Why Nature?

and unfathomed by us. Because unfathomable, we can never have enough of nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, the vast and titanic features, the sea coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander. Welcome to stot to blow your mind

production of My Heart Radio. Hey, you welcome to stuff to blow your mind. My name is Robbert Land and I'm Joe McCormick, and that opening reading was from Walden by Henry David Thureaux, a classic piece of of literature appreciating nature. So today is a Monday, which is usually the day of the week we would feature a bit of listener mail, but instead, today we've got a special bonus episode for you. Unlike in our regular episodes, this is what we call in the industry a branded episode,

which means it was created in partnership with our sponsor today, Mazda. Basically, Mazda came to us with a set of themes, mostly relating to the well documented positive effects of spending time in nature, and we thought, yeah, well we could absolutely do an episode on that, because the effective nature on the human body and is a huge, fascinating and complex subject,

worthy probably of an entire series in itself. But in today's episode, we're going to focus on a few interesting questions and studies in the subject area that really struck us. So today's bonus episode will be our branded feature with Mazda called Why Nature, which we hope you really enjoy.

And then we're going to be back to our regular schedule with a new Core episode tomorrow, and when I first started pondering the subject, I was thinking about how, you know, there are really multiple ways that we can frame our personal relationship with nature, because, of course, there is the very blunt fact that life depends on life, and that nature is the word we use for that complex web of relationships between the sun, the earth, the water,

and all the different life forms that inhabit this environment, which in a literal sense, we could not live without, even with all of our technology. There's a line from the poet Denise Levertov where she writes that we call it nature only reluctantly admitting ourselves to be nature too.

We could not live without it because we are it. Yeah, even when we put up walls against nature, often to distance ourselves from the aspects of nature that we're not crazy about, it's still there with us inside, hopefully in the plants and animals and works of art that we surround ourselves within our our unnatural habitats. But also nature is there in the biological reality of our existence and in the environmental conditions our senses are heightened to appreciate. Yeah, exactly.

So that's like the first level. It's just like we bluntly needed. We can't live without it. The second thing, of course, is that there's a sort of metaphysical or metaphorical facet of nature, which I think is the main subject of that passage I read from thorough in the beginning. We're creatures that search the environment not only for aid and physical survival. You're not only looking for food and shelter and water in the in the landscape around you.

But you know, because of our complex brains, we also search for meaning. And I think it's a surprisingly widespread suspicion that there is somehow meaning to be found in nature, that somehow the rocks, the trees, the birds, the vines, the algae, and the insects in some profound and ineffable way have implications for our lives. So you take a walk in the woods, and somehow it tends to suggest conclusions about the meaning of life and your place in

the universe. So these conclusions can often be very difficult to put into words. Sometimes people like throw give it a try. Yeah. I think of it in two ways. First, there's the metaphorical side of the situation. Linguistically and cognitively, we need things to make sense of life, and everything in it, from skyward branches of the tree to tow its deep diving roots, from soaring hawks the snunbering dogs. We find metaphorical mirrors for our world and our thoughts

in all of nature's details. But on the other hand, and this is something driven home by spiritual teacher at Cartole, if we engage with, say a flower in the wild, and experience it all of itself in the moment, and then we have in that case we have an excellent tool by which to momentarily step outside of our egos, uh quiet the voices of the default mode network and our head worrying about the past and the future, and

simply experienced the now like that that flower. And the flower is especially good because of its enhanced if if a marility, it becomes a window into the now, a window into the timeless, and we're able to sort of let everything else, all the human complexities, fade away, and we become quite literally one with nature in the moment. I think we've all had some of these moments of

a kind of profound connection with the natural environment. I think often in solitude, but sometimes with other people around as well. I mean, I think particularly of a time I felt a really strange kind of relationship to all of the dry desert brush when I took a very brief solo hike and Big Ben National Park. Um, you know, this was like half an hour. But but but something happened to me on that walk and I still remember it. Yeah.

