by Ethan Kross
In one particularly compelling study, the environmental psychologist Roger Ulrich had found that patients recovering from gallbladder surgery who were assigned to a room that faced onto a small cluster of deciduous trees recovered faster from their operations, took fewer painkillers, and were judged as more emotionally resilient by the nurses caring for them than patients whose rooms looked out onto a brick wall. But whether glancing at green views would help people manage the emotional turmoil of inner-city life in one of the most hostile environments in the United States was a complete mystery.
When Ming learned about the housing assignment process at the Robert Taylor Homes, she saw a chance to further examine the effects of nature on the mind. So she and her team got to work visiting apartments to see what they could uncover. First, they took pictures of the areas surrounding eighteen Robert Taylor Homes buildings and coded each building’s view for the presence of green space. Then they went door-to-door recruiting participants for their study; in this case, female heads of households. During forty-five-minute sessions held in the participants’ apartments, Ming’s team cataloged how well they were managing the most important issues in their lives: whether to go back to school, how to keep their homes safe, and how to raise their children. They also measured each person’s ability to focus their attention by measuring how many digits they could retain and manipulate from a string of numbers.
When Ming and her team analyzed the data, they found that the tenants who lived in apartments with green views were significantly better at focusing their attention than those whose buildings looked out onto barren cityscapes. They also procrastinated less when making challenging decisions and felt that the obstacles they faced were less debilitating. In other words, their behavior was more positive; their thinking was calmer and more challenge oriented. What’s more, Ming’s findings suggested that the Robert Taylor Homes residents’ behavior and thinking were more positive because they were better able to focus their attention. Trees and grass seemed to act like mental vitamins that fueled their ability to manage the stressors they faced.
As it turned out, Ming’s findings were not a fluke. In the years since her study, more green revelations have followed. For example, using data from more than ten thousand individuals in England collected over eighteen years, scientists found that people reported experiencing lower levels of distress and higher well-being when living in urban areas with more green space. Meanwhile, a 2015 high-resolution satellite imagery study of the Canadian city of Toronto found that having just ten more trees on a city block was associated with improvements in people’s health comparable to an increase in their annual income of $10,000 or being seven years younger. Finally, a study involving the entire population of England below the age of retirement—approximately forty-one million people—revealed that exposure to green spaces buffered people against several of the harmful effects of poverty on health. To put it another way that only slightly exaggerates, green spaces seem to function like a great therapist, anti-aging elixir, and immune-system booster all in one.
These findings raise a fascinating possibility: that the internal conversations we have with ourselves are influenced by the physical spaces we navigate in our daily lives. And if we make smart choices about how we relate to our surroundings, they can help us control our inner voice. But in order to understand how this works, we first need to know which facets of nature appeal to us.
The Force of Nature
In a certain sense, Ming’s work in Chicago with the Robert Taylor Homes didn’t start with her or Ulrich’s work on gallbladder patients. Rather, it emerged out of a scientific husband-and-wife duo’s curiosity about the interaction between the human mind and the natural world.
In the 1970s, Stephen and Rachel Kaplan, both psychologists at the University of Michigan, had begun to advance an intriguing idea: that nature could act like a battery of sorts, recharging the limited attentional reserves that the human brain possesses. They called it attention restoration theory.
Sure, most people knew that a painterly sunset, mountain view, walk in the woods, or day at the beach usually left a person feeling good, but was there more to it? The Kaplans thought that there was because of a distinction related to human attention that William James, one of the founders of modern-day psychology in the United States, put forth more than a hundred years ago. James separated the ways we paid attention into two categories: involuntary and voluntary.
When we involuntarily pay attention to something, it’s because the object of our attention has an inherently intriguing quality that effortlessly draws us to it. In a real-life scenario, you can imagine, say, a talented musician playing on a street corner while you’re walking around a city, and you feel yourself notice the sound and gravitate toward it to stop and listen for a few minutes (and then maybe toss some money into the instrument case before you keep walking). Your attention has been gently reeled in by a process the Kaplans called “soft fascination.”
Voluntary attention, in contrast, is all about our will. It captures the amazing capacity that we human beings have to shine our attentional spotlight on whatever we want—like a difficult math problem or dilemma we’re trying to stop ruminating on. As a result, voluntary attention is easily exhausted and needs continual recharging, while involuntary attention doesn’t burn as much of our brain’s limited resources.
The Kaplans believed that nature draws our involuntary attention because it is rife with soft fascinations: subtly stimulating properties that our mind is pulled to unconsciously. The natural world delicately captures our attention with artifacts such as big trees, intricate plants, and small animals. We may glance at these things, and approach them for greater appreciation like that musician playing on the corner, but we’re not carefully focusing on them as we would if we were memorizing talking points for a speech or driving in city traffic. Activities like those drain our executive-function batteries, whereas effortlessly absorbing nature does the opposite: It allows the neural resources that guide our voluntary attention to recharge.
