop version and it's going to be a very big image or a big movie for that matter.

There's another way to send it, which is at a lower file resolution, but therefore takes up less memory, doesn't come through as this massive file that you need to go to a second -party site to download or something, and that's a JPEG.

The whole basis of JPEG is to take the average of pixels near one another and compress them.

Take a best guess as to what a black pixel is probably next to another black pixel or probably a gray pixel, but probably not a white pixel.

It could, but what it does, it takes a local averaging and then it compresses it into a JPEG and then you send it to the other side.

But on the other side, you can also unpack that image to its original high resolution value.

The brain does a similar thing.

And the best example that I have from the brain is the olfactory system.

Where in the olfactory system, you're breathing in tons of volatile chemicals, meaning volatile makes it sound like they're about to throw a tantrum, but they're moving through the air, you inhale them, and they're activating millions probably of different odorant receptors.

But your brain compresses those down into coffee.

This is coffee. And then you unpack it as coffee.

Now, if you're a coffee connoisseur, or in the case of wine or a food connoisseur, you can get into the subtle nuance and say, oh, you know, there's a little bit more of this and a little bit more of that, but you're not thinking about the individual chemical molecules.

You'd say, oh, it's a little little bit of a cherry flavor or this chocolate has a little bit of a citrus you know this is the sorts of thing so that's essentially what the brain does with visual images as well yes okay so that's my um very crude and um certainly not complete um description of how bits of information are compressed as they go into the brain and then unpacked into what you call a perception that's right or an experience and the same thing is true of a tiff or photoshop file compressed to a jpeg And then you can literally uncompress that file if you have the sort of computational

capability. So one thing I just want to add to it, the kind of compression that we were doing with the JPEG compression was lossy, meaning that the information was thrown away.

You couldn't recover it, but that didn't really matter.

So if you showed people the image at its high resolution versus the image at its compressed or low resolution, the human eye can't really tell the difference.

and i think um but for the urban images you couldn't get away with that trick you needed to keep all the original pixel values so that's kind of that's what computers and our iphones are actually doing there um and the reason why we think they can get away with that is because nature has a lot of this repeated structure like you were talking about before about predicting the pixels value and you can use that you can capitalize that that that means there's a lot of redundancy so you don't need all of that information natural images also tend to have maybe this is gonna get a little bit technical

too a lot of high frequency spatial content it's a lot of little changes a little contrast changes that we don't really need whereas in the urban environment there's more of these big contrast changes that we do need so we think I think maybe the brain is, like you're saying, there's all this evidence that the brain is basically doing that.

And in nature, because you can, you know, you're walking through the nature, you can kind of throw away a lot of the information.

And so we think that actually might be why it's sort of more softly fascinating and easier to process versus the urban environment.

environment. There's another element here too, which we haven't got it completely yet, but which I'm very interested in.

So that's looking at sort of like complexity of the images at the very, very low level.

But you could also think about semantics, like the language that we use to describe a scene.

And when I see a nature scene, you know, I don't have a huge language repertoire.

I can say lake, tree, river, shrub, sand, desert.

But when I'm in the urban environment, I can say Volkswagen Beetle, you know, BMW M3, gothic architecture.

Like my vocabulary is so much more complex for an urban scene.

So one thing that we're also thinking about is like maybe nature might also be more semantically simple, like from a linguistic level that I can just label it really easily.

And then it allows my brain to just not have to store as much information, whereas in the urban environment, maybe I'm forced to sort of label all of these objects and it just takes up more room in our brain.

So we also do these studies where we show people a bunch of nature scenes and urban scenes and then test their memory for the scenes.

And it turns out that people's memory for the nature scenes is worse than the urban scenes.

So people remember.

Exactly. It fits. It fits.

And you might think, oh, well, you want to remember stuff.

But actually, you know, in some sense, it's measuring how just difficult it is to process.

And if it's so easy to process nature, you're just not going to remember it.

And that, in this case, is a good thing.

So we think that's also part of it, that that's also saying to us that, yeah, it's just easier to process this natural stimulation versus this urban stimulation where you just have to attend to more stuff.

It's more sticky. Do you have any data as to whether or not people track time better or worse when they are in natural versus urban environments?

So I don't have direct evidence to this, but I have a few other little pieces of evidence that I think will kind of get us there.

So we've done some studies where we send people.

This one was actually sending people to a nature arboretum, an indoor nature arboretum, the Garfield Conservatory, a really beautiful conservatory in Chicago, versus the Chicago Water Tower Mall, a very fancy indoor mall in Chicago.

And we actually gave participants here cell phones that we had in the lab that would ping them and ask them questions while they were going on the walk in the conservatory, the walk in the mall.

And we asked them, you know, what are you thinking about?

And it turns out when people are walking in nature, they actually think more about the past than walking in the mall.

So that was kind of interesting.

This is also kind of interesting.

People also said that they felt more impulsive in the mall than in the conservatory, which makes sense that, you know, mall designers want people to be buying things.

But this idea about thinking about the past to me suggested a little bit that time might be going a bit slower.

Other people have found in cities that the larger the city is, people, like, walk faster.

like the pace of everything is a little bit faster.

So my hunch is that based on those two findings that I think time does probably slow down in nature, but I don't have direct evidence for that.

I think that's something that'd be really super interesting to study, but that would be my hypothesis that in nature, time does slow down a bit.

If you had to wager a guess, would you assume that going into an art gallery is more similar to taking a walk in nature or an urban I mean, it's so rich with information.

You have options. You have to decline certain things, certain rooms, certain paintings, certain sculptures.

There's a lot of decision making.

And yet, most people find galleries, big galleries to be extremely calming.

Maybe it's also because everyone's quite quiet in them.

them? I would say the gallery would have a similar effect to nature, would be my guess.

Because, you know, Kaplan's attention restoration theory really is not specific to nature.

It basically just says you got to find an environment that doesn't place a lot of demands on directed attention while simultaneously having softly fascinating stimulation.

And an art gallery gallery might meet those two criteria.

If you don't have to be tested on the artwork and you can just kind of go there and you don't have an agenda, I think there's going to be a lot of very softly fascinating stimulation in an art gallery.

So my hunch would be that, yeah, walking through an art gallery might have a similar kind of effect.

I would, this is going to be a little bit of a jump.

There are some studies that we did where we were looking at the relationship between park visits and crime and going to a museum versus crime.

So there's been a lot of actually interesting studies suggesting that interacting with nature can make people less aggressive, and we think it has to do with attention.

So we had this incredible data set, this cell phone trace data set, where from 100 ,000 people people in Chicago, we knew where they lived and we knew where they went for an entire month.

So what we did is we quantified how many times did people leave their neighborhood and go and visit a park versus leaving their neighborhood and going to a museum or something like that.

And we wanted to correlate that with crime.

And sure enough, we found that neighborhoods where people leave their neighborhood and go and visit a park, there's actually that predicted less crime in those neighborhoods, but the museum visits didn't predict that.

And this was controlled for socioeconomic background.

Yeah. Again, it's a correlational study, so I can't claim causality, but we also controlled for age, education, income, all those demographics.

So there, it seemed like there was something special about the park visit versus the museum visit on at least aggression.

But I do believe that um going through a museum might have a similar effect to nature i'm not sure it'll be as strong but i think it has the the museum maybe has a lot of the same elements that uh that uh nature walk might have i mean i think i'm just obsessively starting to drop into the trench of you know what sorts of things are attention depleting and what sorts of things are attentionally restorative uh because i personally believe that our ability to attend bend is like the hallmark of building a great life yes and I'm so much so that you know on hikes and walks I will listen to audiobooks

and podcasts yeah um but there are times when for instance I will exercise with silence yep and then I'll use music as something to like push me through some particularly hard moments in the exercise but then I'll turn it off yeah and bring it back I don't just kind of like head out the whole time blasting music sometimes I'll do that that.

But I'm starting to become a kind of a experimentalist with this idea of, you know, attention as this resource that we deplete each day, sleep, it's restored, mostly, go back again.

You know, looming in the backdrop of this conversation is a conversation about social media.