Nature is is pretty weird though, when you stop and think about it, because we do have countless reasons to wish to avoid it. Uh, let's let's not deny it. There are risks in nature, and for most of human history, nature itself pose the greatest risk to life and well being. Even today, our relationship with nature is often strained. Is it a thing we seek to distance ourselves from? Is

it a thing we wish to dominate and control? I find that I find that even myself, when I venture into nature, I can still feel myself very much on the path. You know, I'm experiencing nature on my own particular terms. But then sometimes when you let that go, you can experience nature on its own terms and allow yourself to sort of dilute just a little bit back into the thing that we've always been a part of. So for my own part, I'd say some some of

the more pronounced. Experiences like this that I've had include glimpsing a wild sloth in the cloud forests of Costa Rica, um tracking the movement and shifting form of an octopus beneath the waters in Maui. And and I have to say, you know, the encounters, of course, don't have to be anywhere near this exotic. I finally remember spotting some wild turkeys with my family while strolling through a local cemetery.

Year around town, and on certain days in different parts of my life, you know that the sky has been just blue enough, something about a particular shade of blue sky, the clouds wispy enough, uh, that it kind of kind of forges as a renewing moment that is kind of

unshackled from time itself. And when I get to experience the sky in just such a way, a combination of circumstance and awareness of the moment, it's the same sky you know that I saw these other times, and I'm the same person, and it's, uh, you feel this kind of connection to yourself into nature, and you get this a great sense of calm, and and that's something I could potentially experience anywhere as long as the sky looked just right, and I took the time out of my

day to appreciate it. Right. So lots of us have these moments, we remember, these profound moments of connection with with nature and the natural environment. But of course those can be um, you know, difficult to put into words,

much less to study in an organized way. Though when you want to get down to to quantifiable effects, you can actually look at like empirically documented effects of nature on our health, both mental and physical, and on our thoughts and behavior, Like what can scientific experiments and surveys tell us about the measurable impact of proximity to or immersion in natural environments? And to go a step deeper, do we have any idea why these effects would hold true?

And it's this last set of questions that we're going to be primarily focusing on for the rest of this episode. So to start off by mentioning a few of the huge human health and life outcomes that have been correlated with exposure to nature or what sometimes called green space, a pretty self explanatory concept. Uh, this is by no means going to be a comprehensive overview, but it's we're worth mentioning a few things that seem to have good

evidence behind them and caught our attention. Now, Fortunately, at this point there has been enough research on exposure to nature that we don't have to pick through all of the individual uh papers over the decades this has been looked into. We can actually look at meta analyzes that compile these existing studies to see what kind of trends emerge. Now, there is some difficulty in this domain because uh, not all studies that look into the benefits of nature study

the exact same thing. Like one might look at people making trips out into the woods, and another might look at, uh, the outcomes in neighborhoods with nearer access to parks and urban forests, and other ones might just look at what are the effects of people looking at pictures of trees and stuff. But despite that heterogeneity, there is enough research now that you can kind of do this meta analysis

and some signals come through pretty strong. So in terms of physiological health benefits benefits to the body, I was looking at an article by two big Bennett and Jones published in Environmental Research in called The Health Benefits of the Great Outdoors. A systematic review and meta analysis of

green space exposure and health outcomes. So this review looked at a hundred and forty three studies on the health effects of exposure to green space, and when analyzed together, these studies show statistically significant reductions in diastolic blood pressure, in heart rate, and in salivary cortisol. Now you might wonder, what is that last one, salivary cortisol. This would be a measure of the concentration of the hormone cortisol in

your spit. Cortisol is usually interpreted as a physical biomarker of stress. Cortisol is secreted by the adrenal glands and is largely responsible for can trolling the body's fight or flight response. The meta analysis also found reductions in the incidents of diabetes and cardiovascular mortality. And again these are not the only correlations that have been found, just the most significant and consistent ones. So these are some physiological

outcomes measured in the health of the body. But what about like mental well being and cognitive performance. Well, first of all, I would say there is the simple, well documented fact that people seem to just really like nature in a subjective sense. Lots of people have a baseline preference for looking at nature, for hearing nature, for touching it, for being in it, and this has been measured dozens of different ways. Uh, this actually would probably be a

good place to talk about the idea of the biophilia hypothesis. Yes, the biophelia hypothesis that was brought to us by American biologist E. O. Wilson. Now I do have to to mention briefly that that on December one, EO. Wilson passed away at the age of ninety two. Uh. So you know, rest in peace, U E. O. Wilson. But he leaves behind a career full of admiration for and study of the natural world, with a special focus on the world

of ants. He's widely known and respected for his work and mermacology, but he will always be remembered as well for what he called the biophilia hypothesis. So Wilson proposed the term love of life in a short publication back in Biophilia the human bond with other species, and he defined it as humanities innate tendency to focus on living things as opposed to the inadamant. In effect, he argued

for an innate love of nature. He wrote, quote, the object of my reflection can be summarized by a single word, biophilia, which I will be so bold as to define as the innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes quote from Infancy. We concentrate happily on ourselves and other organisms. We learn to distinguish life from the inanimate and move toward it like moths to a porch. Light. Novelty and

diversity are particularly esteemed. The mere mention of the world extraterrestrial evokes reveries about still unexplored life, displacing the old and once potent exotic that drew earlier generations to remote islands and jungle interiors. That much is immediately clear, but a great deal more needs to be added. I will make the case that to explore and affiliate with life is a deep and complicated process in mental development, to

an extent, still undervalued in philosophy and religion. Our existence depends on this propensity. Our spirit is woven from it. Hope rises on its currents, and he goes on to state that the modern scientific understanding of biology allows us to place a greater value upon them and ourselves quote, the living environment is what really sustains us. The living environment creates, the soil creates most of the atmosphere. It's not just something out there. The biosphere is a membrane,

a very thin membrane of a living organism. And we have to stress that this hypothesis goes beyond the mere generalities of hey, people love nature. It gets into the idea that there's at least impart a genetic link involved, that there are genes for biophilia. In the same way that humans are wired, hardwired, as we say, to respond to an infant's laughs and cries, we are also wired

to respond to various things in nature. Uh, and it's been a part of our evolution, or so argues the hypothesis, and in the end Wilson ultimately argues that yes, nature is out there, it's in here, and nature is the thing that sustains us. Wilson also embodied biophilia in a very inspiring way. I think you you'll recall that documentary we watched where he goes up to a mound of fire ants and he plunges his hand into it and he's just beaming with delight, saying, look at how they're

biting me, and he just loves these ants. Yeah, I mean my son likes to um to carefully stir up a fire ant nest and watch them swarm and uh, and just observe them, you know, not not harm them in any way. It make can make walks very slow. But in a sense like this drives home the difference between what sometimes a busy adults walk can be and what like the pure biophilic walk of a child is like, I just want to get from point A to point

B and back. I need to get a certain amount of steps in and I needed to be back to work on something. But to to the child, uh, it is that you're just on the way and here is some nature. Let us observe it, let's watch it, even though Dad thinks that a walk at least this afternoon is supposed to be there and back again in under

a certain amount of time. Yeah. So there are tons of demonstrations that people have this this baseline attraction to and subjective aesthetic preference for nature, and this this is translated even to very abstracted form. So it's not just like people like being out nature. You can even show like there are a lot of experiments that show people prefer looking at pictures of nature as opposed to pictures of other things, you know, built human environments or objects,

inanimate objects, or other types of imagery. There was one study I was looking at from nineteen seventy two that found, interestingly that there was a preference not just for imagery that had nature in it, but especially imagery that had nature in it with a certain amount of visual complexity. People kind of like an intermediately complex natural scene, something that might involve many different kinds of plants, landscape patterns

and shapes, and so forth. Yeah, there's been some interesting work on this talking about these these vistas and paintings that you could essentially walk into and then once you're in there, you could develop a foraging strategy. You can decide where you might seek shelter, where you might get the best view of the surroundings, and so forth. But there have also been empirical studies into the effect acts of exposure to nature on mental health and cognitive performance,

so not just physiological health like we already mentioned. Uh, some of the things that have been found are that, like access to green space has associations with lower levels of stress and anxiety. This would sort of go along with the lower concentrations of salvary cortisol that we mentioned in the Physiological Review, fewer symptoms of depression, improved mood. And some studies have found that immersion in or interaction with nature gives a sort of time dependent power up

to some forms of cognition. Just to cite one study, there have been many like this, but one was by Andrea Faber Taylor and Francis E. Co published in Journal of Attention Disorders in two thousand nine called children with Attention deficits concentrate better after a walk in the park.

And so this points out that other pre existing studies had already found that working memory and the ability to pay attention are enhanced after spin time in certain physical environments, particularly in natural settings, and this study tried to apply the principle to children diagnosed with a d h D between seven and twelve years of age. So the study compared the children's performance on a test of attention and

working memory known as the digit span backwards test. Basically, you read out a sequence of numbers and then you test how well the subject can repeat those numbers back

to you in reverse order. And so they tried this test with children after three different walks of twenty minutes in length, that walk through a neighborhood, will walk through a downtown area, and to walk through a foliated park most resembling the natural setting, and the children apparently performed substantially better after the walk in the park than after the other two walks, adding to this pile of evidence that for some reason, people including children with a d

h D, can pay attention and use their working memory better after a short period of immersion in nature, and the author has used this finding to suggest it's possible that regular quote doses of nature, just nature walks or other ways of immersing yourself in those kind of surroundings might be helpful to kids with a d h D on on attention taxing tasks. But it doesn't stop there. There have been plenty of other findings about cognitive improvements

after periods of exposure to nature. One example I came across was a study by heartig at All published in Environment and Behavior in nineteen one called Restorative Effects of Natural environment Experiences. This apparently found that compared to relaxing indoors or taking a walk in the city, people who took a walk in nature scored better on a proof reading task that's something else that is sort of taxing

on your your find a control of attention. And another common finding seems to be that spending time in nature may improve our ability to block out distracting stimuli or unnecessary information when we're trying to focus, which I would say that absolutely checks out with my experience when my brain is taxed and like I can't read the words on the computer screen anymore, going for a walk in

in the forest does noticeably make a difference there for me. Yeah, And and it's interesting how it can work in both ways, like just on a not only on an audible level, but also visual level. Walk in nature can give you less stimuli when you're over stimulated, and it can also give you the stimulation you need when you feel understimulated.

So regardless if you're you know, especially in today's work environment, you might be at home and working most of the day and then you're just like, I gotta get out. I've got to see something different than what I've seen, and here's something different than what I've been listening to. And then likewise, you could be in the office across town and you've had back to back meetings and constant stimuli and you're like, I need to bring it down a notch. You can also you can both go to

the same forest and you can find your relief. Yes, And I think we'll come back to that a little bit later in the episode because that connects to ideas about different types of stimuli that capture our attention in different ways. Um, but this whole thing we've been talking about, like the the ability of nature to say, improve cognitive performance in certain ways. This is what is often referred to in the scientific literature as the quote restorative potential

of nature immersion. The finding is that natural environments tend to speed our recovery from conditions like stress or mental fatigue. So we have pretty strong evidence from many different studies over decades now that exposing oneself to nature and green space is correlated with a range of positive effects on body health, on psychological well being, and on temporary mental performance,

which brings us to the big question why nature. If exposure to nature does in fact bring these measurable benefits to mind and body, Why why nature in particular, and what is the biological mechanism leading to these positive effects. Now, I think it's worth noting that it's possible that different effects have different explanations, or that a single effect could arise from a combination of inputs. For example, one question that immediately occurred to me when I was reading about

some of the physiological benefits benefits to body health. Could things like lower blood pressure and lower risk of cardiovascular disease from spending time and nature be due to the fact that green space encourages people to get more exercise. That seems possible, so I found one study directly addressing this question when I looked. This was by Richardson at All published in Public Health in called Role of Physical

Activity in the Relationship between Urban green space and Health. Basically, it found that exposure to green space was in fact correlated with better mental and physical health outcomes, and this was true when you controlled for other confounding factors, and people who lived in places with more access to green space did actually get more exercise, but that difference wasn't enough to explain the full green space effect on health.

So just as a hypothetical, it's possible that part, but not all, of the improved health outcomes UH could have something to do with increases in outdoor exercise, while other outcomes such as performance on attention and working memory tasks could have a totally different cause. But for the rest of the episode, I think we're going to focus on several hypothesized frameworks for explaining these effects of nature on

our brains and bodies. Why are we drawn to nature and why does it appear to be so good for us? But first we're going to take a break to hear from our sponsor, and then immediately on returning, I think we'll we'll ease in with a short meditation of some natural sound. All right, we're back. We hope everybody's refreshed

from that that meditation moment. Now, before the break, we were talking about some of the documented positive effects of h immersion in an access to nature, and now we're going to take a look at some possible explanations for some of these effects. So I figured we should start with the semantic stuff, the body health, and then and

then come to the more mental realm. So I already mentioned that meta analysis by to Hick, Bennett and Jones about the the health effects of nature, and it actually has a good background section reviewing some of the main ideas that have been put forward about why exposure to nature might be for health. Uh. These are by no means exhaustive of the possible explanations. None of them are proven to be the main one. But these are some of the main ideas that scientists have offered as as

good possibilities. One is the one I already mentioned that maybe natural environments promote opportunities for and motivation toward physical exercise, and the positive health effects of exercise are pretty obvious.

Another is that some public green spaces may actually promote social interaction, which is also highly correlated with health and well being, though this seems to vary a lot depending on what kind of natural environment you're talking about, though I can certainly say from experience that's say, I don't know, I feel like I probably am more likely to to chat it up with with strangers when walking around in a park that as opposed to walking around on a sidewalk.

I don't I don't know what the difference is there, but that that does ring true to me. Well, I guess part of it is you generally have a pretty good idea why the other person is there, Like you both have a shared reason to be here. Uh, you're not on your way to somewhere else. This is the destination. That makes sense. Yeah, on the sidewalk, you just assume

people are trying to go about their business. You're you're less likely to strike up social conversation, right, But then again, there is something different about nature versus say a video store. You go to a video store, everyone's there to potentially rent a video, but it's more it's often more of a solitary situation with occasional conversations uh popping up. But yeah,

you go and you go into nature. There is this kind of sort of shared understandings like, hey, we're all here because we dig this, and and there's something about this that opens opens us up for conversation. Sure, yeah, that makes sense. Another idea they offer exposure to sunlight. This may be increased when you have access to pleasant natural environments, leading to increases in vitamin D synthesis and

possibly counteracting seasonal mood disorders. Another idea this is pretty interesting, is the old friends hypothis versions of this I think we're formerly known more as the hygiene hypothesis. Old friends, I think is an attempt to recast it to focus on ancestral relationships with certain microbe strains. So the idea here is that spending time in green space may increase our exposure to beneficial strains of micro organisms, which could

help the development of a healthy immune system. So I think this is still partially in the phase where the details are being worked out, but it has been hypothesized that too little exposure to certain environmental microbes contributes to immune system disregulation and inflammatory disorders, which in turn are major contributors to a host negative health outcomes. And so spending time exclusively in built synthetic environments might well give us too much exposure to the wrong kinds of germs

and too little exposure to the right kind. Yeah. I've seen it argue that just having a dog that goes outside and there's an indoor outdoor pet exposes one to secondhand microorganisms that can have a beneficial effect on your health and well being. So to be clear of sending your dog out on one of those hike in the wood dog walking trips, you know where the van comes and collects all the neighborhood dogs. That's not going to make up for your time away from the forest, your

time away from nature. But the argument is out there that it might help you a little bit. Okay, here's one where I abandoned all skeptical scrutiny. I just choose to believe, whatever the evidence, that when my dog goes out, gets filthy, and then comes inside and loves on me, that's good. That's good. Now, Again, as I said earlier, that these explanations are by no means exhaustive, and it's not just one or the other. It could be a

combination of these things. But there's another thing that occurs to me that has been touched on in a number of the studies I looked at, which is the effect of stress. There's already plenty of empirical evidence that exposure to natural environments can cut down on subjective or ports of stress and can help measurably reduce levels of cortisol,

which again is a biomarker of psychological stress. Chronic stress and the cascades that it creates in the body are are known to have a number of bad consequences for health. So I would also wonder if just simple stress reduction were not a pretty large contributor toward improved health outcomes from time and nature. Now, of course, this raises a secondary question, why is it that nature reduces stress? Uh?

This is probably a harder question to answer, but there have been attempts, and and here I think we have to stray more into the realm of the totally hypothetical. But you know, at least there's some interesting ideas out there, even though they may remain unproven. Yes, and of course we want to drive home again that certainly just because you're in nature doesn't mean you're having a stress free right experience. There are plenty of ways that being in

nature can be stressful. But we're talking about, like, you know, all things being equal. Uh, if I am here in a building where I'm here in nature struggling about uh, there does seem to be some sort of of benefit and why would that be exactly? Yes, So one hypothetical answer that addresses a lot of these questions like maybe why is it we're less stressed after spending positive time in nature, or why do we get some of these benefits.

