by Adam Alter
For all their considerable power, colors are but one feature of the physical environments that we inhabit as we live our lives. These locations differ along countless other dimensions, from the presence or absence of nature and noise to the overcrowding that comes when we insist on living in already overpopulated cities. Some of these features are good for us, but others join together to form oppressive environments that disturb our thoughts, dampen our moods, and disrupt our behaviors.
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LOCATIONS
Oppressive Environments
When Japanese troops departed Hong Kong at the end of World War II, they left behind a crumbling fort that covered an area the size of six football fields. Refugees invaded the structure and lived in hundreds of makeshift dwellings until the government built water pipes and tall concrete apartment blocks in the 1960s. The area, known as Kowloon Walled City, became an emblem for the plague of overpopulation. Many of the city’s apartments were barely larger than an office desk, its alleyways were rarely more than a few feet wide, and most of the city was shrouded in perpetual darkness. Doctors and dentists established illegal practices, and Triad gangs opened brothels, gambling houses, and opium dens. By 1987, the tiny city’s population climbed to more than 33,000 residents, making its population seventy-five times denser than the population of Monaco, the world’s most densely populated country. At the same density, the diminutive U.S. state of Delaware could house Earth’s entire human population.
In the mid-1960s, not long after Kowloon Walled City’s population skyrocketed, two researchers at a hospital in Oxford, England, subjected young patients to a controversial experiment on overcrowding. The researchers combed the hospital wards and found fifteen children between three and eight years old, whom they categorized as autistic, severely brain-damaged, or normal. Each day, the children would assemble for “free play” in a room that was designed to hold small groups. Sometimes the experimenters ensured that no more than six children played at once—a comfortable number given the size of the room. At other times the room held more than a dozen children simultaneously. While the children played for fifteen-minute periods, nurses and researchers looked on and recorded their behavior. As expected, the autistic children rarely interacted with their playmates—but they also spent far more time nervously hugging the room’s periphery when it was overpopulated. When joined by only three or four playmates, they spent an average of three minutes on the room’s outskirts, but that number jumped to eight minutes when the room held more than a dozen children. The normal and brain-damaged children didn’t fare much better in the densely populated room. They played happily for ten minutes in smaller groups, but only for five or six minutes when the room was overcrowded. Meanwhile, they spent little more than thirty seconds fighting and snatching toys when the room was sparsely populated, but up to four minutes bickering when the space was congested. Two of the children even had to be restrained from biting their playmates. After only minutes in an overcrowded room, the gregarious children became hostile, and the anxious children were doubly withdrawn.
The Oxford hospital study was groundbreaking, but it left open a number of important questions. Were the results merely a product of the study’s subjects—a small group of children hampered by temporary or ongoing psychological trauma? Or would the results also apply to a larger group of healthy, high-functioning adults? To answer those questions, a large group of psychologists and architects conducted two experiments among eight thousand college students at three institutions in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. Some of the students lived in high-density towers, some in medium-density apartment blocks, and others in lower-density dorms. The researchers used two subtle techniques to measure whether the students had formed strong social bonds with their neighbors. They began by scattering a series of stamped and addressed envelopes inside the buildings, creating the sense that the letters had been lost on the way to the mailbox. They made sure that the letters were dropped in prominent places so the students couldn’t miss them. Some of the students saw the letters, assumed they were lost by fellow residents, and kindly posted them—a small gesture suggesting a measure of social kinship. When the researchers returned four hours later, they found that 100 percent of the letters in the low-density housing were posted, 87 percent were posted in the medium-density blocks, and only 63 percent were posted in the high-density towers.
In a different set of apartment blocks that similarly varied in density, the researchers placed boxes asking residents to donate used milk cartons for an art project. Calculating the number of cartons that were used by the residents in the blocks, they found again that high-density dwellers were less helpful. Those in low- and medium-density housing contributed 55 percent of their cartons, whereas the students in high-density housing gave only 37 percent of their cartons. These results suggest that high-density living hampers generosity, and other researchers have shown that overcrowding similarly provokes mental illness, drug addiction, alcoholism, family disorganization, and a generally diminished quality of life.
Extreme overcrowding is also associated with claustrophobia: the fear of closed or very densely populated spaces. In contrast to some other human phobias that people acquire with experience—like triskaidekaphobia (fear of the number 13) and agyrophobia (fear of crossing the street)—claustrophobia appears to be innate. Humans today are just as afraid of small, dark rooms as were their ancestors who stumbled into small, dark caves thousands of years ago. We’re driven to preserve a measure of personal space, which is why people respond strongly to brief unintended physical contact. In one study, marketing expert Paco Underhill surreptitiously filmed shoppers as they browsed the aisles of a large department store. Some of the aisles were especially narrow, and the shoppers who stopped to browse in narrower aisles tended to be jostled by other customers who struggled to squeeze past them. Seconds later, the disturbed customers stopped browsing and often left the store altogether. When Underhill later questioned some of the shoppers, they had no idea they had been persuaded to leave the store because they were jostled—but the results were unambiguous and the prescription clear: customers are more likely to remain in stores if the aisles are wide enough to prevent even light collisions, or butt brushes, as Underhill called them.
Overcrowding also creates noise, and researchers have found that the constant hum of everyday life stifles creativity and learning. In the early 1970s, psychologists visited four 32-story apartment blocks in upper Manhattan. The apartments faced onto Interstate 95, one of the busiest highways on the East Coast. Among the apartments’ residents were seventy-three elementary school children who were subjected to the constant rumble of highway traffic—a sound that reached up to 84 decibels. Some scales define 84 decibels as “very loud,” its volume matching the noise from a truck without a muffler, or a loud factory. Prolonged exposure to a noise of that intensity sometimes produces hearing loss, and the noise was formidable even inside the apartments. The children on the towers’ lower floors experienced a racket ten times more intense than the relatively muffled sound that reached the children who lived on the top floors. Consequently, when the researchers administered a hearing test, children who had been living on a low floor for at least four years struggled to discriminate between words that sound similar but have very different meanings. For example, the word pairs gear and beer, or cope and coke, are difficult to distinguish when whispered or stifled by background noise. The researchers reasoned that children with poorer hearing are also less likely to engage in conversation and more likely to experience intellectual difficulties. And that’s what they found: the children who had lived on the lower floors for many years also struggled to read relative to other children of their age. Most distressing, when the children had lived in the buildings for more than six years, the researchers could predict their reading scores with astonishing accuracy by asking just one question: “On which floor do you live?” Since the effect of the noise grew over time, the researchers were
able to rule out the possibility that residents on the higher floors were generally smarter, wealthier, or more dedicated to educating their children. Exposing children to cluttered noise for an extended period of time—even the background noise that comes with urban living—is enough to hamper their intellectual development.
Overcrowding and noise pollution are relatively recent problems that barely existed a few hundred years ago, before the Industrial Revolution heralded the arrival of generators and engines. Suddenly, large cities replaced scattered towns and hamlets, and the machines that built those cities were themselves noisy. As so often happens, the best solutions to these modern problems re-create the world as it was before they existed. For one researcher, that solution became apparent when he noticed that hospital patients just a few rooms apart were recovering at very different rates.
The Natural Environment as Panacea
Paoli, Pennsylvania, is a small town not too far from Philadelphia, with a local suburban hospital. Patients at Paoli Memorial Hospital recover in a row of rooms facing a small courtyard. In the early 1980s, a researcher visited the hospital and gathered information about patients who had undergone gallbladder surgery between 1972 and 1981. Gallbladder surgery is routine and generally uncomplicated, but most patients in the 1970s were kept for a week or two before they returned home. Some took longer to recover than others, and the researcher wondered whether subtle differences between the hospital rooms might explain this discrepancy. Some of the rooms on one side of the hospital faced onto a brick wall, whereas others slightly farther down the corridor faced onto a small stand of deciduous trees. Apart from their differing views, the rooms were identical.
When the researcher looked at their recovery charts, he was struck by how much better the patients fared when their rooms looked out onto the trees rather than the brick wall. On average, those who faced the brick wall needed an extra day to recover before returning home. They were also far more depressed and experienced more pain. On average, their nurses recorded four negative notes per patient—comments like “needs much encouragement” and “upset and crying”—whereas those with a view of the trees warranted negative notes only once during their stay. Meanwhile, very few of the patients who looked out onto the trees required more than a single dose of strong painkillers during the middle part of their stay, whereas those facing the wall required two or even three doses. Apart from their view, the patients had received identical treatment at the hospital and were otherwise very similar. Each patient with a view of the trees was matched with a patient whose room looked out onto the brick wall, so that their age, gender, weight, status as smokers or nonsmokers, and attending doctors and nurses were controlled as tightly as possible. Since those factors were controlled, the only explanation was that patients who looked out at a stand of trees recovered more quickly because they were lucky enough to occupy rooms with a natural view.
These results are surprising because the effects are so large—much larger than the effects of many other targeted treatment interventions. By some measures, patients who gazed out at a natural scene were four times better off than those who faced a wall. Strong results usually inspire skepticism, but plenty of studies have shown similar effects. In one of those studies, two environmental psychologists approached 337 sets of parents who lived with their children in five rural communities in upstate New York. The researcher scored the “naturalness” of each family’s home, awarding points for natural views, indoor plants, and grass-covered yards. Some of the children had experienced little stress growing up, rarely fighting or getting punished at school, but others were bullied and struggled to get along with their parents. When the researchers measured the happiness and well-being of the students in their study, they noticed that those who had experienced hardship were distressed and lacking in self-esteem—except when they lived in more natural environments. The presence of nature seemed to buffer them against the stresses that hampered other children who lived in predominantly man-made environments.
In an even more direct test, another group of researchers asked a hundred sets of parents with children who suffered from attention deficit disorder (ADD) how their children responded to different playtime activities. Children who have ADD are often restless and distracted. But the parents reported that green activities—like fishing and soccer—left their children in a far more relaxed, focused state. It wasn’t that the children who spent time outside were merely happier, more likely to interact with friends, or more active—in fact, those who sat indoors, in a room with natural views, were calmer than children who played outside in man-made environments that were devoid of grass and trees.
What is it that sets natural environments apart from others? Why shouldn’t a quiet streetscape have the same effect as a quiet natural landscape, for example? Architecture has its own beauty, and some people prefer urban environments to natural environments, so why does nature seem to have such powerful restorative effects? The answer is that natural environments have a unique constellation of features that set them apart from man-made locations. Just before the dawn of the twentieth century, William James, one of the early giants of modern psychology, explained that human attention comes in two different forms. The first is directed attention, which enables us to focus on demanding tasks like driving and writing. Reading a book also requires directed attention, and you’ll notice that you start to zone out when you’re tired, or you’ve been reading for hours at a time. The second form is involuntary attention, which comes easily and doesn’t require any mental effort at all. As James explained, “Strange things, moving things, wild animals, bright things, pretty things, words, blows, blood, etc., etc., etc.” all attract our attention involuntarily. Nature restores your mental functioning in the same way that food and water restore your body. The business of everyday life—dodging traffic, slavishly making decisions and judgment calls, interacting with strangers—is depleting, and what man-made environments take away from us, nature gives back. There’s something mystical and, you might say, unscientific about this claim, but its heart actually rests in what psychologists call attention restoration theory, or ART. According to ART, urban environments are draining because they force us to direct our attention to specific tasks (e.g., avoiding the onslaught of traffic) and grab our attention dynamically, compelling us to “look here!” before telling us instead to “look over there!” These demands are draining—and they’re also absent in natural environments. Forests, streams, rivers, lakes, and oceans demand very little from us, though they’re still engaging, ever changing, and attention-grabbing. The difference between natural and urban landscapes is how they command our attention. While man-made landscapes bombard us with stimulation, their natural counterparts give us the chance to think as much or as little as we’d like, and the opportunity to replenish exhausted mental resources.
In the early 2000s, more than a hundred unlucky Dutch students were subjected to an experiment that revealed nature’s capacity for mental restoration. The students entered a lab and sat in front of a screen that began to play scenes from the controversial film Faces of Death. First, a woman decapitated a rooster; then sheep and bulls were slaughtered in an abattoir. Two vegetarians, repulsed by the images, left the room and refused to return, while the remaining students stared at the screen transfixed and horrified. As the video ended and the students caught their breath, the researcher began a second video. Mercifully, the second video was less distressing, depicting the scenes a person might view during a seven-minute stroll. For some of the students, the video passed through a Dutch forest, whereas the other students watched a video that progressed down a street in the Dutch city of Utrecht. After watching the video, the students who imagined walking through the forest scene reported feeling happier, more relaxed, and less angry than those who imagined walking through the cityscape. They were also more alert, which enabled them to perform better on a task that required them to search for specific letters of the alphabet among an array d
ominated by irrelevant characters. Merely asking students to imagine strolling through a natural scene was enough to dampen the distressing and attention-sapping effects of the Faces of Death video.
Healers in Japan and Germany have long heralded the benefits of natural therapy, recognizing that humankind has spent 99.99 percent of its history living in natural environments. The Japanese version of natural therapy is shinrin-yoku, or forest bathing, which requires that patients walk for extended periods through forested areas while inhaling woodsy scents that complement the sylvan atmosphere. German Kneipp therapy similarly requires that patients perform physical exercises in forest clearings. These alternative therapies aren’t just idle cultural quirks, and researchers have found that patients enjoy a wide range of benefits. Among others, compared with people who walked through urban areas, shinrin-yoku patients had lower blood pressure, lower pulse rates, and lower cortisol levels, a marker of reduced stress. People who are exposed to natural scenes aren’t just happier or more comfortable; the very building blocks of their physiological well-being also respond positively to natural therapy.
Natural environments promote calmness and well-being in part because they expose people to low levels of stress. These stressful experiences are tame in comparison with the trials and tribulations that most of us associate with stress—workplace drama, traffic jams, and wailing children on international plane trips. Humans thrive with some stimulation, but we’re incapable of coping with extreme stressors, which push us from the comfortable realm of eustress (good stress) to the danger zone of distress (bad stress). Interesting locations, including busy natural environments, are so beneficial that physicians have begun to suggest that they might offer a cheap and effective way to lessen the effects of certain cancers.