The studies that Ming and her colleagues went on to perform in Chicago were designed to rigorously test the Kaplans’ ideas, and as we’ve already seen, they produced dramatic supporting evidence. Other experiments have likewise illustrated nature’s powers.
One now classic study was done in 2007 just a few blocks from my home in Ann Arbor, when Marc Berman and his colleagues brought participants into the lab and had them perform a demanding test that taxed their attentional abilities—they heard several sequences of numbers that varied from three to nine digits in length, which they were asked to repeat in backward order. Half of the participants then went out for a walk in the local arboretum for just under one hour, while the other half walked down a congested street in downtown Ann Arbor for the same amount of time. Then they came back to the lab and repeated the attention task. A week later they swapped circumstances; each person had to go on the walk not taken the previous week.
The finding: Participants’ performance on the attention test improved considerably after the nature walk but not the urban walk. Their ability to invert strings of numbers and repeat them back to the experimenter was much sharper. Moreover, the result didn’t depend on whether participants took their walks during the idyllic summer or gloomy winter. No matter what time of year, the nature stroll helped their attention more than the urban one did.
Berman and his colleagues went on to replicate these results in other populations. For example, one study with clinically depressed participants indicated that the nature walk improved their cognitive function and led them to feel happier. Another satellite-imagery study conducted by a different team with more than 900,000 participants found that children who grew up with the least exposure to green spaces had up to 15 to 55 percent higher risk of developing psychological disorders such as depression and anxiety as adults. All of this, along with Ming’s work in Chicago, suggested that the
benefits of nature weren’t limited to our attentional reserves. They also extended to our emotions.
Nature’s impact on human feelings made sense given how critical the ability to maintain our attention is for helping people manage their inner voice. After all, many of the distancing techniques we’ve examined rely on focusing the mind; it’s hard to keep a journal, “time travel,” or adopt a fly-on-the-wall perspective if you can’t concentrate. Moreover, the ability to divert our internal conversations away from things that are bothering us, or reframe how we’re thinking about stressful situations, likewise requires that our executive functions not be running on empty. But Ming and other scientists never tested the idea that nature could reduce rumination directly. This occurred in 2015 at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.
Leafy, suburban Palo Alto is a far cry from gritty, crowded Chicago, though it does have a handful of busy streets. Researchers there designed an experiment that had participants take a ninety-minute walk either on a congested avenue or through a green space adjacent to Stanford’s campus. When the scientists compared people’s rumination levels at the end of the study, they found that participants in the nature-walk group reported experiencing less chatter and less activity in a network of brain regions that support rumination.
As a born and bred city dweller, I think it’s necessary to pause here for a moment. Over the last two centuries, human civilization has seen a vast migration from rural areas to urban ones, and by 2050 an estimated 68 percent of the world’s population is expected to live in cities. If you have a citified life, it’s natural to feel alarmed if you’re part of this huge swath of humanity with less access to nature and green spaces. When I first learned about this research, I was certainly disconcerted. I wondered, does having lived in the dense, concrete cities of Philadelphia and New York for the first twenty-eight years of my life mean that I—as well as everyone else with similar urban living experiences—am destined to have worse health, impaired attention, and more ruminative thoughts?
Thankfully, the answer is no. You don’t need to be surrounded by nature to “green” your mind. Recall that the underlying idea in the Kaplans’ attention restoration theory is that the subtle perceptual features of nature act as a battery of sorts for the brain. Well, the visual characteristics that create this pleasing soft fascination don’t just have this effect when you’re physically close to nature. Secondhand exposure to the natural world through photos and videos also restores attentional resources. This means that you can bring nature and its sundry benefits into your urban environment—or any environment, for that matter—by glancing at photos or videos of natural scenes. Virtual nature is, incredibly, still nature as far as the human mind is concerned.
An experiment published in 2016, for example, induced stress in participants using the dreaded speech task. Afterward, they watched a six-minute video of neighborhood streets that varied in their green views. At the low end, participants watched a video of homes on a street without any trees; at the high end, the video toured a neighborhood with a lush canopy of trees. Those exposed to the most views of nature demonstrated a 60 percent increase in their ability to recover from the stress of the speech compared with those who saw videos with the fewest views of green spaces.
While the bulk of the research done on the psychological benefits of nature focuses on visual exposure, there’s no reason to think that our other senses don’t also provide pathways for these startling effects. In 2019, a study found that exposing people to natural sounds, such as rainfall and crickets chirping, improved performance on an attentional task. Such sonic forms of nature may also constitute a soft fascination.
Collectively, these findings demonstrate that nature provides humans with a tool for caring for our inner voice from the outside in, and the longer we’re exposed to nature, the more our health improves. It offers us a playbook for structuring our environments to reduce chatter. And bringing new technologies to bear will likely make it easier to reap the benefits. For instance, Marc Berman and his collaborator Kathryn Schertz have developed an app called ReTUNE, short for Restoring Through Urban Nature Experience. It integrates information concerning the greenness, noisiness, and crime frequency of every city block in the neighborhood surrounding the University of Chicago to come up with a naturalness score. When users input their travel destination, the app generates directions that maximize the restorative nature of the walk, taking into account such practical issues as number of road crossings and length of the walk. If proven effective, a natural next step would be to extend the app to, well, everywhere. Of course, you don’t need the app to maximize exposure to nature in your daily life. Just make a careful assessment of the different environments you move through and modify your routes accordingly.
As our mind’s relationship with nature demonstrates, the physical world is capable of influencing psychological processes deep within us. But nature’s many sources of soft fascination are only one pathway through which we reap these benefits. There is another feature that helps us control our inner voice, except this tool isn’t limited to our surroundings in the natural world. We can also find it at concerts, in museums, and even watching a baby take its first steps.
Shrinking the Self
The excitement that Suzanne Bott felt as she grabbed her paddle and climbed into the raft made her body tingle. For the next four days, she would be paddling down Utah’s shimmering Green River with three other rafts of people. During the day they would take in the tawny, castle-like canyon walls. At night they would talk about the day’s adventures around a flickering campfire.
Despite first appearances from a cursory glance at the group, this wasn’t your average collection of wilderness enthusiasts. Most of the paddlers were military veterans who had seen combat, along with several former firefighters who had been first responders on 9/11. Each person had replied to an advertisement recruiting veterans for an expenses-paid journey on the Green River designed to help them connect with nature. There was, however, a catch: The trip doubled as a research experiment. Even so, all the participants had to do was paddle and fill out a few questionnaires.
Bott was the outlier of the group. She wasn’t a combat veteran and had no experience dousing fires. In 2000, after spending six years earning her PhD in natural resource management from Colorado State University, she felt burned out by the publish-or-perish culture of academia. So she began working in redevelopment, helping revitalize small towns. But Bott remained mindful all the while of the privileged life she led compared with so many other Americans, including her brother, a senior intelligence officer serving in Iraq. While some people’s rumination comes from the things that they do, hers came from what she wasn’t doing. She needed a change.
After working stateside for several years, Bott found a job with a State Department contractor in Iraq that supported the new government’s efforts to take firmer control of different regions of the country. She landed in Baghdad in January 2007 and spent a year deployed in Ramadi, the Iraqi city Time magazine had dubbed “the most dangerous place in Iraq” only a month before she arrived. She spent much of her time there developing a long-term transition strategy for the new Iraqi government, working closely with a small corps of marines and army engineers. Her commute involved donning body armor, traveling in Humvee convoys, and sprinting from vehicles to buildings to avoid sniper fire. She was a world away from cozy Colorado.
Her new career provided Bott with the sense of purpose that had been missing from her life. It also pushed her to an emotional breaking point. She attended memorials for fallen colleagues on a regular basis and witnessed horrors amid her work that she wasn’t prepared for—car bombs, territorial warfare, and assassinations. Carnage became the stuff of everyday life.
In 2010, Bott returned home to the United States, where her chatter took over. Questions about why she survived when so many of her colleagues had not were a continual s
ource of distress. Memories of the horrors she witnessed replayed in her mind, compounded by constant news reports detailing the rise of ISIS in areas where she had so recently lived and worked. Her chatter reached a crescendo in 2014 when she learned that in Syria ISIS had decapitated James Foley, a journalist she worked closely with in Iraq. Against her own better judgment, she watched the decapitation video that ISIS posted on the internet. She hadn’t been the same since. Then she saw the advertisement for the rafting trip.
During the evening after their first day out on the water, Bott filled out a brief questionnaire that asked her to rate how much she experienced several different positive emotions. A team of scientists, led by a psychologist named Craig Anderson from the University of California, Berkeley (who was also participating in the trip), were hoping to use the paddlers’ responses to understand the impact of the common but grossly understudied emotional experience of awe.
Awe is the wonder we feel when we encounter something powerful that we can’t easily explain. We are often flooded by it in the natural world when we see an incredible sunset, mile-high mountain peak, or beautiful view. Awe is considered a self-transcendent emotion in that it allows people to think and feel beyond their own needs and wants. This is reflected in what happens in the brain during awe-inspiring experiences: The neural activity associated with self-immersion decreases, similar to how the brain responds when people meditate or take psychedelics like LSD, which are notorious for blurring the line between a person’s sense of self and the surrounding world.
The feeling of awe, however, is by no means restricted to nature and the great outdoors. Some people experience it when they see Bruce Springsteen in concert, read an Emily Dickinson poem, or take in the Mona Lisa at the Louvre. Others may have awe-drenched experiences when they see something extraordinary in person, like a high-stakes sports event or a legendary object such as the U.S. Constitution, or witness something intimately monumental, like an infant taking its first steps. Evolutionary psychologists theorize that we developed this emotion because it helps unite us with others by reducing our self-interest, which provides us with a survival advantage because groups fare better against threats and can achieve loftier goals by working together.