One explanation has to do with the shape of our ancestral environments, and this would actually connect to the biophelia hypothesis.

You already mentioned that this would be I say that the class of explanations that you could put under the umbrella of evolutionary psychology, and this would explain our preferences for natural environments and their mental effects on us, because our species arose in certain types of environments, and there are features of those environments that represented clear risks and rewards.

So under this framework, you know, you would say that to some extent, our brains are still affected by mechanisms that evolve to help us select the right behavior and maximize survival in those ancestral environments. Now, how would this apply to natural environments. Well, for just a very simple example, think about water sources. Humans without access to water will die within a few days. Maintaining constant access to water is about as close to a survival absolute as you

can imagine. Therefore, most evolutionary psychology frameworks would predict that we will probably still to some degree have instinctual preferences for proximity to water, even if those instincts are no

longer strictly relevant to survival anymore. Because now you can get water out of a tap, or you can bring along a water bottle wherever you go, there may be some evolved module in the brain that creates a kind of mild stress response when there is not a water source in the nearby environment, and that motivates you to get closer one and maybe maybe it alleviates some stress when water is audible nearby or is in view. Now, again, this is not something that I have direct evidence for.

This is just a possible example of how something like this could work. But this could be applied to the larger environment as a whole. The world around you is full of sensory cues that could trigger instinctual reactions that are attuned for survival in our ancestral environments. So why do we enjoy the high ground with a wide view. Well, it could be because this is a position of safety. You can see other things approaching from a long way.

Why do we prefer certain types of tree shapes? You know, people seem to This has been tested in experiments. People seem to really like certain types of trees, trees with like enmeshed canopy and like low lying limbs and stuff. And it seems like a reasonable thing to say, Well, those are also the trees that are like that provide really good canopy habitats and are easy to climb and

you could get up away from predators in them. Now, there's a very important caveat to evolutionary psychology explanations, which is that they on one hand, on the pro side, they can make a lot of sense of human preferences and behaviors, but on the other hand, they can also be notoriously difficult, though not impossible, to test in a

rigorous way. So you know, you've probably heard before people just saying like, oh, you know, we do this or we like that because of and then they give some evolutionary story and it's like, but yeah, how do you know that? So you know, it's always good to remember that, just because you've managed to come up with a plausible story in your head about why survival pressures in the ancestral environment might have led to preferences and reactions we

still have today, you haven't necessarily discovered the explanation. You would still need to like work out some predictions that explanation would make and then test to see if those predictions are true. But for the moment, dwelling in this hypothetical space, you can easily imagine a pretty plausible chain of mechanisms that would go something like this. So you have an ancestral landscape that affects our survival, and this gives rise to instinct ual preferences for and against certain

landscape features. Maybe we like proximity to water, we like certain kinds of tree cover, and so forth, and that perhaps those preferences still affect us today, exerting an influence on our levels of anxiety and stress when the landscape is less than favorable, and then anxiety and stress or of course upstream of a raft of other mental health

outcomes in general cognitive performance. So I would consider that like a very uh plausible explanation space, but unfortunately a lot of the stories that it comes up with can be difficult to test. Uh. There's another interesting explanatory framework, especially for the restoration aspect of our nature experience, that has come up in a lot of the papers I've looked at, and this is a framework known as attention

restoration theory. This was developed by a couple of psychologists affiliated with the University of Michigan named Rachel and Stephen Kaplan. I think, especially in their book from Cambridge University Press in eighty nine called The Experience of Nature a Psychological Perspective. Now essentially, attention restoration theory argues that uh, nature and synthetic environments are different and their effects on us are

different because of the different ways that they capture our attention. Now, I found this one very interesting. I'll try to do a brief summary of this idea. I found it summarized in a paper by Berman, Jenniades, and Kaplan and published in Psychological Science in two thousand eight called the Cognitive Benefits of Interacting with Nature. Uh A art is based on a body of research showing that there are two

functionally different types of attention. So there's involuntary attention, and this is where your attention drifts effortlessly to things that are inherently interesting or important. And then on the other hand, there is voluntary or directed attention, and this is where you give attention to things through effortful cognitive control. I think actually there's a pretty good linguistic shorthand for this.

Voluntary or directed attention roughly corresponds to anything you would describe as quote, paying attention to rather than just being aware of it automatically. But so the basic idea goes like this, So we engage with the world through the executive attention network, which is mediated by the brain's prefrontal cortex, and like many other parts of the body, It can become exhausted when it is used to consistently for too long. You've you've been putting a lot of demands on it,

it gets overworked. Tons of tasks in our environment involves sustained use of executive attentional resources. Obviously, most kinds of work do this. You have to pay attention when you're working on something, but even some recreational tasks or things you have to effortfully pay attention to, like misery scrolling on your phone is despite the fact that it's like addictive, you're still like paying attention to things with effort full control.

Attention restoration theory argues that engaging with nature is good at giving your attentional resources a replenishing rest period. By immersing yourself in an environment full of things that attract involuntary attention through what they call soft fascination, you make yourself better at performing subsequent tasks that require directed, effort

full attention. The executive attentional system is basically just allowed to rest during this type of fascination because there's nothing that you have to fixate on, right It's that experience. They're just walking through the woods and you're you're hearing birds what birds? Who knows? They're just they're making bird noises, You're passing trees, You're not necessarily identifying you know, not to say that identification of various organisms isn't also a

rewarding aspect of spending time in nature. But there's this yet, this feeling of just moving through it, your attention drifting among the various stimuli that you're presented with. Uh and and and also allowing your mind to sort of wander. Yeah, and I think it's in a special middle category because it's also not just like a blank room with nothing

in it, nothing that you can pay attention to. It is an environment that is not boring, like boredom in itself can be a type of stress inducing thing because then maybe you start paying really close attention to, say your internal monologue or something. Well, I mean, a boring

room is a human construction, you know. This is these are not environments that we evolve to thrive, and we evolve to thrive in spaces where other organisms have access to those spaces, be they plants, their animals, where they're changes in weather pattern, where the sky is visible. I mean, certainly you can there are caves and whatnot where I guess you could make a case for saying, well, this is a a sensory deprivation environment that one might encounter

in the natural world. But for the most part, this this is just not how it works. The boy Ring spaces are the ones we created for ourselves. Yeah, so nature is this kind of perfect middle. It's not boring, but it's also not something you have to pay attention to. Now, A lot of studies about the restorative potential of nature do appeal to UH to a art, but it's not the only possible explanation. It's not the proven theory. We're

not going to get deep into it here. But there's another similar framework I was reading about multiple times, called s RT instead of a RT, standing for I think stress reduction theory, explaining some of the cognitive benefits of nature via its stress reducing properties rather than through its attention replenishing properties. I don't know how to sort out between those right now, but it's possible that they may

both have some kind of purchase on the truth. Now, I think maybe we should take another break to hear from our sponsor, followed by another brief natural meditation. But when we come back, I want to talk a bit about creativity. Yeah, yeah, alright, we're back. I hope everyone is refreshed and ready for more. Right, So we've talked about physiological health, mental health, and cognitive restoration, but there have been a number of other positive, higher level mental

benefits to nature exposure that have been proposed. Just to mention one, I wanted to talk about creativity for a minute. So this question is can spending time in nature actually make you better at creative thinking? I think the answer is possibly yes. Some experiments do point in that direction, and one, just one study in this area I wanted to look at was called Creativity in the Wild Improving Creative Reasoning through Immersion in Natural Settings, published in Plus

one by actually at all. Uh So, first big question here, like how do you test for something like creativity? Obviously that is much harder to quantify than say tests of working memory that ask you to repeat a sequence of numbers, the number sequence repetition. That that's a pretty straightforward test. But like for creativity, what do you do? Do you have somebody write a poem and then see how good

it is? I mean, no, obviously that would not be very objective, but there actually are some simpler tests for creativity that that don't capture everything we think of when we think of creativity, but they but they do get it some core aspects of it, and I think they're

pretty clever. So the one used in this paper is known as the Remote Associates test or rat, and the test goes like this, I'm gonna give you three words, and then I ask you to come up with a fourth word that and next the three I gave you. So here's an example, same tennis head. Do we want to do some some license for EE Jeopardy type music for this same tennis head. I don't know if I would have got this because the answer is right there in the paper when I read it, so I didn't

have a chance to like test myself. But the answer is match matching. When things are the same, they match. There's a tennis match, there's a match match head. And this is an interesting test because the path to the answer in each puzzles, you know, they give you a long list of these things. It's not obvious. It requires you to make associative leaps and novel connections and to sort of reinterpret linguistic clues in a way that does model part of what we mean when we say creative thinking.

