by Sian Beilock
Given that changes in the body, such as moving from a slumped posture to sitting upright, can positively affect how you feel, it seems logical that learning how to better control your body, how to move and act in a way that lessens pain and encourages fluidity and balance, can also change your ability to think. Our mind has a tendency to be restless and wander. Many think that this tendency extends to the body. In other words, the way we operate in the world puts our body in a tense and restless state, yet we have the power to get our body back—through exercise, meditation, IBMT, and even the Alexander technique.24
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When you think of your body as a shell, merely the casing for your brain and less important than your mind, you will be less healthy. With this perspective, you can’t really take proper care of your body. In fact, the health of your mind is profoundly linked to that of your body. Knowing this, you’ll make healthier choices in your life about what to eat, when to sleep, and how to behave. When you appreciate the power of the body in changing the mind, you function better.25 Exercise and body-centered meditation, awareness, and learning practices that coach the body as well as the mind can help you achieve this mind-body connection. Our thinking extends way beyond the cortex.
CHAPTER 11
Greening the Brain
HOW THE PHYSICAL ENVIRONMENT SHAPES THINKING
Beyond the Body
Blurry-eyed, I stumble out of bed and pull open the window in our tiny bedroom. Gazing out over the lush garden I realize that I have no idea what time it is. Even more striking, I find myself not really caring. There is no clock in the room, and my cell phone, which doesn’t work here anyway, has died. The only timing aid at my disposal is the sun hanging high in the sky.
It’s a small thing, not caring what time it is, something vacationers often do when they relax, unwind, and lose track of the outside world. It usually happens to me around the third day of our annual pilgrimage to the small Italian seaside village of San Felice Circeo, where my husband’s parents have had a summer home for the better part of forty years. Dario grew up in Rome and, as a boy, spent summers in San Felice, where, according to him, nothing has really changed. This is especially true when it comes to technology, he moans.
There is no computer in the family’s Italian villa, no wireless network to plug your laptop into, and email is accessible only at the town’s one Internet café, a twenty-minute drive away. Of course, even when you make it into town there is no guarantee you will actually be able to get online because half the time the network is down and the other half the elderly nonna who owns the café has, with no forewarning, closed shop to meet with friends. In short, vacationing in San Felice is like a trip into a wireless abyss, something that is increasingly rare today, when people can get “plugged in” in even the most remote areas. Yet after a few days of being separated from my email and existing without regular reminders of the time, I find myself less concerned about what I am missing than if I had perpetual access to the outside world.
Perhaps losing that nagging feeling to constantly check your phone is not something most people would think twice about, but as a brain scientist who makes her living studying the inner workings of the mind, I am particularly interested in what happens when we step away from the distractions of our daily life. I want to know how our surroundings—from the technology that keeps us permanently online to the general chaos of urban life—can affect our ability to focus our attention, make decisions, or even learn something new.
In recent years, neuroscientists have realized that our environment influences our mind in unexpected ways. In fact our mind extends beyond the physical cortex of the brain’s flesh. Our brain is not the only resource we have at our disposal to reason or solve problems. In other words, we have to change what we think of when we think of cognition.
Scientists no longer view the body and its surroundings as simply the foil or casing for the mind. Nor do we view cognition as the sole driving force behind what the body does. Striking new evidence makes it clear that particular types of bodies (fit versus more sedentary) and the specific way these bodies act have enormous consequences for how sharp our thinking is. Moreover, it’s not simply the body per se that has a significant impact on the mind. The environment that this body is in contributes nontrivially to our thinking and reasoning skills.
For instance, starting off the morning by having to navigate through intense city traffic or by receiving a dozen emails with “urgent” in the subject line can decrease your ability to shine in a meeting later in the day. Whenever your attention is dramatically captured by stressful situations, your thinking changes. Neurons go into crisis mode. Neural areas involved in focusing attention buckle down and stop communicating effectively with the rest of the brain. This makes it hard for different areas of the brain—those involved in logic, memory, or attention—to work together to help us function at our best.1 Perhaps most interesting, this crisis mode doesn’t stop when the stressful situation is over. Just as it takes time for our body to recover after physical exertion, it takes time for our mind to recover after mental exertion. It might seem quite alarming that operating in a hectic environment one minute can adversely affect the brainpower we bring to the next. But it works the other way too: spending a few hours in the garden can increase the likelihood that you’ll perform at your best long after you have gone inside to a home office or business appointment.
Below are a couple of thought tasks for you. Take out a blank piece of paper and a pen and do the following:
1. List all the uses you can think of for a brick.
Next,
2. What would be the consequences if everyone suddenly lost the ability to read and write? List as many as you can foresee.