But before we go there, if you were at this point to give a kind of a best recommendation in terms of how to reset one's attentional abilities uh what are the basic requirements so i think there's there's a lot there too um i think you have to be really mindful about directed attention fatigue so if you're trying to study or uh you're at work and you're having a really hard time concentrating i would recommend not just trying to power through if if you have the ability and the time to take a break i recommend that you stop and you take a break and what kind of break do i recommend you do i recommend

that you go and try to find some nature and walk in nature what if you're you're having a hard time getting into a focused state at all it's not that you fatigued it okay that day yeah you you know so many people that i hear from yeah uh who listen to the podcast and elsewhere will say you know they they get up they did their best to get their sleep, they get their morning sunlight, they hydrate, they drink their caffeine, they sit down to their computer and they just can't focus.

And then they start thinking like, do they have brain fog?

Do they need a nootropic?

You know, all these questions start to arise.

What are your thoughts?

I think in some sense, even though you might be very well slept and very well fed, you could still be in a directed attention fatigue state.

So I think, yeah, yeah, if you can't concentrate right in the beginning of the morning, then you should go for a walk, right?

That should be the first thing you should do.

Or if you don't have access to nature, maybe listen to some nature sounds or watch a nature video or something like that.

We find that all those things can be beneficial.

Even looking out the window to nature can be beneficial.

Looking at a picture, you've got a picture of nature here.

Looking at a picture of nature can be beneficial.

So I would say anytime you're having trouble concentrating, it doesn't It doesn't matter if it's at the beginning of the day or the end of the day or the middle of the day.

I would recommend that you take some kind of break with nature.

And it could be simulated nature, like listening to nature sounds, watching a nature video, looking at nature pictures.

Or even better is if you can actually get out and interact with nature.

Because Steve Kaplan used to also talk about these other elements that might be important for a restorative environment.

One was that the environment had to have extent.

meaning that it had to have enough interesting things to look at.

Now, it doesn't mean that it has to be Yosemite Valley, which has incredible spatial extent.

I mean, it's huge. It's enormous.

But, you know, like near my office at the University of Chicago, we have this Japanese garden, the Garden of the Phoenix.

It might be only like 100 square meters.

It's pretty small, but man, it's still got a lot of extent.

You know, it's got a walking path.

It's got a little waterfall.

You can see Lake Michigan.

So that's one element.

Another thing about the nature is that you want it to be compatible with your goals.

So what do I mean by that?

If you've got a big exam and you haven't studied, I'm not sure going for the walk in nature is going to work.

You better use that time to study.

study. But if you can't concentrate, you know, trying to power through, I don't think it's gonna be compatible with your goals.

I think going in for the nature walk is compatible with your goals.

So that's another thing that's going to be really important.

And the other concept that Steve used to talk about being important is this, is that the environment needs to give you the sense of being away, that you're kind of removed from your current environment, Almost like a change of mindset.

And again, that doesn't mean you have to go really, really far away, but you might want to go to a location that's not at your desk.

So maybe don't sit at your desk and look at the nature pictures.

Maybe you want to go somewhere else and look at the nature pictures.

And this kind of distance, I think, could be helpful.

I don't know if Cal Newport talks about this in his deep work, but, you know, I've heard people talking about in an office, you might want to have like a separate area of your office for deep work.

And I think this kind of sense of being away is related to that.

You kind of want to get out of your current state and go into this other environment that might be able to replenish those resources.

So I'm hearing that there are two sides of the coin.

One is to designate an area for work that's truly for deep work.

I followed Cal's recommendation, and now I have an area in my basement, believe it or not.

And there has never been a phone in that basement.

basement. There's no phones allowed in that basement.

That's that's not a rule.

It's not a protocol.

It's a policy. Right.

And I remember he talked about in his he has this library office that he goes to.

And I very much agree with that.

Yeah. Now I do get Internet access down there a little bit if I need to look for papers.

But I've been turning off Wi -Fi on my computer when I go down there to work and I get more done in three hours down there than I would in three weeks.

Yeah. Above ground.

Yeah. I swear it's a huge effect.

Yeah. The The other side of the coin is this business of getting out into a different environment.

And it sounds like these walks or these ventures into nature don't take terribly long.

How long does one need to do this in order to get the enhancement and focus and working memory?

Like what do the data say?

Yeah, I mean when we did the – our walking study was 50 minutes, but I've seen other studies with as little as 20 minutes.

You can get the effect.

For cognitive enhancement.

And there's actually been some interesting studies with kids with ADHD.

and they find attention benefits for these kids with ADHD after just a 20 minute walk in nature that actually was similar to like a dose of Ritalin so that was pretty incredible so it doesn't have to be super long and when we were doing the the slideshow of nature pictures that was only for about 10 minutes so it doesn't have to be a really really long immersion there have been other studies that have suggested like overall, you might want to get about two hours a week in nature.

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You know, I've been long obsessed with this difference between what happens in our brain stem, you know, the areas involved as you know with levels of arousal and stress versus calm, when we look at a fixation point versus a horizon or when we go into panoramic vision.

And there are now ample data to support the idea that when we fixate on a small box like a phone or a computer, or we're fixated on something, we're reading or paying attention to it, that our level of autonomic arousal creeps up.

It doesn't creep up indefinitely, but this makes sense, right?

Visual attention matches the cognitive attention.

You need arousal, aka alertness to get cognitive attention yeah but that when we go into panoramic vision which is you know for these aficionados you can look up magnocellular vision what you're essentially doing is you're taking bigger pixels of the of the visual environment yes and when we look at a horizon yep we naturally go into panoramic vision unless we're looking at our phone taking a picture of that horizon yes uh take note it's interesting to me to think about visual environments such as nature that have us taking larger bins, pixels if we're talking about visual space, but that we're

also perhaps, this is a question I'm obsessed with, perhaps taking larger time bins.

What do you think about a kind of a general idea that what we need to do in order to be focused is to allow our mind to go into these kind of like time drift states?

Yeah. And And I kind of think, you know, you're talking about it from a visual perspective, but I think it's also from a cognitive mental perspective.

So I think also, too, being in nature kind of widens your cognitive, you know, landscape.

And that's why I think people sometimes, you know, you hear all these anecdotes where people are struggling to solve a problem.

They can't figure it out.

They go for a walk in nature and then, boom, they solve the problem because the brain is still churning on that.

Right. But maybe being out in nature sort of inspires this widening of attentional space internally.

We had a guest on this podcast, Michael Platt from the University of Pennsylvania.

He's a neuroscientist and he told us about this experiment.

It's pretty wild. This still blows me away.

You're probably familiar with it, but I wasn't, which is that if you have human subjects in a lab, do a connect the dots task where the dots are placed very close together versus a connect the dots task where the dots are placed much further apart.

part, and then you give them a creativity task, the people who do the task, and it's well -controlled for folks, connecting dots that are further apart in physical space show significantly elevated levels of creative insight to solving problems. And so there's something about visual space and time and our ability to link things in cognitive space and time.

This is why when you you said earlier that when you're out in nature, there aren't as many words to describe things.

What that means to me, if I think about the results that Platt was talking about, is that perhaps it isn't just that there's a dearth of language, but perhaps then your brain starts to drop into other modes of cognition.

I don't want to sound too nerdy just to sound nerdy here but yeah you know there are all sorts of things in your brain that have that are that are that can't have words assigned to them like for instance your childhood you could give the whole story but it still wouldn't capture it right but there was your trauma there was your wins there were your um falling in love you know we have these words but they don't capture the experience they don't capture like the visceral experience the smells the taste and so um i love And I love the idea that in nature, things are sparse enough, yet rich enough,

that maybe these networks get triggered.

Right. And I think, you know, this is kind of another, if we want to get into the neuroscience a little bit, we have some of these ideas that, for what a brain looks like when it's kind of at rest. and um when we talk about fractalness you know most of us think about like a spatial fractal so if there's a snowflake it's got a characteristic shape if you put that snowflake under a microscope and zoom in it still kind of has that same shape if you zoom in some more it's still got that same shape um so it doesn't matter what scale you look at the snowflake it's got the same shape so that's called

as a snowflake it's sort of scale free spatially or another way to say it is that it's fractal.

