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Paul Rand: Have you ever finished a binge watching session and somehow you feel worse than when you started…when you thought you were gonna be relaxed? You're wiped after work, you crash on the couch, you hit play on your favorite show and you think you're gonna relax. But later, all you feel is actually more drained. What's going on here?
Marc Berman: A lot of studies have shown that watching a lot of TV or streaming things on the internet is actually fatiguing and people report feeling very irritable and distracted, you know, after watching television or streaming.
Paul Rand: Well, meet Mark Berman, a professor of psychology at the University of Chicago. And in the last few years, well, since the invention of the smartphone, really, he's become obsessed with the science of attention.
Marc Berman: Things like that that we think are all activities that kind of deplete our directed attention.
Paul Rand: We often mistake attention and focus for being just one thing, but the research has shown that there are actually many different kinds of attention, and the most important might be something he calls directed attention.
Marc Berman: Directed attention is where we as an individual person are choosing where to pay attention to and that that ability is sort of fatigable or depletable. We can only do it for so long.
Paul Rand: So if it's depletible...and doing the things we normally think of relaxing doesn't help, how do we replenish it? Well, to discover an answer, Berman had to invent a whole new field, environmental neuroscience. And the secret he found had to do with nature.
Marc Berman: You know, being in parks and green spaces near trees, we're finding in a lot of our studies that interacting with that kind of stimulation can be really good for our brains and really good our subsequent behavior.
Paul Rand: Berman became famous for a research project that you might have actually heard of before. It's called the “Walk in the Park Study”, and it's simple but really powerful. People were given a test of their attention and their focus. One group took a walk in nature, while another went through an urban environment. But once they got back, they took another test. The people who walked in nature performed exceptionally better. And this result has been replicated over and over again.
Marc Berman: People have also found that brief walks in nature for kids with ADHD are as good as about a dose of Ritalin.
Paul Rand: And it doesn't even matter if the nature walk was enjoyable. Even during a freezing winter in January, people who spent time in nature gained measurable benefits in attention and focus.
Marc Berman: People walking in nature in the winter months get the same cognitive benefit as people walking in the summer months. So again, it's not, people aren't getting these cognitive benefits because they just like nature and therefore their mood is better and they show better cognitive improvement. There's something more, there's something deeper going on. It's not about liking.
Paul Rand: It's also not just attention benefits. Berman's studies have shown that time spent in nature can have psychological benefits for mental health issues too.
Marc Berman: Now you have doctors in the UK and in Canada will actually prescribe nature walks for patients suffering from depression and anxiety.
Paul Rand: And even physical benefits on cardiovascular health and how quickly people recover from injuries.
Marc Berman: If you've got this stimulation out your window, that's good for your brain, good for attention, that potentially could have healing qualities. So that's just really amazing.
Paul Rand: Now, Berman has put everything he's learned into a new book, Nature and the Mind, and he wants us to use what they're discovering in environmental neuroscience to redesign the way we construct our cities, our homes, and our lives in general.
Marc Berman: You don't often hear people say, you know, wow, that building really made my working memory or my attention better. Wow. You know, going to this school and the structure of the school made me more cooperative. And I think what we're learning is that there's a lot of aspects of the physical environment that can increase our attention, can increase our memory, can increase our cooperation. And one of the physical elements, environments that tend to do that tends to be these natural environments.
Paul Rand: From the University of Chicago Podcast Network, welcome to Big Brains, the show where we explore the groundbreaking research and discoveries that are transforming our world. I'm your host, Paul Rand. Join me as we meet the minds behind the breakthroughs. On today's episode: the science of how nature improves cognitive, physical and social wellbeing.
Paul Rand: All right. Well, super. Well, Marc, I actually was kind of hoping you’d be sitting in the middle of a forest today, but not so lucky.
Marc Berman: Yeah, I can’t get the wifi there.
Paul Rand: All right. Got you, got you. Well, one of the things that we are definitely hearing a lot of talk about is the lack of attention that we all have these days and that whether it’s social media or the many demands on our attention, it is radically impacting what we do and how we pay attention, but also how we interact with each other.
Marc Berman: We think attention is just really critical, and I think a lot of people understand that attention’s important, but I think when people talk about attention, they think about kids wiggling in their chairs, not able to focus in school or maybe not being able to focus at work. But we think that attention is sort of critical to good human functioning kind of more globally, that in order to be less impulsive, in order to meet your goals, in order to plan well for the future, you need to have a lot of attention. And one of the reasons why we think interacting with nature is beneficial is that we think that interacting with nature can restore our ability to direct attention.
So one of my mentors, Steve Kaplan, he came up with this idea of attention restoration theory, that humans kind of have two kinds of attention. One kind of attention is called directed attention, where you as individual person decide what you’re going to pay attention to. So presumably, Paul, you’re deciding to pay attention to what I’m saying, but you could probably find other things in the environment that are more interesting than what I’m saying. And it’s not-
Paul Rand: That’s not true in the slightest, Marc, whatsoever.
Marc Berman: Unfortunately, this ability of humans to direct their attention, we think is fatigable or depletable, that we can only sort of focus our attention or direct our attention for so long, that’s different from another 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. We don’t really have a lot of control over that. So the idea is if we can find environments that don’t place a lot of demands on directed attention while simultaneously activating this involuntary attention, we might be able to restore or replenish this precious directed attention resource.
Paul Rand: One of the quotes that you talk about is that directed attention is central to our humanity. So if indeed that’s true, are we at risk if we pay less attention to something that’s central to our humanity?
Marc Berman: Yes. Some of the telltale signs of fatigued directed attention are irritability, being unable to concentrate, people might be getting a little bit more aggressive, not having a lot of impulse control. So we think it could underlie a lot of different problems if you’re not giving yourself these breaks that involve involuntary attention. If you’re constantly trying to push directed attention to its limit, there’s going to be consequences to that.
Paul Rand: Okay. I’m going to go deeper in just a moment on this concept of interacting with nature, but I want to get another baseline term onto the table here. And this is one that you also spend a lot of time talking about, which is soft fascination. Can you expand on that for me a little bit?
Marc Berman: Yeah, absolutely. So there’s two kinds of ways to activate involuntary attention. So one way which we call soft fascination would be like if I look at a waterfall, it’s really interesting. It captures my attention. I typically don’t say, “Wow, I’m too tired. I can’t look at that waterfall anymore.” Our involuntary attention is automatically captured by that waterfall, but you can still kind of mind wander and think about other things while you’re looking at the waterfall. If I’m walking in Times Square, wow, that’s also really fascinating, really interesting. It captures my involuntary attention, but it sort of does so in a very harsh or all-consuming way.
Paul Rand: Got it.
Marc Berman: I can’t really mind wander or think about other things while I’m in Times Square. So we think it’s critical that the kind of stimulation that captures involuntary attention to be softly fascinating, and we think that many natural stimulation like waterfalls, rivers, leaves swaying in the wind. One thing I guess I would say too is that nature is not necessarily only kind of stimulation that might be softly fascinating. It’s possible walking through a museum with really beautiful artwork could be softly fascinating. Maybe going through the symphony, it could be softly fascinating. Maybe even reading certain books or something like that could be softly fascinating.
Marc Berman: So as any kind of activity that sort of activates involuntary attention in ways that aren’t sort of all-consuming. The other thing that I think is important is that we don’t want to mix soft fascination with preference. So when we do some of our studies, people say, “Well, I don’t really like nature very much.” But they can still show improvements in their attention after interacting with nature. So you don’t really even have to like the nature or necessarily like the softly fascinating stimulation to kind of get this benefit.
Paul Rand: But the thing about softly fascinating is me sitting in the dark is not softly fascinating. That may be relaxing, but it’s not softly fascinating. So that’s not going to cut it, is it?
Marc Berman: No. And in fact, Tim Wilson and Dan Gilbert and some other people did some studies where they had people sit in a room alone, and people really hate that. In fact, some of the students in their studies were willing to administer themselves electric shocks to not be alone with their thoughts. So sitting in a dark room is boring and boredom is fatiguing. So this process of soft fascination is an active process. We’re not saying don’t do anything.