Creative thinking, I would argue, is making connections that are useful or fruitful, but that are not obvious. Right. I think I would have been thrown off by this test because I would have tried to think of something like maybe clever and humorous that ties them all together, without thinking of something that's something like match like maybe I would think of say Pete Sampre's doppelgangers. Oh, you're too creative for the test. That's the problem. Yeah, that's that's

my problem. Well, so this particular study used that type of test, and the different conditions were whether people had um a multi day immersion in nature through a hiking trip versus control conditions where they did not go out on a natural hiking trip. And they found a pretty sizeable difference. They found it nearly fifty percent increase in the in the performance on these puzzle tests by the group of naive hikers. Now, that sounds like a large effect to me, So I would want to see that

replicated in other studies. Um, But it again does not seem implausible to me that there is some effect that spending time in nature has not only the sort of attention, restoring potential, but maybe clears the mind in other types of ways that haven't even been fully articulated, uh, in ways that allow you to make these sort of uh non obvious connections and creative turns in logic more than you would have been able to do otherwise. I mean I I I feel that I feel that process uh

in in my own creative work sometimes. And there have also been some other studies connecting time and nature to higher level creativity. One I was looking at was not actually an experiment. It was just a survey of creative professionals about their processes and the role of nature in their process and and this one indicated that time and nature was especially helpful in the early stages of a

creative project, more so than in the later stages. That that totally rings true to me, because I think of the early stages of a creative process are the ones that require those sort of strange mental connections, and then the later stages are often more mechanical or about draft. Yeah. Yeah, I find this to be true as well. Like from from for me, if I need to then want to think creatively about something, uh, there's nothing beats just walking

on a beach. If I can get access to a beach with just enough of it to where I can have a decent stroll up and down the beach for a while, like that is where I do some of my best creative thinking. And then once you develop some ideas, then yeah, you're gonna then you're gonna have to work with them. Then you're gonna have to do the harder part. And the beach might not be the best place for that. But you didn't come out to the beach to to

do the harder part. You didn't. You come out to the beach to feel the sense of renewal and to then to get into this creative mindset. Yeah, anecdotally, I can totally get behind that process. If you're if you want to start a new creative project, go for a walk in the woods, go out to a state park,

you know, do whatever that's like. It's great to do right at the beginning, and and then to do again once you get sick of the harder part or you're fed up with the various meetings that you've had to have to try and bring this idea to fruition, then go back of the woods because you'll need it. Then too well. I feel like this has been really interesting and um again, as as we so often end up lamenting after after a fun episode, like we we really

only scratched the surface there. There was so much stuff in the domain of the effects of nature on on our minds and our bodies that we didn't even have time for today. It's something we could totally return to in the future. Yeah. Yeah, And of course, as always, we'd love to hear from listeners about this. Share your experiences with walking in nature both you know so certainly in the past, but also we challenge you to take some of this new inside with you when you go

back into nature again. So whatever your next you know, minor neighborhood walk happens to be, or epic adventure that you've been planning for months and months. Uh. Once you've gone on those adventures, right back to us and tell us what you think and tell us how how all of that connects with what we discussed here today. I want to hear about people's favorite trees. Tell me your favorite tree shape. This will not be a scientific sample,

but I am interested. Do you like the trees with the low, drooping branches, Do you like the tall trunk with a big canopy up above. I want to know all right, well right in, we'd love to hear from you. In the meantime, we'll remind you to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind with core episodes of our show on Tuesdays and Thursdays UM. On Monday's usually we do a listener mail episode, on Wednesday's we do a short form artifact or monster fact episode, and

on Friday's we do Weird How Cinema. That's our time to set aside most serious concerns and just chat about a weird film. Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact. That's Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to

Blow Your Mind. It's production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my Heart Radio because the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows