By Jennifer Weeks, a Boston-based journalist and former senior editor at The Conversation U.S. Her articles have appeared in Audubon, Slate, The Boston Globe Magazine and many other outlets. Originally published on Undark.
Humans have turned to nature for solace and revival for centuries, without knowing exactly why it makes us feel better. “It is not so much for its beauty that the forest makes a claim upon men’s hearts, as for that subtle something, that quality of the air, that emanation from the old trees, that so wonderfully changes and renews a weary spirit,” Robert Louis Stevenson wrote in the mid-1870s. But what is that subtle something, and why does it affect us so profoundly?
In “Nature and the Mind: The Science of How Nature Improves Cognitive, Physical, and Social Well-Being,” neuroscientist Marc Berman brings the data, drawing on his own research and work by other scientists into the psychological and physiological ways in which spending time in natural environments improves human well-being. He starts by recounting a 2008 study that he conducted as a graduate student with his advisers at the University of Michigan.
The researchers gave subjects challenging memory tests, including one called the backward digit span task, in which they would hear a list of up to nine digits and then try to repeat them in reverse order. After completing the tests, the subjects took a 2.8 mile walk either through downtown Ann Arbor or in the university’s leafy arboretum, and repeated the tests. The urban walk did not measurably affect participants’ scores, but walking in the arboretum improved their performance on memory- and attention-related tasks by 20 percent. Looking at pictures of either natural or urban scenes produced similar, although somewhat weaker, results.
“Other studies had asked people how they felt after time in nature, but none had ever quantified nature’s impact on our cognition using objective measures,” Berman writes.
In Berman’s view, attention is a central element of cognition. He sees directed attention — the ability to choose what to focus on and filter out what’s less important — as a critical human capability. “Instead of knee-jerk reactions we may regret, directed attention allows us to pause, consider our intentions, and respond to people and experiences with measure,” he explains. “It keeps our flashes of anger from becoming violent behavior” and “keeps us on task when that’s what we want.”
And modern society, with its plethora of distractions — especially the digital economy and social media — has made attention “the World’s Most Endangered Resource,” in the words of political commentator Chris Hayes, author of the recent book “The Siren’s Call.” Businesses that want our attention — and the user data that comes with it — are churning out web-based products and services designed to keep us online and engaged, and, in some cases, away from their competitors.
For Berman, the founder and director of the Environmental Neuroscience Laboratory at the University of Chicago, this trend is worrisome because directed attention isn’t just a vital ability. It’s also a limited one, and can easily become depleted as we multitask, juggle work and family needs, and try to tune out tech-based noise. “Today, we’re pushing our directed attention to a breaking point,” he warns. “We’re getting distracted when it’s not necessary or adaptive, and our very ability to maintain our important relationships and live meaningful lives is at risk.”
Berman sees hope in a concept called Attention Restoration Theory, developed by University of Michigan psychologists Rachel and Stephen Kaplan, that posits nature as an answer to directed attention depletion. The Kaplans saw natural stimuli — think of leaves rustling on tree branches, or clouds drifting across the sky — as fundamentally different from manmade signals, like cell phone alerts or billboards. Nature’s sights and sounds engage a kind of thinking the Kaplans called “soft fascination” that doesn’t take up all of an observer’s attention. When you sit next to a flowing stream, you can listen to the water splashing and also let your mind wander more widely. That experience, the Kaplans hypothesized, offered an opportunity to replenish our directed attention.
The 2008 “Walk in the Park” study was an early empirical test of attention restoration theory. Its results were encouraging, but raised more questions for Berman: How much restorative power did time in nature have? How did it work, and how could it be applied?
In a follow-up study, Berman and colleagues recruited participants who were experiencing clinical depression and had them carry out the same memory tasks, followed by the same walks. Before the walks, the researchers prompted their subjects to think about something negative that was bothering them, to put them into the mode of repetitive negative rumination that characterizes depression and saps directed attention. Participants who took walks in nature showed even greater cognitive gains than those in the original study.