Paul Rand: But you said something that I want to pull on a second. Many people you said are so uncomfortable being alone with their own thoughts that they’d rather give themselves an electric shock. Tell me about that. And I’m not surprised, but you don’t really ever hear it articulated that way.
Marc Berman: There could be a lot of reasons for that. Oftentimes when we’re kind of in quiescence, you might start to ruminate and think about problems and things like that, but that can actually be useful. And being in a constant state of distraction might be beneficial for short periods of time when something bad happens. If you have a breakup or you do poorly on an exam, maybe it’s good to distract yourself in those moments for a little while. But distraction only works in the short term. It doesn’t work in the long term. It’s kind of interesting that we’ve done studies with participants who have clinical depression, and we thought initially, “Well, maybe if you send a person who’s got depression on a walk alone, they’re just going to ruminate on their problems and they’re going to be worse off.” But we actually found just the opposite, that the results were even stronger for participants with clinical depression and it wasn’t-
Paul Rand: On the positive side stronger.
Marc Berman: On the positive side. Yes. And it wasn’t that they were not thinking about their problems. It may be that, again, when you go out in nature, if you’re restoring your directed attention, you may be giving yourself the cognitive resources necessary to kind of think about your problems. And it takes resources, it takes energy, it takes cognitive energy to think about these problems.
What are the mental health benefits of nature?
Paul Rand: We talked a little bit about folks that were either not depressed or depressed going and taking the walks and being in nature, but you also really dig into this idea that the benefits, there are mental health benefits, not just attention benefits of coming from a walk in nature. Explain those a little bit more for me.
Marc Berman: Yeah. And we think that it’s all kind of tied together. So people with depression have really strong attentional problems. It’s very hard for people with depression to focus. And so when we did our study with participants with depression, we actually found that their attention and their working memory performance increased quite a bit after the walk in nature, maybe breaking this kind of ruminative cycle that they’re sort of in.
Paul Rand: The linkage between nature and health is not necessarily a new concept. I know you talked about in your book even a study back in the ‘70s with a man named Ulrich.
Marc Berman: Yes.
Paul Rand: And there was also some studies done on cancer and health.
Marc Berman: Yes.
Paul Rand: And walking in nature. Can you talk about those a little bit?
Marc Berman: Yeah. So the Roger Ulrich study is really amazing. So Roger Ulrich, this was a study in the 1980s. He looked at a single hospital corridor in a Philadelphia hospital, and the rooms along this corridor have different views. Some of them have views of modest nature, like some trees and some shrubs. Others have views of the hospital turning in, so they get a view of a brick wall.
Paul Rand: Got it.
Marc Berman: And what Ulrich found is that patients who are recovering from gallbladder surgery, if they had the view of nature out their window, they recovered from gallbladder surgery a day earlier and they used less pain medication than the people who had the views of the brick wall. Patients are just randomly assigned to the different rooms.
Paul Rand: Right, right.
Marc Berman: They don’t really get to choose what rooms they’re going into. So it’s not like people who are wealthier or healthier or more educated get the nature views. And yet these views had a significant impact on healing. The question there is what in the world is the mechanism? It’s not likely that it was about air quality or exercising or something else. It’s something about the aesthetic of nature, processing that aesthetic of nature has these healing benefits. So again, it’s this strong mind and body are very connected, hospital designers are taking Roger’s work seriously, and they’re trying to get more nature into hospitals, but of course you have to make sure that the hospital is clean and things like that.
Paul Rand: Of course.
Marc Berman: But I think it’s a really, really important topic. Bernadine Cimprich, she’s done studies with breast cancer patients and she found patients recovering from chemotherapy. If they went in nature, I think again, she was doing about two hours a week, that could be gardening or walking in nature, these participants recovered faster from what’s called chemo brain, which is like this brain fog that people typically get after undergoing chemotherapy. So their attention was much better after interacting with nature. They were more likely to start new projects. They also had less marital conflict when they were interacting with nature versus the control group that was just doing leisure activities like crossword puzzles and things like that.
Paul Rand: And I thought about this specifically as I saw your point, the idea of simply having 11 more trees per city block is a 1% decrease in really cardio metabolic conditions that lead to stress.
Marc Berman: Yes. So in a study that we did in Toronto, we had a dataset, an incredible dataset that had cataloged every single tree on public land in the city of Toronto. Simultaneously, we had a health dataset from the Ontario Health Study from about 30,000 people in Toronto where we knew people had a stroke or diabetes or heart disease. And it turned out if you had 11 trees of average size per city block, that was related to a 1% reduction in these cardio metabolic disorders. And you might be thinking, “Wow, that sounds pretty modest. 1% doesn’t sound like very much.” But to get that 1% decrease in cardio metabolic disorders economically, you’d have to give every household on that city block about $20,000 and have them move to a neighborhood that was about $20,000 wealthier or make people about one and a half years younger.
Paul Rand: Some of the other guests we’ve had on Big Brains, and one that keeps coming to mind is a fellow by name of Jens Ludwig, who I’m sure you know.
Marc Berman: Yes.
Paul Rand: And who’s done research on the environment that people are living in and how that ends up impacting the level of violent crime.
Marc Berman: Yes.
Paul Rand: And I’m sure you’re familiar with his work.
Marc Berman: Yes, yes.
Paul Rand: Can you talk about this a little bit in relation to some of those things?
Marc Berman: Yes, and I’m really glad you asked me about this, Paul, because I always think about Jens work a lot and how some of this work might relate to crime. So the trees have this significant impact on health. Other people have actually found trees have this really amazing impact on aggression and crime. So Ming Kuo and Bill Sullivan did amazing studies in Chicago public housing projects like the Robert Taylor Homes, which are no longer around. And what they did is they looked at how much green space was out the windows of some of these different apartments and around the different apartments. And they found that in these public housing projects, the apartments that had more views of green space, there was less reports of aggression and less reported crimes.
What’s also interesting is that it wasn’t the case that the residents that had the nature view were just staring out the window all day long versus not. It’s very, very, very implicit kind of effect. And so we built on those studies too, where we had cellphone trace data from 100,000 people in Chicago and 300,000 people in New York, it’s a little bit creepy, but basically for a whole month we knew where people lived and where they went for the entire month. So what my student Cate Schurz did is she quantified how many times did people leave their neighborhood and go and visit a park. And it turns out that neighborhoods in Chicago where people left their neighborhood and went to visit a park, and the reason why we said you had to leave your neighborhood is because in wealthier neighborhoods, there are more parks in the neighborhood, so it’s very easy to go to the park.
Paul Rand: Right, right.
Marc Berman: So we wanted to kind of control for that. So it turns out that in neighborhoods where people leave their neighborhood more often and go and visit a park, that correlates with less crime in those neighborhoods, even when we control for age, education, income and ethnicity. And the same results replicate in New York City. What’s also interesting is that Cate also quantified how many times did people leave their neighborhood and go and visit a museum? Maybe, again, because I said it’s possible that museums might be softly fascinating, but the effect was not there for the museum visits. It was specific to the park visits.
How does nature improve our ability to pay attention?
Paul Rand: If you’re getting a lot out of the important research shared on Big Brains, there’s another University of Chicago Podcast Network show you should check out, it’s called Entitled. And it’s about human rights. Co-hosted by lawyers and new Chicago law school professors, Claudia Flores and Tom Ginsburg, Entitled, explores the stories around why rights matter and what’s the matter with rights. What is it about being in nature of all the options that could be out there that helps us gather our thoughts in a soft attention kind of way better than other ways?
Marc Berman: Yeah. Why? Why? What is it about nature that makes it softly fascinating? And we think there it has to do with actually some of the physical properties of nature. So one thing that distinguishes natural stimulation from a lot of other stimulation is that natural stimulation tends to have a lot of fractals. And so what I mean by a fractal is if you imagine a snowflake, a snowflake has a characteristic shape, if you put that snowflake under a microscope and zoom in, you’ll see a similar kind of shape. And if you zoom in even more, you’ll see that same shape repeating. So it doesn’t matter what spatial scale you look at the snowflake, it’s kind of got the same characteristic shape. So we say that the snowflake is sort of scale free. It doesn’t matter at what spatial scale you look at it, it’s got the same shape. Or you can also say that that means that the snowflake is fractal. Well, fractals and the scale free structure are abundant in nature.
Paul Rand: Okay.
Marc Berman: Trees have this fractal structure, mountains have this fractal structure, coastlines have this fractal structure, and we think that that kind of stimulation is actually easier for our brains to process. Maybe because it’s got this repeated pattern, you can kind of just save the pattern and throw everything else out. Whereas in an urban environment, it’s not very fractal. You’ve got all these sharp right angled lines. If you look at a city a mile away versus 50 meters away, it looks very, very different.
Paul Rand: Yep.
Marc Berman: And we think that actually might be more taxing the process. Another element to that might actually have to do with language. When I’m in nature, maybe I kind of just say, “Oh, there’s some trees, grass, water.” When I’m in an urban environment, I might say, “Oh, there’s a Volkswagen Beetle, a Toyota Camry, Gothic architecture, Subway restaurant.” I’m labeling all the different things. So it might have more objects that we kind of semantically label, which might make it more complex for us to process.
Paul Rand: Okay.
Marc Berman: And so what we actually find, and this kind of relates to another guest you had in the show, Wilma Bainbridge, we find that nature stimulation is less memorable than urban. And you might say, “Oh gosh, that’s terrible. Memory is good. I want to be remembering stuff.” But in this case, we think being more forgettable indicates that it’s easier to process. And because nature stimulation is more forgettable, we think it’s kind of easier for us to process and not as sticky as the urban stimulation, which might be gumming up our neural systems. But we also did something else that’s kind of interesting.
You and the listeners might be familiar with JPEG compression. So that’s an algorithm that your computer uses, your phone uses where you have an image that might be 100 megabytes, but you don’t actually need all the information. You can compress the image down to fewer bytes. Maybe you can compress it down to 10 megabytes to save room on your computer or your iPhone. And your human eye can’t really tell the difference between the full resolution image and the compressed image. So what we thought is do nature images get compressed down to fewer bytes than urban images? And sure enough, they do. So we think that’s because in these natural images, there’s a lot of high frequency information, like you can imagine little blades of grass or the little veins in a tree where maybe our eye can’t even see all that stimulation, and you can just throw away that information to compress the image down.
Whereas in the built environment, it’s like every line or edge seems to be critical, and you can’t discard very much of the information. So maybe that’s what our brains are doing too, is that because these natural images have all this repeated structure and this high frequency structure, maybe we can just throw away a lot of that information, which might be easier for our brains to process. And interestingly, one of the reasons why we find that nature images are less memorable than urban images is because they’re more compressible. So because you can compress the nature images down into fewer bits, we think that might be a reason why they’re less remembered.
Paul Rand: Okay. One of the things that absolutely surprised me from your research is that some of these benefits could actually be received by actually looking at a picture of nature or a nature book rather than actually being in nature.
Marc Berman: Right.
Paul Rand: That’s kind of baffling.
Marc Berman: Yeah. So that actually suggests to us that there’s something about the perceptual qualities of nature. So the fractalness, the curved edge structure, the entropy that maybe our brains sort of we evolved in nature and maybe processing that stimulation is easier for our brains to process versus a lot of the stimulation in the urban environment. I would say this though, that the effects of the simulated nature are not as strong as the real thing, but many of us don’t have easy access to nature.
Paul Rand: Right.
Marc Berman: So it’s really important to know that you can get some of these benefits even with these simulations of nature.
Paul Rand: And even going back to simulations, the idea of even having plastic plants, is that the same? Is that perception against a shape benefit not necessarily other benefits?
Marc Berman: Right. So you’re not going to maybe get a olfactory benefit from a fake plant, but there have been studies to suggest that even artificial nature in indoor environments can be beneficial. In my office right here, I have a fake plant behind me. I don’t have good enough sunlight in my office to have a real plant. And people have shown that the artificial nature can lead to some of the same benefits. Again, they’re probably attenuated. It’s probably not as good as the real thing, but it’s better than nothing.
Paul Rand: You mentioned the plants behind you, which are not real. So here you are working to control what’s in your environment. If you were going to give advice to maybe civic planners, architects, or even people in setting up their own homes, where would you be guiding them?
Marc Berman: Yeah, so let’s start first maybe with the individual person. So I think that’s where you want to be really mindful about whether you’re in a directed attention fatigue state, and you can’t concentrate, don’t scroll your social media feed. Don’t start streaming. That’s when we want you to take a walk in nature. You can say, “Okay, well Marc, I don’t have easy access to nature.” Then look at some pictures of nature. Maybe watch a nature video, maybe listen to nature sounds. Those all will have some benefit. For schools and workplaces, we want to be, and in our homes, we want to be getting more nature in our homes, so we want to have more plants in our homes. They’re starting to have these green walls where you can hang natural plants on the wall.
Paul Rand: Right, right.
Marc Berman: And you can even have artificial green walls. But also we have to do in things like schools and workplaces, we have to give people time to interact with this. So I get kind of annoyed sometimes, they’re always trying to cut back recess time in schools, and it might actually be more beneficial or productive to have six hours of instruction and two hours of a break in nature for kids than to have eight hours straight of instruction. The kids might actually learn more. And so I think the same thing applies in workplaces, you want to be giving your employees some ability to restore their directed attention in the workday.
In terms of cities, it’s not enough just to have the green space there. It can’t be too noisy. You can’t have too much car traffic. You need to sort of keep that green space away from all of those things that are going to take directed attention. So if I had a billion dollars, I would put all the cars underground in those places and make them more pedestrian friendly. But I think what we want to do, so we want to have more green spaces, but they need to be safe, and people need to be able to access them in ways where they can really soak into nature and not be distracted by other stimulation.
Paul Rand: Over the weekend, my wife and I were at a breakfast restaurant, and one of the walls, it was painted very earth green, and one of the walls had beautiful palm plants wallpaper on it. So much so that we talked about it for a while and even asked the owner, “Why and how did you come up with this concept?” And he went on to talk about how they designed it to feel relaxing. Is the insights that you’re getting, and maybe it’s a known thing at this point, but is the insights that you’re getting, whether it’s in design or architecture or structure, becoming part of the way that we’re helping set up our living spaces?
Marc Berman: I hope so. I mean, there is now this movement called biophilic design where you try to mimic the patterns of nature in the built environment.
Paul Rand: Okay, biophilic design?
Marc Berman: Biophilic design.
Paul Rand: Okay.
Marc Berman: However, to me, it hasn’t really taken a great hold. I would expect then that all of our built spaces, we’d be doing this everywhere.
Paul Rand: Right.
Marc Berman: We’d be doing this in schools, workplaces, our homes, that we would be just changing everything to have this biophilic design. And that hasn’t really happened yet. I think part of it could be cost, that may be building in this way could be more cost. I mean, for example, I’m not sure we could build the University of Chicago Quad today, but I think another part of it is that I think people think of these kinds of things, these kinds of designs as an amenity and not a necessity, that, “Yeah, it would be nice if we designed that way, but we don’t really need it.” And I think what we’re trying to say in this research, in our research is that, “Actually, this may be more of a necessity, that we can’t be our best functioning selves without this.”
But I think to really take it to the next level, I think we’re going to have to really quantify these things and say, “Look, if you increase the biophilic design of this school, the kids are going to learn X amount better and that’s going to lead to X amount more economic growth or this much less aggression or this much better physical health.” And we’re getting there, but I think we haven’t quite filled in all the gaps yet to make a strong convincing argument. But I think we’re starting to do that now.
Matt Hodapp: Big Brains is a production of the University of Chicago Podcast Network. We’re sponsored by the Graham School. Are you a lifelong learner with an insatiable curiosity? Access more than 50 open enrollment courses every quarter. Learn more at graham.uchicago.edu/bigbrains. If you like what you heard on our podcast, please leave us a rating and review. The show is hosted by Paul M. Rand, and produced by Lea Ceasrine and me, Matt Hodapp. Thanks for listening.