It's got this repeated patterning at these different spatial scales and nature is filled with fractals.

Could you tell us more about some of those?

I recall hearing about fractals in Mandelbrot that came up with fractals.

But despite the fact that I remember Mandelbrot's name, all that tells you is that my brain is filled with meaningless information because what I want to know is not who came up with it, right?

This is the problem with the hippocampus, right?

You can encode perfectly useless information, no discredit to Mandelbrot, But where in nature, aside from snowflakes, do fractals show up?

Are they in tree bark?

Everywhere. I mean, a tree is also quite fractal, right?

So you have the trunk of the tree, and then it breaks off into branches, which breaks off into smaller branches, which breaks off into leaves, and the leaves have the veins that also branch off.

So it's very, very fractal.

It's got this same branching structure at all these different scales.

Yeah. So when I look at, like, sand in the desert— Yeah.

you're telling me that this regularity exists at every scale yeah pretty much i think a desert would also be fractal in terms of um you know how the wind because the wind is also kind of a fractal uh sort of process so the sand will be somewhat fractal a mountain scape will also be quite fractal a coastline will be fractal well tell me for a mountain so where am i going to look at a smaller scale i can see i can imagine a mountain mountain yeah if you zoomed in on a different portion of the mountain it would have some of the same structural properties as the zoomed out version.

Really? Yeah. Wild.

Yeah so and again this kind of you have to return back to like compression again if you have this repeated pattern patterning that might be easier for our brain to process because you really you just have to only kind of encode one structure because that structure is repeated at all these different scales.

Whereas human beings and advertisements and all that You know, there's this thing in science, as you know, people are either lumpers or splitters, right?

And many a career has been made by splitting when lumping would have been sufficient.

Human behavior, human advertising, music, I mean, I'm sure there's immense regularity.

But when we're bombarded with that, now I'm sort of making the segue to something like social media where you're just bombarded with sensory information.

like one movement of my thumb takes me from one cognitive landscape to a completely different cognitive landscape i mean if it were my preference my entire feed would be dogs yeah but i'm going from dogs to politics to fitness to and then stuff that the algorithm is testing on me and i mean it's amazing that we can do this yeah and yet the more we talk about nature and how restorative it it is or reading a book and what kind of a following a common narrative like kind of drilling down into that or watching a movie which hopefully has some continuity to the to the plot the more i realize that social

media is for lack of a better word is kind of chaos it's like cognitive chaos or it's definitely not fractal yeah it's definitely not fractal and if we kind return to fractals too so we think um so we talked about fractals in terms of space like uh there's that this shape and you zoom in same shape zoom in some more same shape you can also talk about fractalness in time so you can have like a signal oscillating in time fluctuating in time and you can also quantify how fractal that signal is in time so it's like if you look at the signal If we look at a signal at 1 millisecond, 10 milliseconds,

50 milliseconds, 10 seconds, 30 seconds, an hour, does that signal look the same or does it look different?

If the signal looks the same at all those different temporal windows, we say the signal is fractal in time.

Can you give me an example from a nature environment and one by comparison from an urban environment?

I'm thinking a car alarm in an urban environment is like the most alerting.

I mean, it grabs our involuntary attention.

And it's not fractal.

It's periodic. It's just wah, wah, wah, wah, you know, over and over again.

Like a fractal signal will kind of have low frequency stuff will be have a lot of power, but it also has all of the different frequencies are represented.

represented, but their, um, how their amplitude is, this is going to get a little nerdy, is proportional to their frequency.

So low frequency stuff will have higher amplitude or higher power and high frequency stuff will have lower amplitude or lower power.

And a lot of natural sounds and stuff are also more fractal.

But what's interesting is that you can also look at brain signals.

Like I can take a, put a person in MRI machine and look at like, how are the brain areas fluctuating?

Or Or I can have an EEG cap on them and look at how their electrical activity is fluctuating.

And it turns out when brains are more fractal in time, brains are exerting less effort, less cognitive effort.

So, you know, it's kind of depressing, but as we age, our brains kind of get less fractal.

um if you're learning uh a new task for a first time when it's harder uh the brain is less fractal than when you're well practiced at the task if you're doing an easy task the brain is more fractal than when you're doing a harder task and so we think that maybe nature is kind of pushing the the brain into this like higher fractal state that might be like this sort of critical rested state um that's that's kind of a really uh that's gonna that's gonna that's gonna allow you to actually have a lot of directed attention when you need it when you need it versus like the social media stuff is just

pulling grabbing it's it's not letting you get into this fractal rested state it's it's it's driving fractalness down right well the social media platforms not to paint them as evil because i i teach on social media learn on social media enjoy social media but it's a business right they're not doing it for free no they're not doing it out of the goodness of their hearts and um i basically think of social media as the reality tv show that we've all either chosen to be a part of, we've cast ourselves in it.

The idea here is that it is not designed to be relaxing.

It's designed to capture your directed attention.

If it just grabbed your involuntary attention, it wouldn't work.

Now that might seem a little bit counterintuitive because I and everybody else has the experience of picking up your phone, you're like, I'm only gonna spend a minute.

I'm gonna just kind of check what's on Instagram.

And all of a sudden you're taking down this rabbit hole of one thing.

And then it's 30 minutes later, and you're like, goodness, you know, I got to get ready for work or something like this.

But the involuntary attention that you were talking about before is the kind of thing that cues you to something and then you go down that direction.

Right. Or I would say that the social media, it's not softly fascinating.

It's harshly fascinating.

It's grabbing you and not letting you mind wander or think about anything else.

It's grabbing all of your attentional resources.

And I would say it does that not by taking us typically down rabbit holes, but it's not not like you spend a lot of time on one post right you might go into the comment section if you're interested in that but it's the fact that you have i'm imagining now that there's some resource in the brain that's a combination of catecholamines dopamine norepinephrine certainly yeah plus a bunch of neural network metabolism yeah stuff yeah it will never be one thing right it's not gonna be like a molecule right and that depending on how what well rested we are we go into the day with a certain amount of directed

attention units that we can spend.

And everything you're telling us today is that going into a fractal, a .k .a.

nature environment, allows us to come off the sort of spending of our directed attention.

That's right. And it also seems to reset the directed attention account.

Yes. Are there any data that speak to whether or not it just allows us to not spend extend or whether or not it actually replenishes this directed attention capability?

Yeah, it's a good question.

Or does it even, like, extend capabilities?

Like, does it take you above your baseline?

Right. Is it an investment?

Right. Lately, I think not so much about dopamine per se.

I think about, are you spending your dopamine down or are you investing your dopamine?

Right. And I would say, I mean, unfortunately, I don't have a good answer for it.

I'm not sure. It might actually, it's possible that it might expand your store it might it might you might be getting interest so one of the things too that we kind of struggle with a little bit is like is nature boosting us a lot or is urban fatiguing us either depleting us and i think both things are kind of at play there i have a whole set of questions popping to mind about sleep states and deep sleep being more like fractal environments and rapid eye movement sleep being more like like reality and therefore more challenging but um I'm going to just shelve those and maybe we'll get back to

them maybe we won't I want to make sure that I understand correctly what the protocol for lack of a better word would be get out into nature ideally move yeah for about 20 minutes minimum yeah and ideally you remove yourself from phone what if you have to make a phone call while you're doing it I mean that's I just you don't want to do it and I'd even say too I know you you were saying you like to put the earbuds in.

Sometimes I would say you don't want the earbuds in.

You want all of your attentional capacity or involuntary attention to be captured by that environment.

Okay. Great. You know, I kind of joke with my students about this a little bit, where I would say, you know, how many of you study with listening to music?

And a lot of students raise their hand, yeah, I study with listening to music.

I said, okay, how many of you want to take the exam listening to music nobody nobody writes you i say well that's a that's not consistent you know and and and it's it's not because you know the students are uh not smart it's it's that studying sucks and you know listening to music just makes it more pleasurable but you're not you know you're you're you're taking away attentional resources that it could be used for the studying by listening to music.