What predicts how many different solutions you will be able to come up with? Your motivation or knowledge of the world might come into play, but you might be surprised to learn that another factor is what you were doing before you encountered this exercise. What you do in the middle of problem-solving matters too. If you are able to take a break, you are more likely to come up with new answers to problems like the ones above.2 Walking away from a puzzle or challenge brings new possibilities to the surface and also flushes out dead-end thinking. It’s akin to rebooting your computer when it freezes. Stepping back helps get rid of bugs, creating new opportunities for insight.
I often describe this phenomenon of walking away in talks I give to companies about how we can use findings from brain science to improve our daily lives. People find it counterintuitive that stepping away from what you are working on increases the probability of success. My guess is that this is because we have a tendency to want to avoid doing anything that seems to initially take us farther away from a goal—backup avoidance, psychologists call it. But if you think about it for a moment, it’s easy to come up with instances when turning your back on a problem helped you solve it.
After a recent presentation I gave, Gary, a computer programmer who works in downtown Chicago, came up to me and shared a story. As Gary explains it, whenever he hits a roadblock at work, no matter how long he bangs his head against the wall trying to solve the problem, the answer always comes to him on his walk home to his house in the Oak Park suburbs at the end of the day. The bus drops Gary off right by Oak Park’s Austin Gardens, a picturesque park and nature preserve. Walking through Austin Gardens, Gary told me, he has solved more programming issues than anywhere else.
Neuroscientists have known for some time that, when rats try to solve a problem like navigating through new surroundings, their neurons fire in new ways. And it’s when the rats take a break from their exploration that they convert these new firing patterns into long-lasting memories of the experience.3 Something similar seems to apply to how humans reason and learn. It’s only when Gary takes a break that the solution to his coding problem pops into his head. Interestingly, it’s probably not just the act of stepping away or a change in environment that improves his thinking. Being more likely to come up w
ith answers when he is in the park resonates with some remarkable discoveries scientists have made about how nature affects our brainpower.
Nature, it turns out, can have a powerful influence on our thinking. Poets, writers, and philosophers have long suspected that spending time outdoors offers positive benefits for our health and well-being. Being in harmony with nature is a central idea in many Eastern cultures and practices. The practice of Tai Chi, martial arts, meditation, and yoga often occur in parks. In the West, national parks attract millions of visitors every year, and many people who want to relax and unwind choose to hike in the mountains or walk on the beach. The belief in nature’s restorative properties can be seen in how we pick our vacation destinations and choose our extracurricular activities.4
Brain scientists have recently discovered that the positive benefits of nature extend beyond our physical health to our mental capacities. Frances Kuo, who runs the Landscape and Human Health Laboratory at the University of Illinois, studies the relationship between people and the physical environment. Her research reveals that the impact of nature on the human psyche goes beyond nature’s aesthetic appeal. Kuo has found links between green space and a safe home life. She has also discovered that natural surroundings are tied to enhanced working memory, which translates into increased concentration and self-control.
Kuo is particularly interested in how nature affects well-being in inner-city settings. There are many demands on your attention when you live in poverty. “Basic concerns such as rent, utilities, and food are ongoing challenges that require effortful problem solving and reasoning,” Kuo writes.5 Safety concerns, both within the family and outside it, mandate a level of vigilance that the middle class and well-off can’t even comprehend. Surviving in the inner city requires a high degree of self-discipline that, at the most basic level, comes down to what psychologists call executive control.
Executive control is an umbrella term that refers to a collection of cognitive functions, such as the ability to focus attention and working memory, which helps us keep thoughts we want in our consciousness and unwanted thoughts out. When we can’t successfully manage our impulses—whether it’s reacting violently in an argument, gambling away the rent money, or giving in to eating that donut we swore we were going to avoid—a failure of executive control is usually lurking in the background.
In one study, Kuo asked residents of the Robert Taylor Homes, a housing project in inner-city Chicago, to think back to situations in which they had a disagreement with a family member and how they dealt with that conflict. Were they able to reason through their differences and talk it out? Or did the altercation end in physical violence or even the use of a gun or other weapon?
A typical resident of the Robert Taylor Homes whom Kuo studied is a single, thirty-four-year-old African American woman with a high school diploma or equivalency degree. She’s raising three children on a household income of less than $10,000 a year, which she might make in a variety of ways, such as part-time work at a local fast-food chain or nearby convenience store. Not only is making ends meet a constant struggle, but keeping peace in such a stressful environment is very difficult, mandating a high degree of executive control.
Some of the residents of the Robert Taylor Homes live in relatively green high-rise apartment buildings, meaning that they have views of trees and grass out their windows, while others live in more barren surroundings, with views of, say, a vacant lot. Kuo had a hunch that what people can see outside their windows might have a real impact on their ability to manage the stress in their home. She found that the more green residents could see outside their windows, the less aggression and violence they reported at home.
In the early 1960s, when the Robert Taylor Homes were first built, bushes, trees, and grass were planted around each of the twenty-eight high-rise buildings in the complex to give them some of the characteristics of a typical suburban neighborhood. With time, however, many of the green spaces have been destroyed and paved over in an effort to keep down maintenance costs. Yet the leftover patches of green still have a positive effect on what happens in residents’ homes.
Can it really be the case that seeing green space outside one’s window leads to less violence? Or could it be the other way around, that less violent households are rewarded by being assigned to greener buildings in the first place? Kuo is convinced that the former is true, because, when people apply to the Chicago Housing Authority for placement in one of the seventeen projects located throughout the city, they have no say over where they live within a particular development. As Kuo points out, clerks in the central office handle all the housing assignments, which involve some forty thousand residents spread out across 1,500 buildings in the city. No bureaucrat can remember the characteristics of so many buildings, let alone take them into account when assigning apartments.
Kuo also measured the residents’ level of executive control, specifically the amount of working memory they had. Working memory is largely housed in the prefrontal cortex, the very front part of the brain, above the eyes. The prefrontal cortex is what really distinguishes us humans from other animals. Not only is the human prefrontal cortex much larger than that of other primates of similar body size, but it occupies a far larger percentage of our brain than it does in any other animal. The prefrontal cortex is the seat of many of the mental abilities that make us uniquely human, including self-control, and it also plays a big role in regulating emotions. The more powerful your prefrontal cortex and the working memory housed there, the better you are at not letting your emotions get the better of you.
Kuo found that residents who had views of nature scored higher on tests of working memory than those who had barren views. And the more working memory, the less violence they experienced in the home. Even a small area of a natural environment outside your window changes working memory for the better and gives you the self-discipline to keep your own emotions in check and effectively handle altercations that occur in your home.
The benefits of green space are widespread. University students with mostly natural views from their dormitory room score higher on tests of working memory and concentration than college students who live in the same dorm but with views of other buildings.6 Similar to the Robert Taylor residents, university students rarely get to choose exactly where they live. They may get to specify their preference for a particular area of campus or a set of dorm buildings, but they usually don’t get to choose the particular room. So it’s not that the students with better concentration skills opt for a greener view, but that the views affect students’ concentration abilities.
Kuo’s work shows that something as simple as being in nature, even looking out at a patch of it from indoors, can help boost working memory, focus attention, and get things done. This is good news for parents of children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, because central among the deficits that characterize ADHD is an impairment in working memory, which contributes to kids’ inability to control their impulses and behavior.7 If exposure to green space helps boost working memory, then being in nature should help curtail some symptoms of ADHD. And it seems to. Studies have found that parents rate their children with ADHD as functioning better than usual after having engaged in activities in green settings relative to indoor or even outdoor city settings.8
That nature improves brain functioning was known by even the first psychologists. In the late 1800s, William James made a distinction between two types of attention. Certain elements in the environment are effortlessly engaging and draw on involuntary attention: “strange things, moving things, wild animals, bright things,” James wrote.9 In situations that don’t effortlessly engage us, we need to execute voluntary or directed attention instead.
Scientists compare directed attention—which is at the heart of our ability to concentrate—to a mental muscle that can wear out over time. When we’re in nature, our surroundings (whether the sound of a bird chirping or the sight of a beautiful sunrise) attract our involuntary attention,
which gives our directed attention, which is fueled by working memory, time to rest and replenish. If we never give this focus a break, it deteriorates.
Being in the middle of a crazy urban environment has the opposite effect. Cities are filled with objects and events that capture involuntary attention from one moment to the next: the horn of the car that is just about to run you over, the ringing bell of a bicycle messenger, the blaring alarm of sidewalk cover openings, and the rattle of the granny cart and baby buggies in your path. You also have to use your directed attention to consciously steer clear of advertisements that aim to lure you into buying something you don’t want or need. In short, urban environments are a lot less restorative than natural ones.
Researchers at the School of the Built Environment in Edinburgh, Scotland, asked volunteers to take a walk that wound through both built environments and natural landscapes while they wore a mobile EEG device that captured their brain waves. The researchers found reductions in patterns of brain activity associated with being aroused and engaged (that is, reductions in directed attention) when folks walked out of the city and into green space.10 Akin to James’s observations about nature, when people are walking through the park, their brain is, in a way, quieter than when they travel in urbanized and busy areas.
Professor Stephen Kaplan at the University of Michigan has given a name to James’s observations about nature: attention restoration theory.11 In a series of cleverly designed studies with his colleagues Marc Berman and John Jonides, he has put James’s ideas to the test. In one study, students were asked to perform tests designed to measure their directed attention abilities. First, they had to listen to letters of the alphabet presented in random order, memorize them, and then recall them in the opposite order. An experimenter sat next to them and wrote down their answer. This type of task is quite difficult because you have to keep moving items in and out of your focus of attention.