“It felt like discovering a fifty-minute miracle — a therapy with no known side effects that’s readily available and can improve our cognitive functioning at zero cost,” Berman writes. The results echoed findings by scientists at the University of Illinois who discovered that when children with ADHD spent time in green outdoor settings, they showed fewer attention-related symptoms afterward compared to others who spent time in human-made spaces. In one study, children with ADHD showed attention performance improvements after a walk in a park that were comparable to the effects from a dose of Ritalin.
Another notable aspect of Berman’s findings was that people didn’t have to like nature to benefit from it. Participants in the walking studies didn’t always experience mood benefits, but they showed clear attention-related improvements. “Good medicine doesn’t always taste sweet,” Berman observes.
Another area of Berman’s research examined which features of nature provided these benefits. Through several studies that asked subjects to rate photos of natural and built settings, he and his colleagues found four key qualities that people considered “natural”: abundant curved edges, such as the bends of rivers; an absence of straight lines, such as highways; green and blue hues; and fractals — branching patterns that repeat at multiple scales. Fractals can be generated mathematically, but they also occur throughout nature, from tree branches to many snowflake designs.
“Natural curves and natural fractals are all softly fascinating because they can balance complexity and predictability,” Berman writes. “They’re not so complex that they’re overwhelming, but not so predictable that they’re boring. Instead, they live in a kind of active equilibrium, like a churning waterfall or a burning campfire — things humans tend to find particularly softly fascinating.”
Using artificial neural networks — machine learning programs that may make decisions in ways similar to human brains — Berman and a doctoral student found that scenes with more natural elements were likely to be less memorable to humans than urban scenes. This suggests that it takes less directed attention to process natural stimuli. When we look at something like a tree with a huge mass of leaves, we don’t zero in on each individual leaf and analyze its features. Instead, we throw away a lot of the repeated elements and focus on the key features, such as the tree’s overall shape, mass and colors. This leaves us with more brainpower for other tasks.
These observations have implications for design — not just for those of us who can easily add plants and natural materials to our homes, but on a larger scale. One ongoing focus in Berman’s environmental neuroscience lab is combining brain science with urban planning to improve the designs of cities and towns. He argues that access to nature should be seen as a human right, rather than a nice perk, and that it’s especially important to provide more green space in cities, where the majority of the world’s population lives.
“If we don’t investigate the increases in individual and societal health that nature can offer us — if we just go on a gut sense that nature is good — then only the wealthiest among us will continue to have consistent access to the ways nature can keep us healthy and safe,” he asserts. “Meanwhile, poor and marginalized populations will continue to lack access, and worse, be told (or shown) that nature is not for them.”
While Berman is clearly frustrated by our tendency to underestimate how much we need nature, there is a strongly optimistic thread running through his highly readable and jargon-free account. Humans, he reminds us, “are not who we are by individual factors alone — we are who we are because of our environment and how individual factors interact with environmental factors (such as nature) to shape us.”
“And science,” he concludes, “shows that cultivating access to green space changes minds in ways beyond our wildest expectations.”
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Good stuff thanks Conor.
My meditation teacher often used to tell us to just “enjoy nature” as a practice. One of his rationales was that trees don’t have right angles (unlike our ugly human constructions), and thus the brain’s overactive pattern-seer switches off. So just gazing at nature relaxed our brains and nervous systems.
> an absence of straight lines
Our back yard is an edible landscape with Japanese garden aesthetics. It’s come to fruition this year, and the back perch has a sliding door for a window, full view. If you sit in the directors chair on the north side, the sightlines let you see everything, over and through the woods and bamboo, into the catbird tunnel and watching the legs of passersby in the alley, who cannot see you in return.
The middle chair is lower, and when you sit in it you see a wall of green. What little of neighbors houses seen are broken up by leaf and branch. The ancient laundry pole has a small mulberry vectored in front of it, you can’t see the garden table and work area to the south. I can sit and let the clouds work, throw some seeds to the chipmunks and cardinals that ask. Completely chill. No straight lines.
“One ongoing focus in Berman’s environmental neuroscience lab is combining brain science with urban planning to improve the designs of cities and towns. He argues that access to nature should be seen as a human right, rather than a nice perk, and that it’s especially important to provide more green space in cities, where the majority of the world’s population lives.”
It’s always interesting to see yet more confirmation of the notion of man as still being part of nature and not separated from it.
There’s 4.5 billion urban dwellers globally who can only benefit from this kind of work.
But there’s a lot of wheel re-invention going on here.
It’s been known that the urban heat island phenomenon is profoundly affected by the presence of city green spaces and tree lined avenues for over half a century. My climate tutor – one Prof Tony Chandler – was the main innovator in the mid 60s.
This has more recently morphed into city climate change adaption policies through greening – a basic principle of urban planning for some years now.
The original work of Patrick Geddes, pioneering city planner and the first ‘landscape architect’ of the industrial age, automatically integrated green spaces like parks and gardens in his city design to enhance urban well-being all his professional life (1890-1930), not only to promote that connection to nature but also he was a committed early ecologist believing that those “green lungs” improved densely populated urban areas, filtering pollution.
And of course, they do, even if there is still highly destructive urban planning such as the infamous Sheffield Chainsaw Massacre.
Between 2014-18 Sheffield CC contracted Amey to fell and “replace” 17,500 street trees, many of which were healthy.
The programme was titled “Streets Ahead” – apparently with no irony whatsoever.
It was part of a £2.2 billion road maintenance PFI – so mostly serving corporate profit – and sparked large scale public protests, folk occupying trees to prevent felling, various arrests, and then community legal action.
There is no doubt the felling was unnecessary and harmful to the city. An independent 2023 inquiry found Sheffield council’s leadership to be dishonest and eventually forced them to issue a belated public apology. It does show that people do care about greened urban environments and community agency still exists.
In this context the use of Trump’s urban troop deployments to clean up Washington’s parks and gardens, mulching trees and picking litter is an unintended but welcome consequence of his militarisation policies. There’s 8100 acres of green spaces in Chicago that might similarly benefit from troops with 47 monogrammed leaf blowers. …… Make America Green Again ?
Geddes work was then paralleled by Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City movement with a comparable emphasis on sustainable green urban dwelling from the late 1890s onward, which owed much to the social reform and ownership agenda of the Arts and Crafts movement. Then there is that frequent citation that 40%+ of Russian food production is/has been grown in dacha gardens, many/most of which are urban or urban fringe.
The concepts of both Geddes and Howard have fed into the recent rediscovery of well greened urban villages by the 15 minute city movement, also providing huge scope for climate change cityscape adaptation like that taken up in Paris – which is an amusing ‘volte face’ considering the grand design car centred thinking of Corbu and Parisian 60s and 70s large scale urban ‘renewal’.
Then we have Christopher Alexander’s Green Streets and Accessible Greenspace proposals integrated within his 1977 “A Pattern Language” – a design manual which ought to be compulsory reading before course entry to all architecture, urban design and planning, and community development programmes.
The Christopher Alexander work on Pattern Languages made it into the software world.
the concept of pattern languages making it into agile thinking late 90s and early 00s. All referencing back to Alexander.
I remember it as a very powerful concept. and without wishing to bring AI into everything… pattern languages and reference to them is a good way to keep a machine bringing forth the patterns you want.
it is also the only thing I have ever been published on – a very small part on web usability patterns back in 01. 2-3 patterns in a workshop that later appeared compiled and published.
Ran across this earlier, seems relevant: https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2025/08/you-cant-walk-your-way-out-of-disability
Of course “nature” takes in a huge variety of environments and perhaps ‘imprinting” plays a role in all this. I love trees because I grew up in a neighborhood full of them. Those who grew up in Western US landscapes may prefer all that open space.
At any rate the above ideas definitely resonate in many fields other than psychology. Architecture comes to mind.
I had the feeling in the review that the vastness of nature was understated, since, as you say, the variety is huge, from the drama of the US Southwest to the meandering mountain trails of the UK Lake District.
Also, nature has some of the most perfect straight lines: Consider sunbeams piercing a forest canopy.
I think having a natural space at your disposal is like having a superpower; in dealing with the modern stresses of knowing the world of mankind is a festering pile of shite.
I am fortunate to have a chunk of woodland with elevations, rocks, water and trees…. and all the life that comes along with it. This mini forest is a place that is only minutes away from the “real” world, but being in it feels like another time and place. Nature makes you aware of how trivial and temporary we are. It is good to know we are not the source of anything. We do not have “control”. But we do share a connection with The Source, with everything.
And then coming back out to the world…..where; it just is what it is.
One should remind that real life Nature isn’t always warm and fuzzy which may be why we often prefer the civilized nature park version–lacking teeth and claws. In Annie Hall Woody Allen talks about how he prefers the city and to him nature is bugs splatting on the windshield. The above suggests that even nature haters may benefit in spite of themselves, but there’s a considerable cultural counter tradition of forest fears and visions of nature as menace.
rob: the world of mankind is a festering pile of shite
Okay. But we — the human species — came from nature and our drives are all the result of natural evolution, red in tooth and claw. So we and our festering pile of shite are entirely products of nature, not something separate despite what urban fantasists prefer to believe. In which case ….
Carolinian: One should remind (oneself?) that real life Nature isn’t always warm and fuzzy
Quite. I’ve always found the views of Werner Herzog — who, after all, has lived in jungles and wilderness, and grew up in a Bavarian village so remote he and his family crapped in an outhouse and fetched water from a well — a refreshing and arguably more accurate take on the nature of Nature.
“The trees are in misery, and the birds are in misery. I don’t think they sing. They just screech in pain. …Taking a close look at what’s around us, there is some sort of harmony: it’s the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder.”
~ Werner Herzog
“I believe the common denominator of the Universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility and murder.” ~ Werner Herzog
“Life in the oceans must be sheer hell. A vast, merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger. So much of a hell that during evolution some species—including man—crawled, fled onto some small continents of solid land, where the Lessons of Darkness continue.”
~ Werner Herzog
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grizzly_Man
But I don’t agree with his bleak point of view. Life is a precious gift. Our love of being alive is another one of our instincts. And it’s one that animals I think share, despite the teeth and claws.
Our love of being alive is another one of our instincts.
How does that accord with the fact that homo sapiens is (as far as I know) the only animal that deliberately, and in significant numbers, choses suicide?
There’s nature and then there’s nurture. I’d blame nurture. We’re not exactly like the other animals.
Because it is in our nature to seek meaning in life?
It’s telling that in our earliest religious mythology, Adam and Eve lived in the Garden of Eden, not (say) the Forest of Eden. Nature, but under human/divine control. It was only after they were expelled from the Garden that they had to deal with the actual natural world.
Herzog was responsible for several people being killed during the shoot of Fitzcarraldo. In the documentary, Burden of Dreams, he blames nature for their deaths. “Der jungle! Der jungle is to blame!”
I’ve seen most of his movies and many are good but, IMO, philosophically he’s a bit of a crackpot.
But all the anthropomorphizing that goes on during PBS nature shows shouldn’t be taken seriously either. Truth to tell we don’t know what animals think. But behaviorally they often resemble us.
Most of this emphasizes the visual element, though I suspect that such natural environments engage other other senses in beneficial ways — and perhaps even some metabolic benefits not associated with perception at all (oxygen levels, pheromones, etc)
Should it be pointed out that we humans have spent hundreds of thousands of years living in forests and plains which our brain was designed for? And that modern human civilization is just an eye-blink when set against all those eons? Our brains are still the mark one brains of our ancestors and no doubt internally rebel at all those sharp lines and squares and materials like concrete. If you are in a town and city you will, if you take the time, see that they look hideous and are not places that you can relax in and be at peace. And this is even more true of our times with Brutalist architecture and cookie cutter developments. Going into a natural setting is just bringing us back home on an internal level. And if you do not believe me, then feel free to totally mess up your Circadian rhythm and see how far you get doing that. But at night, don’t forget to look up at the stars from time to time. Humans grew up with them as well.
I had the same thought. It’s highly symptomatic of the predicament of our times that we need to perform exacting science to demonstrate what otherwise would ideally be culturally self-evident: that we are better off emotionally and cognitively when our surroundings better resemble that which evolutionarily shaped our consciousness. Who knew??
“ But at night, don’t forget to look up at the stars from time to time. Humans grew up with them as well.”
Indeed. But like so much, even the stars for most are rapidly disappearing as well. Think urban glare masking the full magnifience of our celestial sphere.
Bear with me here. Golf. When played as intended, standing on your feet and walking instead of “played at” while mostly sitting on your ass in a golf cart with a blue tooth speaker blaring and an ice chest filled with adult beverages, the game engages your entire being as you try to solve a 4D puzzle: Getting the ball in the hole in the fewest number of strokes over an ever changing ground while dealing with changes in the wind and the weather over the course of a few hours…Usually with supportive and genial companions who are trying to do the same thing, even in competition. My evolutionary biology teacher, who was elected to the National Academy of Sciences at a young age as a pioneer in molecular evolution, liked to point out that the landscape of the typical golf course resembles the savannas of East Africa where humans emerged. He was only half kidding. His research group used the university golf course as a natural laboratory to study turtle molecular genetics after several of us recommended that to his lab coordinator. Politics also recedes from view on the golf course, a place where it does not matter. Which is also very healthy; everyone else knows I’m a bit different from the general run of golfers, in the US. The occasional blowhard shows up and if he (always a “he”) continues becomes unwelcome within a short time.
Anyway, my usual golf course is alternating green space and woods and streams and large ponds, filled with birds of all kinds, including red-tailed hawks, medium-sized red-headed woodpeckers, and bluebirds. Plus the occasional undocumented alien who leaves nothing but a mess behind. 3-4 hours of a good walk not spoiled is good for one’s mental health. One other thing. A golf course that fits in its environment is not necessarily a swamp of chemicals or water hog. Golf courses where they do not belong, such as in the desert or as an excuse for a sterile neighborhood of McMansions, are another matter altogether. And a peculiar American perversion of the game, not unlike the golf cart. I’ll return to my corner now after a final word. You can learn everything you need to know about a person (especially final two paragraphs) in one 18-hole round. There is no hiding who you are when playing such a difficult game in the company of others.
From your digital lips to Donald Trump’s ears although here’s guessing he does use a golf cart. Trump likes to go on about sunsets and nice weather when he’s not sending ordinance to the Israelis. Perhaps it’s all those hungry lions on the savannah that his particular DNA remembers.
Snark aside thanks for the comment although golf’s Scottish beginnings may not have been too African. Here in the US we mellowed it out.
BTW have just watched a great golf movie from the 1950s–Pat and Mike with Tracy and Hepburn as a champ woman golfer. No golf carts in evidence. Check it out if not seen.
Our world of thoughts and feeling is radically moulded for us by the events which befall us. We are the echo of the conditions in which we find ourselves at a given time. Life can be understood only by living it.
Exposure to the patterns of nature and the circadian rhythms of the days and seasons are critical to our cognitive functioning and well-being. I have been fortunate most of my life to have lived in houses that backed-up to open spaces, even when living in built-up areas.
I also make it a point to engage in “forest bathing” whenever I can; no earbuds allowed. Walking in the woods does open-up my mind and dispel any despair or dread that I might be feeling.
Let me recommend the book Visual Delight in Architecture: Daylight, Vision and View by Lisa Heschong. I planned my current house using her principles (along with A Pattern Language mentioned above). https://www.lheschong.com/visual-delight
National Parks, and Wildlife Reserves, are all to have new names,
names drawn from a list of billionaires. ” ’tis better than having a
football stadium named after one,” declared one ultra-rich dude…