And I think, you know, on the flip side, I want you to be fully engaged with nature.

I want your involuntary attention to be just automatically captured by this nature stimulation.

I don't want anything else interfering with that.

I think that's how you're going to get the most bang for your buck.

And in fact, you know, we did these studies where I wasn't sure how it was going to work.

So we did some studies where we took participants who were diagnosed with clinical depression.

And this is kind of mean, but I think important.

We had them walk in nature too.

But before these participants went for a walk in nature, we had them think about a negative thought or memory that's been bothering them to try to induce rumination, to get them ruminating.

And we we thought, you know, maybe if you go for a walk alone in nature and you're restoring your attention, maybe they're going to ruminate even more.

That is going to be, you know, not good.

It's going to, maybe it's going to hurt performance.

And we found just the opposite, that actually these participants with clinical depression who we had induced to ruminate got even stronger benefits walking in nature than our non -clinical sample.

On working memory. Working memory.

And you can imagine participants that are struggling with depression and rumination, their working memory is not as good because you've got cognitive resources devoted to these negative thoughts that are just repeating over and over again.

You don't have your full bank account of attention because you're spending it on the rumination.

And we found that for these these participants, the effects were stronger in improving their attention and working memory.

And I think part of that might be that it's actually giving them some of the attention resources necessary to deal with the rumination.

Super interesting. I know rumination is something that many people, depressed or not, struggle with.

And I've long thought, and I'm certainly coming to this conclusion with each successive year of my life, that distraction is the enemy.

me like the ability to drop into work creative work or for me prepping a podcast or reading papers or um taking a walk with somebody having a conversation with somebody because relationships are important too of course and just being able to be fully present to that right is the basis of a great life right even if you're dealing with challenge right it's it that when we spread ourselves out across all these different modalities that no good comes of it that's right And like any destructive force that's really bad, it's the fact that we don't notice that we were absent for large swaths of it and that it

becomes so pervasive in society that it's not also frowned on.

I actually put social media on an old phone.

So I have social media accounts on an old phone, and that's the only way I can access social media.

yeah somebody sends me something by way of social media I don't do it because I mean it's the I don't know what the best analogy is it's like someone who's trying to eat clean and that you're constantly handing them junk food or right you know and I enjoy social media but I like to make it a designated right time so getting out for for a walk in 20 minutes and put the I would say put the phone put the phone away the whole basis here seems to be allowing your brain to go into kind of if i take it to its logical conclusion to kind of its necessary state to reset yeah maybe this state of getting

into nature and let's call it uh high fractal environments is similar or should be similar to the way that we've started to talk about sleep you know prior Prior to 2015, maybe it was 2018, the notion was sleep when you're dead.

Matt Walker, UC Berkeley, with the book Why We Sleep, transformed what we now understand.

And I and others have been arguing that people need sleep.

Now, I think everyone understands if you don't sleep, your mental health, your physical health, your performance drops dramatically.

You need sleep. And Matt has educated us that you need slow wave sleep.

You need rapid eye movement sleep.

Maybe we also need these high fractal environments and the fact that they come in their best form through walks in nature when we're not doing anything else, just like you wouldn't want to, I don't know, you don't want to bring the phone into the bedroom kind of thing late at night because you're not going to get your deep sleep because you're going to go to sleep too late and then you miss out on the opportunity for deep sleep.

Right. I love the idea that these waking states become better understood as, and perhaps even requirements.

I feel like we understand so much about sleep, slow wave sleep, growth hormone, REM sleep, emotional repair, and everyone now is like, cool, we need sleep.

Here are the different states of sleep.

We actually know very little, it seems, about waking states and the requirement for different waking states.

Because if you stay up all night, you entirely expect to not be at your best the next day.

But I have a feeling that based on your work that we're doing all sorts of things that are making us far less than our natural best. And that some of us who are clinically diagnosed with things, I haven't been clinically diagnosed with ADHD.

If anything, I'd probably veer more towards the OCD side of things when it comes to work.

But my guess is that if we understand and engage in the proper waking states, that our lives are going to improve markedly, that irrespective of whether or not we need medication, I mean, that can only be determined it seems when we're doing the right behavioral things.

Right. So what are your thoughts?

This is a big question, but what are your thoughts on really starting to understand what the different waking states are and our requirements for waking states?

Because I feel like that's pretty much what your work's about.

Yeah. Yeah. That's right.

That's right. And I think, um you know the social media and things on the phone are kind of like the junk food they're just ruining our waking states to a large extent and i think what we're what we're talking a lot about with um this attention restoration theory and walking in nature is that we need breaks you need breaks during your waking time or if like you were talking before that if we want to get into a state where we are going to be able to concentrate well, maybe you have to take the nature walk first to kind of recharge the battery even, you know, right at the beginning of the day.

So I think there's two elements there.

One is that there's a lot of stuff that we're doing during our waking hours that's depleting directed attention.

And we want to mitigate a lot of that stuff.

The other thing is that you can't work 10 hours straight.

I mean, I don't, I mean, maybe some people say they can, but I just don't think people really can direct their attention for 10 hours straight.

I think. Not continuously.

Not continuously. In talking to a lot of writers, um, because I've been working on this book, most writers who are like career writers will say that the most number of hours that they can do really focused writing per day on a regular basis is four.

Yep. And some even say three, some say five, but four seems to be the average.

And that's where their entire day and night is dedicated to creating that four hours, typically in the morning, although some wrote at night, most wrote early in the morning.

And that after four hours, they are saturated.

The brain just can't do it.

Right. So I think there's this element of during our waking hours, protecting directed attention, and then also doing these nature interventions as your breaks i mean i love this i mean i'm big on getting sunlight in the morning i try to see a horizon when i do it yeah the reason i don't talk about that so broadly is many people don't live in environments where they can catch a horizon right and i go up on my roof through a trap door you know and i don't want people falling off the roofs and ebma is what people do with information yeah um at the same time if i don't do that I find it very difficult

to ratchet into work in the same way yeah um I mean I think again to take a step back what I think is so important about your work is that you've identified at least one and and clearly uh several ways that we can reset our levels maybe even improve our abilities that directed attention and again I don't want to demonize social media yeah but social media is it's a commercial product that we're engaging in yeah and we get returns in likes follows and right some people get paid on there but for the most part it's it's a it's a business right um that and we're the customer right and they're the owner

right and i'm just saying it you're it's using directed attention like it's not a restful activity is basically so you can choose to spend your directed attention allocation on that but then you're going to have less stress, you know, for your work or for other things.

So is it fair to say that low cognitive demand activities are not always restorative?

That's right. I think people need to really understand that and hear that.

I think because when I think about like, okay, like yesterday, I recorded a solo on the podcast and those are extremely, I don't use a teleprompter except for ads because those have proper wording for legal reasons.

The amount of attentional demand is is immense right so i didn't do this but in the past i would finish up go home and i would you know i find that scrolling social media it feels relaxed you can do it reclined right if i just want i it's passive participation right unless i'm posting or commenting it's like you know maybe use my thumb yeah you know right like you know uh and like some things but even though it's low cognitive demand it's draining that's what you're saying exactly and i mean that's you know steve and and I wrote this paper back in 2010, you know, then it was still television was still

the kind of low cognitive load activity that we thought was not restful.

And there's all these studies on television that people watching television after they watch for a couple hours, they report being fatigued and being irritable.

Does cognitive performance decline after watching?

Cognitive performance declines.

So it's just, even though it's low cognitive load, it's depleting.

It's depleting of directed attention well i'm really extreme about this stuff and i'm i'm excited to be able to incorporate uh more knowledge toward creating better opportunities for directed attention to the right things and not depleting that i mean i'm so maniacal that like before i do a solo i'll tell my assistant um when he comes to the house in the morning like please don't talk to me today i'm sorry i don't want to be rude but i need to keep rehearsing it in my head yeah i need to keep not the specific words but the concepts right right literally thinking about like the structure of the vagus

nerve yeah i constantly for usually about 48 hours before in the same way that like you would obsess over something right and then once it's done it's done right but anything that's introduced there right like like having to make a decision about what to eat for breakfast yeah is interference right the brain is amazing but we're not that great at using our brain to its best advantage always right yeah or our bodies well put yeah i want to make sure that we get back into this discussion about rumination so you discovered that depressed people ruminate about their problem in nature in a way that allows

them to dump the problem we don't know if depressed if people depression ruminate by the problems we in the experiment we we kind of force them to to ruminate to see if people are in this ruin of state, would nature still have a benefit?

And it turns out that it did.

Now, one thing that we were kind of wondering about is, like, do people just maybe they just think less about their problems in nature than the urban environment?

And we found that wasn't true.

We were also kind of this is actually work that we did with Ethan Cross.

And actually, my my wife, Catherine Kirpin, was also an author in the study.

We also thought maybe that maybe interacting with nature might put you in this more third party distance kind of state.

So instead of saying, you know, Mark is so unhappy or instead of saying I'm so unhappy, you'd say Mark is unhappy.

You know, it's a distant state.

We didn't find evidence of that, too.

It wasn't that people thought about their problems from a more distanced perspective in nature either.

So what I think is happening is I think we just increased their directed attention.

And when you increase directed attention, you're able to do lots of things.

And maybe they could just deal with the ruminations better because they had more cognitive resources to deal with those problems. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, Element.

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You mentioned impulsivity, aggression, and the probability of committing a crime.

You have some data that there are these ways of reducing impulsivity more broadly.

I don't think impulsivity is something that most people think they deal with.

But I'll tell you, if you've ever found yourself picking up your phone just because everyone else did, that's impulsivity.

And by the way, I think perhaps I've been a little bit unfair to social media and I've spared that equally or maybe even more pernicious thing of modern life, which is texting.

I mean it's amazing to me on a plane how hard it is for people to disengage from texting.

And it's also amazing to me how we can all get into like three or four conversations over text or three or four conversations with one person within a text thread.

I mean, if that were converted into like actual dialogue, it'd be crazy.

It would be like switching back and forth between four different conversations.

I mean, that party is nuts.

But in the form of texting, it's like we're doing it.

Are there any data on what texting is doing to directed attention?

I haven't seen any on it.

But again, I would say it's got to be depleting.

There was some interesting work.

actually I think by one of your colleagues at Stanford, Anthony Wagner, who did work on these multimedia multitaskers.

So people that text and are doing email or social media and, you know, something on the computer, like you're using multiple media devices simultaneously.

Does that train attention or does it deplete attention?

And I think those studies quite evident that it it depletes attention.

It's not training people's attention.

It's just depleting their attention.

So I would say, yeah, you know, managing all those conversations is going to be very taxing of directed attention.

Again, I'm not somebody who's totally against smartphones.

I have a smartphone.

I don't do social media, but I do text a lot.

I guess I try not to always be so fast. You know, I say sometimes I'm just going to have my time and not always be so fast to respond.

But it's hard. It's very difficult.

You have to be really mindful and protective of your directed attention.

And people get angry if they have kind of an expectation of response latency, and then you depart from that.

Right. Which is just nerd speak for sometimes I'll text back fast. Sometimes it will take me several weeks or months.

I think that's starting to normalize a little bit out there because of the sheer volume of communication that people are getting.

Right. A few years ago, that was considered rude.

Right. I've heard more and more discussions that I have no, you know, no real knowledge of what the discussions were, but there was a, there's a very popular podcast in particular for women where the host was talking about this the other day.

Someone sent it to me and they're like, oh, it's, it's the, the texting three weeks later thing is, is becoming a norm.

I think some people are just bombarded with text messages.

I guess there are species is really good at creating technologies and then figuring out like, darn, like we need to backtrack a little bit.

Right. Because all the programs to like the program freedom, for instance, which shuts down the internet for a certain interval of time on your computer.

That was great. Hardly anyone uses it.

Yeah. And hardly any of the people i know who used to use it use it anymore forgive me uh freedom designers but it's like it starts to just disappear because the culture drifts in a new way right um and people like cal newport or you who don't have social media or me who put social media on a separate phone and takes a month to reply to a text right unless it's urgent right um we're considered the weirdos yeah so it's it's it's hard but again it's you know i've seen people that like on email Where they'll have an auto reply that just says, I'm not going to respond really quickly or I only respond

to email, you know, at this time and this time, you know, and I think that makes sense, you know, again, because we have to protect our directed attention.

We're just not going to be good functioning humans if we're just constantly being depleted.

I read a study from Wendy Suzuki's lab at NYU a few years ago that people that do 13 minutes a day of mindfulness meditation, so basically sitting or lying down, closing one's eyes, focusing on their breathing and constantly refocusing their attention as it drifts back to a location kind of like right in the middle of their forehead.

head. They observed improvements in memory tasks, but actually decrements in sleep were mentioned there, especially if they did it too late in the day.

And meditation to me always seemed like a focusing exercise.

And so while it's relaxing because you're not jogging or socially engaging, it's cognitively demanding because you have to constantly bring your attention back.

So for many years, we thought of meditation as a reset.

I think of meditation as focus training.

not a reset. What you're talking about with nature walks is a reset.

Yeah. And, uh, it's interesting because yeah, there was a paper, uh, Tang, I can't remember her first name and Michael Posner, they did some meditation results and then they, and they found these kinds of improvements and attention after meditation.

And they're kind of contacting me because I was doing this nature stuff.

And, uh, they're asking me, do you think it's the same mechanism?

And I was saying, no, I don't think it's the same mechanism that, that as as you're saying, Andrew, that this meditation is very, very focused, lots of directed attention, right?

Whereas what I'm talking about in nature is sort of like eliminating the need for any directed attention, that it's all just kind of mind -wandering and involuntary attention.

So I think even though maybe you can get some of the same results at the end, I think they're very different mechanisms. What I do find fascinating is that I think in a lot of ancient meditation meditation practices, often they try to do it in beautiful nature.

And I wonder if they knew something that actually they could meditate better in this beautiful nature because while they were using directed attention to meditate, being immersed in the beautiful nature was also sort of restoring directed attention at the same time.

So I do kind of wonder sometimes if maybe combining them, you could get some really interesting results.

But exactly, you know, being a nature to me is not a meditative process.

It's a much more passive kind of cognitive process.

So I think we need to distinguish between passive and restorative and passive and depleting.

And it should be obvious which things fall into which categories.

And then there are things that that are perhaps passive and restorative, but go beyond restorative.

They might even be passive, restorative, and cognitive enhancing when you get back to work, back to focused attention on the real stuff.

And then, the scary thought, which is probably true, based on just real world observation, is that passive and depleting activities, when you repeat them over time, aren't just taking away your ability to engage directed attention later that day or the next day, but that over time, the circuitry for directed attention in the brain is probably subject to plasticity in both directions.

This is something that I've long been obsessed with.

Every neural circuit that we are aware of is available for plasticity.

It requires focus, it requires alertness, and it requires sleep.

Those are the requirements, right?

But it's also possible that the circuits for focus focus can strengthen.

So you can get better at focusing by focusing.

I certainly see that.

The more I do focused work, the better I get at it, the longer I can do it.

There's a threshold there.

But also if I take time away from it for a while, it gets, yes, I can replenish, but just like exercise, eventually you start to atrophy.

And it could be that passive and depleting stuff, repeated for enough years, kind of brings you to a state of like really true ADHD.

adhd yeah maybe like maybe you fall into clinical adhd that probably existed before but maybe we see it so much more now because people i mean this is the equivalent of mental obesity yeah basically right or mental metabolic syndrome i don't know let's just be direct mental obesity right if you don't exercise enough for long enough yeah chances are you're going to end up overweight or obese yeah certainly with metabolic syndrome yeah and unfortunately too you know like these technology things are addictive and and you know most addictions just are not healthy right so um then it's hard to get

out once you start um that is an interesting term mental obesity um there was this interesting paper that kind of looked at how our collective intelligent how our collective attention span has sort of changed they've looked at just a short time window but like uh tweet hashtags you know maybe they used to last for 40 hours you know be popular Now it's down to 20 hours.

Move if you look at movie ticket sales, like the best, you know, the most popular movies, they were more popular, most probably for three months.

Now it's like one and a half months.

Like, it's just maybe our collective attention span is kind of shrinking a little bit.

And we've kind of been wondering, like, does that does that mean has our like individual directed attention kind of shrunk a little bit?

or is there just, you know, too many other possibilities that we're just too overwhelmed that that's causing that.

But it is something that is a bit worrisome that, you know, it's not just that we're having a lot of things, and I'm speculating now, it's not just that we have a lot of things vying for our directed attention, but if we're being so bombarded so much, and as you say, we're kind of getting into these bad modes of thinking, could our directed attention span band actually shrink.

I believe it can and it is out there.

I mean, to borrow from the mighty David Goggins, who's kind of the, I don't know if you're familiar with David, but author of Can't Hurt Me, and he's been on this podcast and a real proponent of doing hard things every single day, not because he wants to do them, but precisely because he doesn't want to do them, you know, forcing upon himself like real discipline.

He's emblematic of that.

He's also said, and this should be reassuring to people that nowadays it's easier than ever to be exceptional because all you have to do is overcome the urge to be on your phone as much run a bit more i mean maybe what we're going to select for the people who who are very organized about their engagement with phones and social media i mean i will say coming from the bay area i know a number of people who work for and have founded very large social media platforms they're not on their phones all day Right.

They're definitely not.

And their kids aren't either.

Their kids aren't either.

So you're a father of four.

Yeah. Are there things that you do with your kids to encourage the build up and reinforcement of these circuits?

Certainly their brains are still plastic.

And a lot of people listening to this have kids or are kids and would like to know what they should do.

Is it exactly what adults should do?

You know, so I try to practice what I preach. It's hard because all of their friends have the technologies, too.

My oldest daughter does have a smartphone, but she doesn't have any social media.

She uses it mostly to text her friends and play Duolingo or something like that.

You know, I try to get them to go out in nature as much as possible.

Sometimes they're hesitant or, Dad, they don't want to do it.

But we definitely try to get them outside as much as possible.

And even, you know, when we get to go on vacation once in a while, my wife's family, we're fortunate they have like a little cabin in northern Ontario that we go to.

And there's really no internet there or anything.

And the kids are just running around with their cousins and playing in the lake and, you know, doing just normal kid things.

things. And, you know, I think you've had Jonathan Haidt on the podcast, and he kind of talked about this.

And he said, you know, the kids have to have more free play.

And the thing that I would just kind of add to what Jonathan is saying, I would say you want them to have more free play in nature.

And we want them getting out in nature more.

And I think, you know, back to Goggins was his name?

David Goggins. David Goggins.

I do agree, too, that we should do hard things.

things um and i think taking breaks in nature actually allows us to do more hard things that's you know just like you can't lift weights continuously all day long every day you got to rest and you got to take good rest and i think the nature breaks are the good mental rest which is going to allow you then to later do the heavy cognitive work better so but many of us are not taking good rest breaks we're taking bad rest breaks and i think if we can eliminate those bad rest breaks and substitute in the good nature rest breaks, people are just going to be much healthier cognitively, physically, you

know, socially. Well, I'm going to offer something controversial, but with a purpose.

I did an episode on alcohol about basically the conclusion was zero is better than any and two a week is probably fine.

And yes, it's poison and remains one of our most popular episodes but even though I'm not a drinker you have to kind of wonder whether the kind of doing away with happy hour which by the way used to be every day at the end of work right created this gap for passive depleting stuff to come in and it kind of raises This is this question of like, well, was happy hour restorative?

And just to give people a clear sense of how pervasive happy hour with alcohol was, when I first was a graduate student at Berkeley and was at Tolman Hall.

So first I was at Berkeley and then I did a second graduate degree elsewhere.

But when I was at Tolman Hall, there was this library in the psychology building.

And I was told that up until just three years before, so that was in 1998.

it was customary for people to gather in the library for drinks every day at the end of the day.

And that for many, many decades prior, the founders of this, of Frank Beach and all those guys used to get together and get like really drunk at the end of each day and go home, walk home, hopefully not drive home, and then spend time with their families and then get up the next morning, drink coffee and go back to work.

And so, you know, alcohol culture, drinking culture sure right was a big part of how people socialize and decompress at the end of the day we know it's not good for you you'll live a shorter life um and has a bunch of other issues with it and what happens when people drink together etc that can often not be good but the point here is I think for many people who have families but especially who don't have families The number of healthy ways to reset in the evening, to reset on a weekend in non -destructive ways, it has become more limited.

In part because what's offered to us as passive restoration, I'm realizing today is passive depletion.

So do we bring back happy hour?

Maybe with non -alcoholic beverages or something like that.

The happy hour is probably good socially, but I'm not sure it was so good for directed attention.

Do they still do a happy hour in your department?

You're chair of a department at University of Chicago.

They used to do graduate student happy hour every Friday when I was a graduate student and a volleyball game.

And then people would go out to dinner.

And this was prior to smartphones.

Right as smartphones showed up because 2000 was when I started my PhD.

And it was really nice.

I didn't always go.

So I was often in lab late working.

But I would go sometimes.

I feel like being on one's phone is not that.

It's not a volleyball game with friends.

It was a friendly volleyball game, meaning if you weren't good at volleyball, people didn't give you a hard time.

And then people would go out for dinner and drinks.

Right. We do do happy hours once in a while.

I think it's kind of funny.

After COVID, I kind of felt like students didn't always know how to interact with faculty anymore.

There was kind of this weird dynamic.

So the happy hours have been kind of a good way to kind of reset and, you know, show that we're all colleagues and, you know, kind of help students to interact more with faculty and faculty to interact more with students.

I think one thing, you know, about the reset is, I didn't say this, but I think the going in nature also has to be solitary to really get the benefit.

If you're going with a friend, you're going to be chit -chatting with the friend, that's going to take directed attention.

When I take my kids in nature, it's good for my kids, but I don't count that as necessarily a restorative experience for me.

You're tracking their positions.

You've got four little ones, so that's your evolutionary task, you know.

So I have to carve out time where I can go on my own.

And I think, you know, there's different buckets.

I think there's a bucket for, you know, getting the good social interaction.

So I don't, I'm not advocating that people do like throw and you build a cabin in the woods and you're just there solo.

I'm kind of more advocating for these kind of micro doses of nature to kind of bump directed attention up.

Can you bring a dog?

I think a dog would work well.

A dog doesn't require conversation.

No words, no language.

You know, as long as the dog is pretty well -behaved, I think that would work, too.

And dogs, you know, in some sense, that's also kind of—I mean, we're part of nature.

Dogs are part of nature.

And, you know, some elements to me, too.

I think dogs are kind of softly fascinating and interesting.

But I do think these nature—to get the really most bang for your buck for these nature experiences they do have to be solitary all right so minimum 20 minutes uh but perhaps on the weekend you can get out for longer if you can't do it every day because i i'm not gonna say i can't but i think many people aren't going to manage 20 minutes in nature every single day by themselves right but if you can it sounds like a terrific thing to do and certainly people are going to start thinking about new concepts like soft fascination and directed attention and the the ability to restore directed attention if something

is actually restorative versus passively depleting.

Right. I want to make sure that I ask you about stroke, diabetes, and heart disease.

You have some really interesting data that people who take on this practice of getting into nature can actually improve their health outcomes beyond just being able to focus better.

Right. So there's, you know, there's all this incredible work on physical health benefits of nature.

Now, of course, mind and body are united.

And, you know, that's one thing that we talk about in the book, that it's mind, body are united, and then we have to deal with the environment, too.

But it's interesting that there have been these studies about these incredible physical health benefits that people get from interacting with nature.

And one of the most incredible ones, I don't know if you're familiar with this, Andrew, was a study done by Roger Alrick in the 1980s.

And what Roger Alrick was looking at was a hospital corridor in this hospital in Philadelphia.

and he looked at in these hospital rooms what view that they have out of the window of these hospital rooms and some of the hospital rooms had views of modest nature like tree and some shrubs others were just looking out to a brick wall and it was interesting that um patients who are recovering from gallbladder surgery when they had the view of nature out of their window, this modest view of nature, they recovered from gallbladder surgery a day earlier and they use less pain medication compared to the people that had the view of the brick wall.

And what's cool about this study is that it wasn't, you know, Ulrich didn't have the power to randomly put people in different rooms, but essentially patients were just randomly put into these different hospital rooms. So it's not like healthier people got the views of nature or wealthier people got the views of nature, these patients were just randomly placed into these different hospital rooms. And the ones that have the modest view of nature recovered faster from gallbladder surgery and used less pain medication.

And you got to be thinking, what's up with that?

Like, what's the mechanism there?

I don't think it's air quality.

I don't think the people with the views of nature somehow exercised more.

There's something about the aesthetic of nature that can also be physically healing.

I mean, that's pretty wild.

We kind of followed up on that in a study that we did in Toronto, which was kind of cool.

We had health data from about 30 ,000 people in Toronto.

And then we had two incredible data sets to quantify green space space in people's neighborhoods, then we then could relate to health.

So the University of Toronto Forestry Department had a data set where they cataloged every single tree on public land in the city of Toronto.

So we had data for 580 ,000 trees in the city of Toronto.

We knew the species of the tree and the diameter of the tree at breast height, basically saying how old the tree was.

was and then my student omid cardan calculated basically how much tree canopy each individual tree provided then we had this other data set that was satellite imagery of the whole city of toronto where we could quantify all the other trees that were like in people's backyards or something like that and from those data we basically related health the health data to the tree data and we found uh so for one variable is subjective so how healthy do people uh think they are how healthy do they feel and we found that uh if you just added one tree on their city block that was related to a one percent

increase in people's health perception now that sounds pretty modest but to get that equivalent benefit monetarily you'd have to give give everybody in that neighborhood $10 ,000 and have them move to a neighborhood that had a median income that was $10 ,000 wealthier, or it was also related with being seven years younger.

And again, the tree effect was controlling for age, education, and income.

So that was pretty interesting.

We also had data on more objective health measures.

Does somebody have a stroke?

Do they have diabetes or heart disease?

And there we found if you increased the amount of trees on the street by one tree per neighborhood, that was related to a 1 % reduction in stroke, diabetes, and heart disease.

Again, sounds pretty modest. But to get that equivalent benefit monetarily, you'd have to give every household in that neighborhood $20 ,000, have them all move to a neighborhood that's $20 ,000 wealthier, or it was also related to being one and a half years younger.

So pretty incredible.

Again, I can't say causality because because it's correlational.

But I'm fairly confident in the direction because we're the worst case scenario is just healthier people choose to live in neighborhoods that have more trees, but they can't be younger.

They can't be wealthier.

They can't be more educated because we controlled for that.

Now, for that study, maybe the mechanism could be air quality, or maybe the mechanism could be, you know, maybe people are more willing to exercise if there's more trees on the street.

But pretty incredible stuff that just increasing the tree canopy a little bit, you could get these physical health benefits.

That is impressive.

For people that don't have the opportunity to plant more trees in their neighborhood, would getting and tending to an indoor plant have any positive effects?

So people have found some effects of having having indoor plants.

Not necessarily to these physical health benefits, but there's some attention benefits of having indoor greenery.

There's also been some benefits, like hospitals now are starting to take this seriously, that patients subjectively feel better when there's this greenery around.

I've seen other work too that people that are having some procedures that are very painful uh that actually bringing greenery into the hospital rooms can be helpful for reducing feelings of pain interesting yeah yeah i'm about to embark on putting a bunch of plants in my place i'm also a big fan of fish tanks as long as you take good care of them underwater scapes are really cool yes and i like to think i don't have any data on this but I like to think that they are passive and restorative.

Staring at a fish tank is a lot like being in a dream.

Yeah. In Toronto, there's a Ripley's Aquarium, and they have this tank that's got kelp.

Oh, yeah. And you can see the kelp kind of moving in the water.

It definitely feels very restorative.

And watching the fish swim around also feels very, very restorative.

Yeah, the feeling that might be familiar to people that visited, for instance, the Monterey Bay Aquarium or this aquarium that you're describing is when the tanks are at eye level or higher, it puts you into this other world, right?

Like you're at the bottom of the ocean or you're in the ocean.

But the feeling that's always striking to me is when you leave an aquarium and you're out into the real world again, it feels so different.

It's what you take away from it that's equally interesting.

In the same way that when you walk out of a really great movie, the world feels different.

Yes. It feels lighter, brighter.

It's, of course, physically brighter, but there's really something to it, the contrast between experiences, which is so much of what we're talking about today.

I think a lot of people who have some aesthetic sense will be familiar with the experience of seeing a building or walking into a space and like, oh, this feels good.

Or this doesn't feel right.

And sometimes they can point to the clutter or the lack of whatever it is.

Some people are more design -oriented.

What's this phrase?

It's the feng shui, right?

What do we know about nature and physical spaces and how they impact how we feel or even how we think?

Yeah. It's a really interesting question.

And there's a couple of interesting things that we've done that's related to this.

So one design concept that people talk about quite a bit now is this idea of biophilic design.

So kind of trying to mimic patterns of nature and architecture um and like you can imagine like a gaudy building in barcelona that's got all the curves and you know gaudy was trying to mimic um nature in a lot of his buildings and people really like that kind of architecture and uh so we collaborated with this architect alex coburn and we basically um took a bunch of building facades and had people basically look at these facades and rate how much they like these buildings and building interiors.

And we also had them do this kind of game on the computer where we'd show them a few of these architectural scenes on the screen, and they'd have to move them around, like lumping the ones that are most similar together together and lumping different ones somewhere else.

And when we analyzed the data, we saw something really interesting, which is that people kind of lumped together a lot of this architecture that had a lot of the fractal patterns kind of on one side and other kinds of architecture that was kind of more, you know, brutalist with the straight lines kind of on the the other side.

And when we had people, actually another set of people rate these images for how natural they thought they were, people were actually using naturalness to make these similarity judgments, suggesting that even in an architectural scene, people will like see nature in a building and it may not even be conscious.

And they like that kind of architecture better.

They find it more comforting.

And so, you know, again, when we're kind of talking about like a nature revolution like we do in the book, it's maybe not just even about putting real nature in, but even building spaces, trying to mimic the patterns of nature that might also have some benefits.

So we found that to be pretty interesting.

Another student of mine, Kate Schertz, led another set of studies where we collaborated with this foundation that was called TKF Foundation.

Now it's called Nature Sacred.

And this was a foundation that built many parks in the Baltimore, D .C., Annapolis, Maryland area.

And they built like 100 of these parks.

And what they also do in these parks is they would put a bench, this characteristic bench in the park, and underneath the bench was a journal.

and people could write things in the journal and so I found this foundation and I got a small grant from them to do some research with them and they actually transcribed all these journal entries digitally and we also had pictures of these parks and so one thing that we did is we ran a topic model on these journal entries trees to kind of see what are some themes that people are talking about.

And people, a lot of these parks were actually near churches or hospitals.

So people wrote concepts related to religion.

They wrote things about nature.

And they also wrote things related to spirituality.

So one analysis that we did, we also had another set of people rate the parks for how natural they were based on the pictures.

And we found that if the park was rated as being more natural, people actually wrote more about things related to naturalness okay not too surprising but a nice sanity check what was even more surprising is with computer vision algorithms we could quantify the amount of curved edges in these park pictures and it turns out if the park had more curved edges in it people wrote more about topics related to spirituality and their life journey wild pretty wild it gets wilder so that was very correlational and we kind of found you know like I don't know maybe there's some kind of confounding variables

there so we did another study where we actually manipulated uh we had images that had more curved edges or less curved edges and also images that were more natural and less natural and we did an online study where we would show people one image image and then had them select like, when you look at this image, do you think it's related more to nature or time or spirituality?

And it turns out if the picture had more curved edges in it, people were more likely to say, yeah, this picture kind of has me thinking about spirituality in my life journey.

So that's causal. It gets even crazier because we were kind of wondering, you know, when we looked at some of the images, we were thinking, you know, some of the images that don't have as much curved edge structure, they have more water in them.

So maybe there's like something about having water that maybe makes you think less about spirituality.

You know, I don't know if I believe that, but maybe there's something in there.

So we did something even crazier.

We took these images and we scrambled them.

So we would like, we have this image and it looks like, you know, a park with trees and some water.

And then we scramble all the pixels and now you can't really tell what it is anymore.

It just looks kind of like a Jackson Pollock painting.

It turns out if those scrambled images have more curved edges, people also say they think more about spirituality and their life journey.

So there's something, you know, we don't know the mechanism, but there's something interesting there about just perceiving these curved edges that has people thinking more more about spirituality so it can't be object related because they're scrambled that's right this is almost reminiscent of this connect the dot experiment where if the dots are more distantly uh placed it seems to trigger some different form of cognition related to creativity right if nothing else um it's becoming increasingly clear that visual scenes have a profound impact on our cognition, and I don't even know what brain network

to think of when we think about spirituality, probably somewhere down in the temporal lobe, because if you don't know where something is in the brain, you almost always say it's down the infrotemporal lobe, where all the other sort of mysterious stuff is.

Super interesting. This also tells me that I need to introduce more curved edges to my home environment.

And people seem to really like curved edges, And even they find that in other species, that other species tend to prefer curvature and curved edges.

If you had a magic wand and you could wave that magic wand and have people change one, maybe two behaviors on a daily and weekly basis, on the basis of everything that you've learned from your work and related work, what would you wish with that wand?

Yeah. I think I would.

So I think in a couple of things.

So one, I would just the easy one is just people need to get out into nature more and they need to do it, especially when they kind of feel mentally fatigued.

I think that's easier than saying, you know, get off of the devices.

It's not going to happen.

Right. Not entirely.

Not entirely. So I think, you know, forget about that for a moment.

Go out in nature and do it without your phone and be engaged with it.

And if you don't have access to nature, try these simulations.

Bring nature into your home.

You can even have fake plants in your home.

There's been some evidence that even fake plants can work.

You know, get some nature sounds going.

Maybe think about where you're going to take your next vacation.

maybe think about going to a national park or something like that so that's one thing the other thing and you know is kind of building up kind of you know in the book i kind of want to start this nature revolution where we're really take this work seriously and i think part of it is that i think everybody has this intuition that nature is good for us but it's sort of like it's an amenity not a necessity you know it'd be nice to have but we don't really need it and i think I think if I wanted to wave my magic wand, I would want to change that to actually know nature.

These experiences are a necessity, not an amenity.

And it's not just a necessity because of climate change and things like that.

It's a necessity for us as humans to reach our full potential.

We can't reach our full potential without nature.

So I think that's another critical element.

And then I think when people start feeling it and feeling the effects, then I think we need to start changing a lot of things like, you know, schools, like they want to take away recess and they want to take away playtime outside, right?

Right. And that's almost exactly counter to what I would recommend.

I would recommend that we actually want to have more recess and more recess out in nature that, you know, think about this, Andrew, what if this would be incredible?

But what if, you know, school is like an eight hour day?

What if instead of eight hours of instruction, it was six hours of instruction and two hours of a nature break?

I'd go back to school.

Well, kids might perform better.

I mean, it might be—it actually might be revolutionary.

Kids might actually perform better.

Now, you know, sometimes people talk to me about nature schools and like doing all the learning in nature.

Like I'm not so sure about that, like doing calculus when wind is blowing my papers around.

But definitely to take a break out in nature, you know, give the kids a break in nature.

They might actually learn more.

You know, it might be this win -win kind of thing where they would actually learn more from less.

Same thing with work.

You know, we would need to redesign schedules around work that, you know, maybe your employees will be more productive if you can give them some of these nature breaks.

breaks. And then, you know, I want to start building out from that.

It's like, we have not built the built environment to improve people's psychological wellbeing, right?

We basically built the built environment to move goods efficiently, house people efficiently.

But when have you ever been in a place where they're like, you know, we built this school to increase people's directed attention, or we built this school to make people more cooperative.

What What we're finding is that interacting with nature kind of does both things.

So we need we need people.

I mean, there are architects that are starting to do this, but we need to incorporate these natural elements into all built spaces.

And then I think, you know, going on even more is that in a city, you want to jam as much nature as possible into cities.

And I love cities. Cities are great.

They're beacons of innovation, wealth.

wealth. We even find that bigger cities have lower racial biases, and we actually find that depression is lower in bigger cities per capita.

But we can do a lot more.

And I think by kind of naturizing cities can be really, really beneficial.

And then, you know, a lot of people don't live in cities, but, you know, I have family that live in rural areas.

And often, yeah, they're surrounded by nature, but it's not really nature they can use.

You know, it might be more agricultural.

So I think even in these more rural places, you need to think about, hey, is the nature that's actually there really usable for people to get restoration?

Listen, I absolutely love the work you're doing.

I especially love it because it's grounded in data, right?

It's grounded in laboratory data and it's grounded in real world data.

And I just asked you for two and I'm actually very gratified that you offered six.

I think that's very much the sort of answers I tend to give, I'm going to ask you one question, but I end up asking you four.

So that's not just welcome.

It's invited and encouraged here.

I think the work you're doing is extremely important because it's highlighting these principles of brain function and psychological health that are unaware to most people about themselves and others.

Certainly, even as a neuroscientist, I like to think of myself as psychologically minded.

I mean, this notion of passive but depleting just has never occurred to me until I got familiar with your work.

and more so during today's conversation, I also am delighted, believe it or not, that you didn't use the word forest bathing.

I guess that's two words.

And I want to be very clear.

It's not because I don't think forest bathing is a wonderful concept.

I mean, what is more lovely than bathing in a forest?

I imagine, you know, people maybe with clothes, minimal clothes, maybe no clothes, who knows, in the forest, greenery everywhere.

And we've heard of this incredible set of discoveries and this concept from Japanese laboratories about forest bathing.

But the problem with the term forest bathing is that it implies you need a forest. Right.

And it implies that you need to bathe, which sounds like a vacation.

It sounds like something that you really have to devote a ton of time to.

And so I'm a big fan of forest bathing as a concept and as a practice.

But I really appreciate that your work is focused on what what people can do in a real practical sense as we bring more nature into cities, into homes, into rural areas that's accessible.

Hopefully people will forest bathe, continue to or go out and forest bathe.

But what you're talking about is very practical and very feasible for people to get 20 minutes alone, nature walk, maybe with a dog, maybe just alone, disconnect as a way to be able to engage focused attention better.

Or who knows, maybe just to get back into life and enjoy Enjoy non -focused attention, hanging out with your kids or your spouse or whatever it might be, friends.

So very excited about the book, which comes out soon.

We'll put a link to the book in the show note captions, of course.

And I'm delighted you're doing this work and that you're going to continue to do this work, even though you have the unfortunate honor of being a chair, which basically means you get a lot of administrative duties.

You've still kept up your research and are continuing to.

too. So if ever there was an example of where research can really be put to practical use for people and the book is helping disseminate that, certainly this conversation will as well.

It's you and what you're doing.

So thank you. I really appreciate it.

And come back again and update us on the latest data when there are more data.

Great. Thanks so much for having me on the podcast. Great.

Will do. And I'll get into nature today.

Great. Thank you. Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Mark Berman.

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[The Science of Nature: How Environment Restores Cognitive Function and Focus]-[How Nature & Other Physical Environments Impact Your Focus, Cognition & Health | Dr. Marc Berman]

📋 Summary

The Science of Nature: Restoring Cognitive Resources

The Problem: Directed Attention Fatigue

The Solution: Soft Fascination and Nature

Actionable Protocols for Cognitive Restoration

Long-term Health Impacts

Conclusion

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript