How Nature & Other Physical Environments Impact Your Focus, Cognition & Health

00:00:00.360 | Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools

00:00:04.800 | for everyday life.

00:00:07.460 | I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford

00:00:13.880 | School of Medicine.

00:00:15.160 | My guest today is Dr. Mark Berman.

00:00:17.240 | Dr. Mark Berman is a professor of psychology at the University of Chicago, where he directs

00:00:21.840 | the Environmental Neuroscience Laboratory.

00:00:24.320 | His research focuses on how our physical environments, particularly natural environments, impact our

00:00:29.120 | brain function, mental health, and cognitive performance.

00:00:32.200 | During today's episode, we discussed the fascinating and actionable science of how your physical

00:00:36.040 | surroundings indoors, and in particular your relationship and interactions with nature,

00:00:40.440 | can shape your biology and your cognitive abilities.

00:00:43.080 | Dr. Berman explains how exposure to very common features in nature, such as fractal patterns,

00:00:48.580 | increase your ability to focus, reduce your stress, and improve your mental and physical

00:00:52.360 | health metrics, and not just while you're in nature, but after you return indoors for many

00:00:56.380 | hours and even days afterwards.

00:00:58.240 | During today's episode, you'll learn about something called attention restoration theory,

00:01:01.320 | which turns out to be very important for understanding how different types of indoor and outdoor

00:01:06.240 | environments either deplete or restore your cognitive resources.

00:01:09.960 | We also discuss practical science-based strategies that anyone can implement, regardless of where

00:01:14.120 | you live.

00:01:15.120 | If you're in an apartment or a house, if you have ready access to nature or if you don't, today's

00:01:19.160 | episode explains how to design your indoor space, the optimal duration and timing of nature exposure, and the specific

00:01:25.120 | visual and auditory elements that will provide you with the greatest cognitive and health benefits.

00:01:29.280 | So whether you're a student or a professional looking to enhance your learning capacity, focus, and reduce your burnout, or you're simply interested in optimizing your mental and physical health through exposure to different elements of nature,

00:01:39.120 | today's episode provides clear, actionable protocols based on rigorous scientific research.

00:01:44.200 | By the end of today's episode, you'll have a toolkit of evidence-based strategies that will transform your relationship with your indoor environment and outdoor environments, and you'll learn to harness those to improve your brain and body.

00:01:55.200 | Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.

00:02:00.280 | It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public.

00:02:07.280 | In keeping with that theme, today's episode does include sponsors, and now for my discussion with Dr. Mark Berman.

00:02:14.280 | Dr. Mark Berman, welcome.

00:02:16.280 | Dr. Mark Berman: Great to be here, Andrew.

00:02:18.280 | I love being out in nature.

00:02:20.280 | Dr. Mark Berman: So I'm excited about today's conversation, which is taking place indoors, but we're going to talk about the relationship between the mind, the brain, nature, stress, rumination, and this incredible power that interactions with the natural world can have on our brain.

00:02:38.360 | As we wade into this, I'd like to start with this issue of recapturing our attentional abilities, because I think nowadays, everybody, whether they're clinically diagnosed with ADHD,

00:02:50.240 | or they are just a human being on the planet, or they are just a human being on the planet, feels as if their attention is being pulled in different directions, sometimes without our awareness, sometimes with our awareness.

00:03:00.280 | What is this notion of recapturing attention?

00:03:04.280 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah, I think it's a really fundamental concept, and we think that attention, you know, maybe on the surface of it, people just kind of think about, oh, it's kids trying to pay attention to school, or, oh, it's trying to pay attention at work.

00:03:19.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: But it's actually deeper than that. We kind of think that elements of attention are sort of involved in controlling all of our behaviors.

00:03:27.280 | Dr. Mark Berman: And when our attention is depleted, we don't have as much impulse control, we might behave more aggressively, you know, we may not be able to achieve our goals.

00:03:41.280 | Dr. Mark Berman: And with a lot of things in the modern world, our attention is just being fatigued, and we're depleted, and it's really hard to recharge the battery or know what to do to recharge the battery.

00:03:55.320 | Dr. Mark Berman: And I think that's kind of the entry point why I sort of got interested in this and one of my mentors, Steve Kaplan, would talk about this directed attention fatigue problem that a lot of us are facing.

00:04:09.360 | Dr. Mark Berman: You know, our ancestors, you know, thousands and thousands of years ago were not bombarded with so much information like we are now.

00:04:17.400 | Dr. Mark Berman: Now, the modern human has to sort of pick and choose what to pay attention to, and it's kind of overwhelming.

00:04:23.400 | Dr. Mark Berman: And Steve Kaplan had this idea that humans kind of have two different kinds of attention, so one kind of attention is called directed attention, and that's kind of the attention that I've been talking about just recently here, and that's the kind of attention where you, as an individual person, are deciding what to pay attention to.

00:04:45.440 | Dr. Mark Berman: So, presumably, Andrew, you're deciding to pay attention to what I'm saying, even though there's many other things you could find that might be more inherently interesting.

00:04:53.360 | Dr. Mark Berman: than what I'm saying, and this is kind of a very, you know, unique human capability.

00:04:59.360 | Dr. Mark Berman: There might be other species that can kind of decide what to pay attention to, but we're really good at it.

00:05:03.360 | Dr. Mark Berman: Humans are really, really good at being able to, like, focus on this lecture or focus on reading this paper or focus on trying to finish this math problem, but we can't do it forever.

00:05:15.360 | Dr. Mark Berman: And I think everybody kind of has had that sensation where at the end of a long workday, maybe three or four o'clock, you might be thinking,

00:05:23.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: just staring at the computer screen and you can't focus anymore.

00:05:26.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And we call that a directed attention fatigue state, where you can't really control your attentional focus anymore.

00:05:32.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And I see this all the time when I'm lecturing at the University of Chicago, and I think I'm a decent lecturer.

00:05:39.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: First five minutes of class, all the students' eyes are on me.

00:05:42.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: They're engaged.

00:05:43.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: You know, I see they're nodding along with me.

00:05:45.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And, you know, 45 minutes into my lecture, I kind of see people nodding back like this.

00:05:50.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: They're getting tired, it's just hard for people to direct their attention for long periods of time.

00:05:56.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So that's kind of the special attention, directed attention.

00:05:59.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: We think there's this other kind of attention that we call involuntary attention.

00:06:03.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And that's the kind of attention that's automatically captured by interesting stimulation in the environment.

00:06:08.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So bright lights, loud noises, those things automatically capture our attention, and we don't really have much control over it.

00:06:16.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And we think that kind of attention, this involuntary attention, is less susceptible to fatigue or depletion.

00:06:23.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So you don't often hear people say, "Oh, I can't look at that beautiful waterfall anymore.

00:06:28.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: It's just too interesting.

00:06:29.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I got to step away."

00:06:30.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Or, "Oh, I have to stop watching this movie.

00:06:33.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: It's just too interesting.

00:06:34.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I'm too tired out."

00:06:35.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So that's a different kind of attention.

00:06:39.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And we think what's happening in modern times is that our directed attention is being fatigued.

00:06:48.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: But maybe we can restore directed attention by going into environments that can softly capture our involuntary attention.

00:06:59.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Do we know the basis of attentional fatigue?

00:07:02.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I mean, I could imagine it's something in the noradrenergic, dopamine, catecholamine world.

00:07:09.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Listeners of this podcast will recognize those terms, at least crudely.

00:07:13.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I could also imagine that it's literally a fatigue of the visual system and/or the auditory system.

00:07:21.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: You know, it's hard to maintain fixation, as we say, as visual neuroscientists, to focus on a target is challenging.

00:07:27.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: You know, if we allow our eyes to rest, it actually gets easier to look back at it and fixate on a target.

00:07:34.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So what is the basis of the attentional fatigue for this focused attention or what you call directed attention?

00:07:40.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah, it's a really great question.

00:07:42.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I'm not sure I have a great answer yet.

00:07:44.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Maybe you'd have some ideas, Andrew.

00:07:46.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: You know, one thing that sort of to me puzzles me a little bit about the brain is that from my understanding, it's kind of like brain metabolism is 20% of overall metabolism, no matter what people are doing, except for really extreme exercise where brain metabolism goes down a little bit.

00:08:04.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: But if you're asleep or if you're doing a hard calculus problem, I think the brain is still using 20% of metabolism.

00:08:11.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So it's sort of this puzzle.

00:08:12.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Why do we get this mental fatigue state?

00:08:16.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I'm it's got to have some kind of neurological component.

00:08:20.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: At this point, I can't point to it.

00:08:22.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So I'm going to talk about it more at this psychological level.

00:08:24.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: It's a sensation that we have that we can't focus anymore.

00:08:28.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: If I was to talk about brain areas, I would say probably this ability to direct attention is most likely in frontal cortex.

00:08:35.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Whereas this involuntary tension, sometimes we call it more bottom up attention or exogenous attention where it's activated by external stimulation.

00:08:44.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I would say that's probably more activated by things in the parietal cortex or even occipital cortex or auditory cortex, depending on what that external stimulation is.

00:08:54.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I'm not going to lean everything on the visual system, but I've been listening to this book that unfortunately is only available as an audio book called Daily Rituals, which it's got two minute chapters and it describes the daily rituals of writers and artists and creatives.

00:09:09.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And it's very interesting that across many of those chapters, you find the same thing, which is that almost all of these people had a ritual of taking some stimulant, typically caffeine, sometimes more aggressive stimulants, but caffeine.

00:09:25.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And then something to restrict their visual world, make it more tunnel vision.

00:09:29.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: In fact, there are certain painters, I forget that the particular painter that they described, who literally built cardboard blinders onto his glasses when things weren't going so well.

00:09:39.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Now, the reason I bring this up is not as a suggestion, although I suppose it could.

00:09:44.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I actually used to read papers.

00:09:46.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Maybe I need to go back to this.

00:09:47.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I'd put a baseball cap on, put a hoodie on and restrict your visual world.

00:09:52.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

00:09:53.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And it makes perfect sense if, in fact, involuntary attention, which presumably comes from the periphery, is inexhaustible.

00:10:00.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

00:10:01.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So, you know, I think what's interesting about the digital interface that we exist in now is that the whole world is brought right in front of us.

00:10:09.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yes, yes.

00:10:10.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So presumably we evolved to move through space and direct our attention to particular locations and let the rest of the world fall away.

00:10:16.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yes.

00:10:17.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And then involuntary attention could grab us to alert us to people showing up or danger or the smell of something wafting by, calling us for dinner.

00:10:26.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: But now it's all placed right in our central visual field.

00:10:31.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yes.

00:10:32.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So it makes sense that we would all be very challenged with maintaining directed attention within that space.

00:10:38.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yes.

00:10:39.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: That small tunnel vision.

00:10:40.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yes.

00:10:41.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And I would say something else too.

00:10:42.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I guess if you felt like you had to create an isolation kind of chamber sort of thing to focus your directed attention, that's where we would say it's probably time to take a break.

00:10:52.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: That that's when, you know, we might recommend that you go for a walk in nature to recharge this kind of precious directed attention resource.

00:11:01.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So that might be a signal if you're just having a really hard time focusing.

00:11:05.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah, you can try to power through, but I think that might not be the most productive.

00:11:11.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: That might be a signal to you to say, hey, maybe I got to go take a break and the break better not be scrolling on social media.

00:11:18.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: We're saying a really good break is actually a walk in nature or some kind of interaction with nature.

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00:13:50.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I want to talk about interaction with nature.

00:13:53.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I just want to, it's not a pushback on what you just said, but maybe just a probe a little bit deeper.

00:13:58.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I think a lot of people struggle with getting into a focused state at the outset.

00:14:05.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

00:14:06.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And I myself am familiar with the sitting down to do some work and it taking some time to kind of warm up and that agitation.

00:14:14.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah, yeah.

00:14:15.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I always think about it as literally climbing over or through barbed wire.

00:14:19.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yes.

00:14:20.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Sometimes it actually feels like that, right?

00:14:21.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yes.

00:14:22.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And then either side of the barbed wire is a steep slope.

00:14:25.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: On one side is distraction that can come from surfing the web or social media.

00:14:29.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

00:14:30.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And then on the other side is any sort of drama.

00:14:31.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yes.

00:14:32.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And then of course, our mind starts creating all these things that we think we need to do.

00:14:35.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And the idea is to get through the barbed wire.

00:14:37.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yes.

00:14:38.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And then on the other side of it is that focused state.

00:14:40.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yes.

00:14:41.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: For most people, I think what I described is not terribly different from that.

00:14:47.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

00:14:48.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I'm making a lot of assumptions here, but I don't know many people that can just sit down to work that-

00:14:51.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: No, and just-

00:14:52.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And just drop in like a-

00:14:53.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right, yes.

00:14:54.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Like a trench.

00:14:55.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: That's right.

00:14:56.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Can you do that?

00:14:57.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: No, but I can do it better after a walk in nature.

00:15:01.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So I think almost like the walk in nature is sort of like a preparatory kind of process.

00:15:07.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Just like, you know, think about like lifting weights or something like that.

00:15:10.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: You wouldn't start off a workout and say, "Oh, let's put 250 on the bench and start going."

00:15:15.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Correct.

00:15:16.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: You warm up.

00:15:17.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: You got to wake up your nervous system a little bit.

00:15:20.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I think that's kind of a little bit what we think interacting with nature is kind of doing.

00:15:26.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I mean, it's not a passive process.

00:15:28.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: We're not saying go and sit in a dark room for 30 minutes and then start to go to work.

00:15:32.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: No, we're saying we want you to be interacting with nature.

00:15:35.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: We want you to notice nature.

00:15:36.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: We want your involuntary attention to be automatically captured by the stimulation of nature.

00:15:42.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And then after you've kind of been sufficiently recharged, then we think you're going to be able to go back to your desk

00:15:49.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: and be able to direct attention and be able to focus.

00:15:52.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So let's talk about some of the data around what walks in nature and interactions with other components of nature can do for our cognition and our level of focus.

00:16:02.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I think intuitively people will appreciate, okay, a nice walk in nature, not looking at one's phone.

00:16:09.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: It's very pleasant.

00:16:10.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: It's relaxing.

00:16:11.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And then you get back to your desk and you can really focus.

00:16:14.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: What about the laboratory data that support this or out of laboratory data that support this?

00:16:19.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

00:16:20.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Maybe you could describe a few of the incredible studies that you've done because they are really incredible.

00:16:24.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And they're very pioneering in the way that you've brought real laboratory technology into nature as well.

00:16:29.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So pick your favorite study about this and then I'll ask you about a few others as well.

00:16:33.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Sure, thanks.

00:16:34.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Well, I think the kind of the seminal experiment that we did was back in, you know, 2008.

00:16:43.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And at that time, when people did these sort of nature walk studies, they would ask people, how do you feel after the walk?

00:16:52.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And it was very subjective and I'm not against subjective accounts.

00:16:56.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And people reported, yeah, I feel much more refreshed after the walk in nature.

00:17:00.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: But I always felt a little bit dissatisfied by that.

00:17:05.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I wanted to see, well, does objective performance change?

00:17:08.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Just like we would probably be dissatisfied if I gave you a pill and I said, this pill is going to get you stronger.

00:17:14.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: You're going to be able to lift more weight.

00:17:16.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And if we just had people say, yeah, I feel like I can lift more weight.

00:17:19.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I don't think that'd be satisfying.

00:17:20.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: We'd actually want to see, can people actually lift more weight?

00:17:23.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And so what we did is we designed a study that was experimentally controlled that would have objective measures.

00:17:31.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: How did people perform cognitively before and after going on a walk in nature?

00:17:36.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So what we did is we brought people into the laboratory and then we gave them some challenging working memory and attention tasks.

00:17:44.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So one of the tasks was called the backwards digit span task, where you would hear digits out loud at a pace of about one digit per second.

00:17:54.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And then the participant would need to repeat them back in backwards order.

00:17:58.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So if I said five, six, seven, the participant would have to repeat back seven, six, five.

00:18:04.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Pretty easy task at three digits, but we keep increasing the number of digits all the way till about nine digits.

00:18:10.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: At about five digits, you're ready to pull your hair out is a challenging task.

00:18:14.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So we gave participants this backwards digit span task.

00:18:17.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And then we gave them a map of a walk.

00:18:23.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: It could be the first studies were through the Ann Arbor Arboretum, which was a nature walk kind of by the psychology building at the University of Michigan.

00:18:32.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Or participants went for a walk on busy Washtenaw Street in downtown Ann Arbor.

00:18:40.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: The walks were both about 2.6 miles, so it took people about 50 minutes to do the walk.

00:18:46.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: We also took participants cell phones because we didn't want them texting or chit chatting on the walk.

00:18:53.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: We wanted their attention to be fully focused on the environment.

00:18:56.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And we also did one other thing.

00:18:57.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: We also gave them a GPS watch.

00:18:59.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Why did we give them a GPS watch?

00:19:01.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Well, we did it for two reasons.

00:19:02.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: One, we wanted to make sure they went on the walk.

00:19:04.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: They didn't just go to Starbucks.

00:19:06.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And two, we wanted to see, did people get lost?

00:19:09.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Because if people got lost on the walk, maybe that wouldn't be restorative.

00:19:12.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Okay, so people do the backwards digit span task.

00:19:15.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: We send them on a walk in nature or we send them on a walk through an urban environment.

00:19:20.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: They go on this 50 minute walk.

00:19:22.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: They come back to the lab.

00:19:23.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: We give them that same backwards digit span task again to see if there is any performance change or not.

00:19:29.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Measure that.

00:19:31.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Then we have people repeat the whole procedure again.

00:19:34.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: They come back to the lab a week later.

00:19:36.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So they walked in nature the first week.

00:19:38.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: They walked in the urban environment the second week or vice versa.

00:19:41.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So it's all within subject, very tight experimental control.

00:19:45.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And what we found was pretty incredible that people's working memory capacity

00:19:50.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: and their ability to direct attention improved by about 20% after the walk in nature versus the walk in the urban environment.

00:20:00.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And people might be thinking, well, maybe it's just because the nature walk was just more pleasant.

00:20:06.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: They just like the nature walk more and people did tend to like the nature walk more.

00:20:11.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And we did measure improvement in mood, how much did mood improve on the walk.

00:20:15.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: We didn't find very strong correlation between improvements in mood and improvements in the working memory and directed attention performance,

00:20:23.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: suggesting that people weren't just getting better because they were getting into good moods.

00:20:27.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: But the even stronger demonstration that this wasn't mood driven is that we had people walk at different times of the year.

00:20:33.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So some of our participants walked in June when it was like 80 degrees Fahrenheit.

00:20:39.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: People said, Mark, I can't believe you're paying me to go for a walk in nature.

00:20:42.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Really healthy mood benefits, really healthy working memory and attention benefits.

00:20:47.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: We also had participants walk in January, 25 degrees Fahrenheit.

00:20:52.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: People said, Mark, I was freezing my butt off out there.

00:20:55.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I did not enjoy that walk.

00:20:56.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: But incredibly, the people that walked in January when it was freezing cold and they didn't enjoy the walk,

00:21:01.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: obtained the same working memory and attention benefits as the people that walked in June.

00:21:07.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So you didn't even have to like the nature interaction to get this directed attention benefit.

00:21:12.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So that I thought was pretty interesting and counterintuitive that this isn't just about liking or pleasantness.

00:21:18.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: There's something deep about processing auditory, visual, maybe even tactile stimulation of nature that somehow is good for our brains and restores our ability to direct attention.

00:21:30.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Super interesting findings and it leads me back to this finite resource of directed attention, whatever the underlying networks and chemicals happen to be.

00:21:42.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

00:21:43.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Could we speculate what might be occurring in the nature walks that is enhancing or allowing restoration of directed attention?

00:21:52.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And I guess the neurobiologist in me wants to say, okay, I'm walking in nature.

00:21:59.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: That probably means some greenery, some dirt, maybe some water.

00:22:04.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And I could imagine one hypothesis that it's the kind of irregularity of nature environments.

00:22:14.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

00:22:15.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

00:22:16.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I mean, maybe trees are spaced out, you know, in perfect spacing, like on Palm Drive at Stanford.

00:22:19.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

00:22:20.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: It's like, it looks like a, it speaks to the engineering department that they're set at such even intervals.

00:22:25.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

00:22:26.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

00:22:27.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Typically when you're in the forest or nature, there's also things to break up that regularity.

00:22:32.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yep.

00:22:33.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Whereas indoor environments and city environments tend to have a lot of right angles.

00:22:39.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Buildings can be different sizes, but city blocks are pretty fixed for a given neighborhood in terms of their size.

00:22:44.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yep.

00:22:45.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So that's just one hypothesis.

00:22:46.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Sure.

00:22:47.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I'm coming up with this off the top of my head.

00:22:48.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Do we have any data or do you have any preferential speculation as to what it is about nature in terms of its physical structure?

00:22:57.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

00:22:57.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And as a corollary to that, is it that nature is relaxing people and therefore they're not having to use their directed attention and therefore directed attention capability comes back or is set at a higher level?

00:23:11.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I realize this is two questions kind of braided together, but that's what I'm curious about.

00:23:18.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

00:23:19.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And I think I think both elements are placed.

00:23:21.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So maybe I'll start first with kind of the the resting directed attention element.

00:23:25.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So let's let's pretend we're on these walks in nature or the walk on the urban environment.

00:23:30.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And I'll start with the walk on the urban environment.

00:23:33.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: The walk in the urban environment required people to cross a lot of streets.

00:23:38.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So you had to be vigilant, so you still had to use directed attention.

00:23:42.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I also had a lot of car traffic.

00:23:44.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So you're hearing the noise of cars whizzing by at probably, you know, 40, 45 miles per hour.

00:23:50.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: There's also advertising.

00:23:52.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: You're going by shops and billboards that that kind of require some directed attention.

00:23:58.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So you can't really just mind wander and let your mind kind of go in those environments.

00:24:03.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: You still have to be vigilant, you still have to use directed attention.

00:24:06.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: The walk through the Ann Arbor Arboretum, you didn't have a lot of those distractions.

00:24:11.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So I think you only had to cross one or two streets and then you're kind of getting towards the Arboretum.

00:24:16.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: You don't have to cross any more streets.

00:24:18.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: There's no advertising there.

00:24:21.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And then, and this is the thing I want to talk about too, this idea of soft fascination.

00:24:27.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: There's all the colors, fractalness, curved edges of nature that we think sort of captures our involuntary attention in what we say is softly fascinating ways.

00:24:41.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And we think that in combination with not placing a lot of demand on directed attention is why nature is able to restore directed attention.

00:24:52.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So what do I mean by softly fascinating stimulation?

00:24:54.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So let's pretend we're looking at a waterfall and the waterfall is really beautiful.

00:25:01.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: You can hear the rush of the water going down.

00:25:03.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: You can see all the like the bubbles and maybe some of the froth of the water going down.

00:25:09.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: It captures our attention, but we can still kind of mind wander and think about other things at the same time.

00:25:15.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So it doesn't really harshly capture all of our attentional resources.

00:25:19.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: If we're in Times Square, also super interesting, lots of interesting stimulation to look at, but it kind of captures all of our attentional resources in an all consuming way that doesn't allow for any reflection or mind wandering or anything like that.

00:25:34.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So while Times Square does capture our involuntary attention, we say it does so in a very harshly fascinating way, whereas the waterfall captures our involuntary attention in a softly fascinating way.

00:25:47.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And we think that's the way that's going to be restful eventually of directed attention.

00:25:52.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So we think two elements created why the nature walk was restorative.

00:25:58.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: One, it didn't place as many demands on directed attention.

00:26:01.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And two, it had this softly fascinating stimulation that activated this involuntary attention, but not in an all consuming way.

00:26:09.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So we think those two things are critical.

00:26:11.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: The other point that you bring up about, okay, well, what, what causes soft fascination to be captured or why does something capture involuntary attention in a softly fascinating way?

00:26:22.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And that gets really interesting where we think it could be elements of the structure of nature.

00:26:27.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So it's interesting, Andrew, that we can get these effects of nature improving cognitive performance, people just looking at pictures of nature versus looking at pictures of urban scenes, listening to nature sounds versus listening to urban sounds, watching nature videos versus watching urban videos.

00:26:46.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So there, you don't have to worry about getting hit by a car.

00:26:49.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: There's something about the visual aesthetic of nature that we think is producing some of those benefits that somehow our brain maybe processes that fractal stimulation in more efficient or easier ways than kind of what you were talking about, the 90 degree angled built environment that we've constructed.

00:27:11.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I have to ask if you are exposing people to nature images versus urban environment images in the laboratory and seeing some of these same effects, are you presenting that on a typical, you know, small screen right in front of somebody or is it in panorama?

00:27:29.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I'm headed in a particular direction with this question because I have a pet hypothesis as to what nature could be doing to not deplete directed attention.

00:27:39.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: But before I ask you about that, I'm just curious what the experimental setup is.

00:27:44.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

00:27:45.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I'm also asking because I'm a little concerned that people are going to hear, oh, great, I can just look at a picture of a forest.

00:27:49.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I don't have to get outside.

00:27:50.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And as you mentioned, there are so many things in an actual nature environment that provide a rich experience of soundscape, et cetera.

00:27:58.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

00:27:59.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: But what's the format?

00:28:00.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

00:28:01.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

00:28:02.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So it's basically the same format as the walk, the walking study that I described.

00:28:08.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So people come into the lab, we give them the backwards digit spend task, but then we take them into a room in the lab where they just have a computer screen that's flipping through nature scenes or urban scenes.

00:28:20.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: They look at the scene for a couple of seconds.

00:28:23.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: We also have them rate the scene on a scale of one to three for how much they like it, just to make sure that they're awake and they're engaged with the environment.

00:28:31.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: That whole procedure takes about 10 minutes.

00:28:34.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: They come out of the laboratory room that had the pictures and then they take the backwards digit spend task again to see if there are changes in performance.

00:28:44.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And then we'd have them come back to the lab a week later, repeat the whole procedure again.

00:28:48.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: If they saw the nature pictures the first week, they see the urban pictures the second week or vice versa.

00:28:53.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And they're even just seeing the pictures of nature, we see improvements in working memory and directed attention.

00:29:01.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: However, I would caution that the effects are not as large as they are for the actual walk.

00:29:06.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So it's harder, or I would say, I guess, the intervention is not as strong as actually walking in nature, right?

00:29:16.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Just seeing 10 minutes of nature pictures, it's incredible that it works.

00:29:19.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: You can get some of these benefits, but the benefits are not as strong as they are for the real thing.

00:29:24.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And the same procedure happens when we test sounds of nature versus urban sounds.

00:29:30.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: We test people with the backwards digit span task, then we put headphones on them, play a series of nature sounds or play a series of urban sounds.

00:29:39.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Then they do the backwards digit span task again.

00:29:41.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And we find that when people listen to nature sounds, they also show improvements on working memory performance and directed attention.

00:29:52.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: We don't do anything special in terms of having it being a panoramic view.

00:29:56.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: It's basically just looking at a slideshow of nature pictures or urban pictures on a computer screen.

00:30:03.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So I'm hearing this, I'm starting to wonder whether we have brain areas and/or circuits that are devoted to nature.

00:30:11.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Which first pass seems like kind of a crazy idea because visual perceptions and auditory perceptions are built up from their sort of elementary units, which is just nerd speak for, you know, your eye and low level visual system cares about circles and angles.

00:30:30.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

00:30:31.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And then your higher level cortex puts it into the recognition of a person or a building, et cetera, is literally built up from elementary units.

00:30:39.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: You know, in the sound domain, it's built up from different frequencies, et cetera.

00:30:43.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

00:30:44.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: But, you know, there's something about this problem.

00:30:49.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Here's what's on my mind here.

00:30:51.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: If I walk through a neighborhood, an urban neighborhood, where it's a bunch of warehouses-

00:30:56.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

00:30:57.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: With some cyclone fence and some signs and it's a weekend, maybe it's a Sunday and they're all closed.

00:31:04.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

00:31:05.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: There aren't trucks coming in and out and not a whole lot's happening.

00:31:07.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yep.

00:31:08.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: This reminds me of like West Oakland near the shipyard on a Sunday.

00:31:12.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yep.

00:31:13.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right?

00:31:14.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Not a place I recommend people go unless you really like kind of bland urban environments on a Sunday.

00:31:18.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

00:31:19.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Because not much is happening.

00:31:20.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: It's a shipyard.

00:31:21.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Sunday, it's closed.

00:31:22.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Versus a trail in Yosemite.

00:31:25.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I used to work up in Yosemite in the summers, but it's not one of the most magnificent trails.

00:31:30.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Meaning it's not Yosemite Falls, Half Dome or Cloud's Rest.

00:31:35.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

00:31:36.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: My favorite trail.

00:31:37.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: It's a kind of barren environment, but there might be a meadow and there might be a mountain.

00:31:41.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: You would never say, you know, this trail up in Tuolumne that I'm on right now is, it's kind of boring.

00:31:48.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

00:31:49.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: It's not as interesting as the peak of Cloud's Rest, and arguably it's not.

00:31:52.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

00:31:53.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I mean, when you get to the top of Cloud's Rest, it's like, whoa.

00:31:56.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

00:31:57.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Like, I mean, it's a spiritual experience.

00:31:59.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah, yeah.

00:32:00.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Okay.

00:32:01.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: But when we are in nature, we don't tend to think, oh, this is boring.

00:32:05.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: There's nothing here.

00:32:06.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

00:32:07.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Even if it's fairly sparse visually.

00:32:09.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right, right.

00:32:10.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So as we dissect this, it can't just be density of visual stuff.

00:32:14.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: No.

00:32:15.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: There must be something additional.

00:32:16.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

00:32:17.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Even, and we could say, well, maybe it's the greenery.

00:32:19.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: But, you know, I was out in the Utah desert not that long ago, and it wasn't arches or, you know, the beautiful, you know, landscapes that definitely exist out there.

00:32:27.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

00:32:28.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: It was just kind of like horizon sky, some sand.

00:32:31.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

00:32:32.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Maybe a cactus or two, some rocks.

00:32:34.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

00:32:35.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: But it's beautiful.

00:32:36.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah, right.

00:32:37.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And you would never say, oh, this is boring because it doesn't have arches.

00:32:39.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

00:32:40.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: When you get to arches, you're like, it's that much better.

00:32:41.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

00:32:42.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: You get the point here.

00:32:43.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

00:32:44.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So it can't be density of visual objects.

00:32:45.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

00:32:46.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And it's pretty quiet out there in the desert.

00:32:48.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

00:32:49.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Except at night when it's really quite noisy in the desert, actually, with animals and stuff.

00:32:54.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

00:32:55.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: If you're lucky.

00:32:56.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So what's the deal?

00:32:57.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Part of it could be evolution to some extent.

00:33:00.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I mean, our brains evolved in nature, right?

00:33:02.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So is it possible that our neural machinery is just more tuned to that kind of stimulation?

00:33:09.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I mean, there's no natural right angles in nature.

00:33:12.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: We created right angles.

00:33:14.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I mean, that's pretty speculative.

00:33:16.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

00:33:17.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And I'd want to dig in a little more about that, but I can't ignore it.

00:33:21.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: That there's just something maybe fundamental with how our brains evolved.

00:33:25.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And we evolved in nature that there's just something maybe about we just maybe more fluently process natural stimulation.

00:33:33.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And maybe we like that.

00:33:34.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: But we started to have some ideas, you know, soft fascination.

00:33:39.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I love it as a concept, but it's still a little bit squishy.

00:33:44.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I kind of wanted to get some kind of quantitative parameters around it.

00:33:48.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So one idea that we were thinking about was that maybe nature scenes are actually more compressible than urban scenes.

00:33:59.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Now, what do I mean by that?

00:34:00.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So what I mean by that is that maybe they just there's because there's repeated patterns in nature.

00:34:06.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I don't need to store all of the information.

00:34:08.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

00:34:09.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I can kind of smush it down into fewer bits.

00:34:11.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Mm-hmm.

00:34:12.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Um, and that might be easier for my brain to process.

00:34:15.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Whereas in a lot of urban scenes, it's not very fractal and maybe I have to store all of that information.

00:34:20.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So we actually, this is one of my students, Nakwan, we actually did, we ran a JPEG compression algorithm on thousands of nature and urban scenes.

00:34:29.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And it turns out nature scenes get compressed down into fewer bits.

00:34:34.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Um, so we should, no pun intended, unpack a little bit of what you just said, because I think, um, for people that are not familiar with thinking about neural processing.

00:34:43.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yes.

00:34:44.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And JPEGs versus TIFF files.

00:34:46.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yes.

00:34:47.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Uh, if, if I may, I'm just going to give my, uh, crude rendition of this because I was very interested in this and did some work related to this years ago.

00:34:54.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: But just to keep it brief, um, people are probably familiar with the idea that some electronic files are larger than others.

00:35:02.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

00:35:03.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So if you have a picture that you take on a camera or your phone and you want to email it to somebody, nowadays you would just text it.

00:35:09.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

00:35:10.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: You might want to email it to somebody, you can send them the TIFF version or the Photoshop version and it's going to be a very big image.

00:35:17.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

00:35:18.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Or a big movie for that matter.

00:35:19.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

00:35:20.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: There's another way to send it, which is at a lower file resolution.

00:35:23.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

00:35:24.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: But, um, therefore takes up less memory.

00:35:27.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

00:35:28.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Doesn't come through as this massive file.

00:35:29.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

00:35:30.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

00:35:31.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

00:35:32.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: To download or something.

00:35:33.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

00:35:34.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And that's a JPEG.

00:35:35.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

00:35:36.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: The whole basis of JPEG is to take the average of pixels near one another and compress them.

00:35:40.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Kind of take a best guess as to what a black pixel is probably next to another black pixel or probably a gray pixel, but probably not a white pixel.

00:35:47.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: It could.

00:35:48.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

00:35:49.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: But what it does, it takes a local averaging.

00:35:50.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yes.

00:35:51.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And then it compresses it into a JPEG and then you send it to the other side.

00:35:54.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yep.

00:35:55.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: But on the other side, you can also unpack that image to its original high resolution value.

00:36:02.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: The brain does a similar thing.

00:36:04.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And the best example that I have from the brain is the olfactory system.

00:36:07.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Where in the olfactory system, you're breathing in tons of volatile chemicals, meaning volatile makes it sound like they're about to throw a tantrum, but they're moving through the air.

00:36:16.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: You inhale them and they're activating millions probably of different odorant receptors.

00:36:22.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: But your brain compresses those down into coffee.

00:36:26.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: This is coffee.

00:36:27.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And then you unpack it as coffee.

00:36:29.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Now, if you're a coffee connoisseur or in the case of wine or a food connoisseur, you can get into the subtle nuance and say, oh, you know, there's a little bit more of this and a little bit more of that.

00:36:37.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: But you're not thinking about the individual chemical molecules.

00:36:39.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: You'd say, oh, it's a little bit of a cherry flavor or this chocolate has a little bit of a citrus.

00:36:45.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: You know, this is the sorts of thing.

00:36:46.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yep.

00:36:47.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So that's essentially what the brain does with visual images as well.

00:36:50.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yes.

00:36:51.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Okay.

00:36:52.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So that's my very crude and certainly not complete description of how bits of information are compressed as they go into the brain and then unpacked into what you call a perception.

00:37:04.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: That's right.

00:37:05.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Or an experience.

00:37:06.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And the same thing is true of a TIFF or Photoshop file compressed to a JPEG.

00:37:10.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yes.

00:37:11.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And then you can literally uncompress that file.

00:37:13.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yes.

00:37:14.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: If you have the sort of computational capability.

00:37:16.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So one thing I just want to add to it, the kind of compression that we were doing with the JPEG compression was lossy, meaning that the information was thrown away.

00:37:25.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: You couldn't recover it, but that didn't really matter.

00:37:28.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So if you showed people the image at its high resolution versus the image at its compressed or lower resolution, the human eye can't really tell the difference.

00:37:38.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And I think but for the urban images, you couldn't get away with that trick.

00:37:44.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: You needed to keep all of the original pixel values.

00:37:48.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So that's kind of that's what computers and our iPhones are actually doing there.

00:37:53.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And the reason why we think they can get away with that is because nature has a lot of this repeated structure like you were talking about before about predicting the pixels value.

00:38:04.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And you can use that you can capitalize that that that means there's a lot of redundancy.

00:38:08.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So you don't need all of that information.

00:38:10.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Natural images also tend to have maybe this can get a little bit technical to a lot of high frequency spatial content.

00:38:17.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So a lot of little changes are little contrast changes that we don't really need.

00:38:23.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Whereas in the urban environment, there's more of these big contrast changes that we do need.

00:38:27.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So we think maybe the brain is like you're saying there's all this evidence that the brain is basically doing that.

00:38:34.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And in nature, because you can smack, you know, you're walking through the nature, you can kind of throw away a lot of the information.

00:38:44.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And so we think that actually might be why it's sort of more softly fascinating and easier to process versus the urban environment.

00:38:52.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: There's another element here too, which we haven't got it completely yet, but which I'm very interested in.

00:38:58.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So that that's looking at sort of like complexity of the images at the very, very low level.

00:39:04.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: But you could also think about semantics, like the language that we use to describe a scene.

00:39:10.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And when I see a nature scene, you know, I don't have a huge language repertoire.

00:39:14.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I can say lake, tree, river, shrub, sand, desert.

00:39:21.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: But when I'm in the urban environment, I can say Volkswagen Beetle, you know, BMW M3, uh, Gothic architecture.

00:39:30.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Like my vocabulary is so much more complex for an urban scene.

00:39:36.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So, so one thing that we're also thinking about is like maybe nature might also be more semantically simple, like from a linguistic level that I can just label it really easily.

00:39:46.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And then it allows my brain to just not have to store as much information.

00:39:51.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Whereas in the urban environment, maybe I'm forced to sort of label all of these objects and it just takes up more room in our brain.

00:39:58.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So we also do these studies where we show people a bunch of nature scenes and urban scenes and then test their memory.

00:40:05.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: For the scenes.

00:40:06.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And it turns out that people's memory for the nature scenes is worse than the urban scene.

00:40:13.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So people remember.

00:40:14.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Perfect.

00:40:15.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Exactly.

00:40:16.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: It fits.

00:40:17.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: It fits.

00:40:18.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And you might think, oh, well, you want to remember stuff.

00:40:20.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: But actually, you know, in some sense it's, it's measuring how, how just difficult it is to process.

00:40:25.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And we're, if it's so easy to process nature, you're just not going to remember it.

00:40:29.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And that in this case is a good thing.

00:40:31.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So we think that's also part of it, that it's, that that's also saying to us that, yeah, it's just, it's just easier to process this natural stimulation versus this urban stimulation where you just have to attend to more stuff.

00:40:42.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: It's more sticky.

00:40:43.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Do you have any data as to whether or not people track time better or worse when they are in natural versus urban environments?

00:40:50.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So I don't have direct evidence to this, but I have a few other little pieces of evidence that I think will kind of get us there.

00:40:58.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So we've done some studies where we send people, this one was actually sending people to a nature arboretum, an indoor nature arboretum, the Garfield Conservatory, a really beautiful conservatory in Chicago versus the Chicago Water Tower Mall, a very fancy indoor mall in Chicago.

00:41:16.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And we actually gave participants here cell phones that we had in the lab that would ping them and ask them questions while they were going on the walk in the conservatory, the walk in the mall.

00:41:29.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And we asked them, you know, what are you thinking about?

00:41:31.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And it turns out when people are walking in nature, they actually think more about the past than walking in the mall.

00:41:42.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So that was kind of interesting.

00:41:46.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: This is also kind of interesting.

00:41:47.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: People also said that they felt more impulsive in the mall than in the conservatory, which makes sense that, you know, mall designers want people to be buying things.

00:41:55.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: But this idea about thinking about the past to me suggested a little bit that time might be going a bit slower.

00:42:02.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Other people have found in cities that the larger the city is, people like walk faster.

00:42:09.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Like the pace of everything is a little bit faster.

00:42:12.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So my hunch is that based on those two findings that I think time does probably slow down in nature, but I don't have direct evidence for that.

00:42:21.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I think that's something that'd be really super interesting to study.

00:42:24.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: But that would be my hypothesis that in nature, time does slow down a bit.

00:42:28.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: If you had to wager a guess, would you assume that going into an art gallery is more similar to taking a walk in nature or an urban environment?

00:42:37.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I mean, it's so rich with information.

00:42:39.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

00:42:40.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: You have options.

00:42:41.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

00:42:41.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: You have to decline certain things, certain rooms, certain paintings, certain sculptures.

00:42:45.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: It's a lot of decision making.

00:42:46.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

00:42:47.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And yet, most people find galleries, big galleries, to be extremely calming.

00:42:53.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

00:42:54.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Maybe it's also because everyone's quite quiet in them.

00:42:55.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

00:42:56.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I would say the gallery would have a similar effect to nature, would be my guess.

00:43:02.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Because, you know, Kaplan's attention restoration theory really is not specific to nature.

00:43:09.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: It basically just says you got to find an environment that doesn't place a lot of demands on directed attention while simultaneously having softly fascinating stimulation.

00:43:21.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And an art gallery might meet those two criteria.

00:43:24.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: If you don't have to be tested on the artwork and you can just kind of go there and you don't have an agenda.

00:43:30.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I think there's going to be a lot of very softly fascinating stimulation in art galleries.

00:43:34.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So my hunch would be that, yeah, walking through an art gallery might have a similar kind of effect.

00:43:40.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I would, this is going to be a little bit of a jump.

00:43:45.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: There, there are some studies that we did where we were looking at the relationship between park visits

00:43:51.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: and crime and going to a museum versus crime.

00:43:56.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So these were, there's been a lot of actually interesting studies suggesting that interacting with nature can make people less aggressive.

00:44:06.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And we think it has to do with attention.

00:44:09.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So we, you know, we had this incredible data set.

00:44:14.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: The cell phone trace data set.

00:44:17.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Where from 100,000 people in Chicago.

00:44:20.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: We knew where they lived.

00:44:22.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And we knew where they went for an entire month.

00:44:25.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So what we did is we quantified how many times that people leave their neighborhood and go and visit a park.

00:44:33.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Versus leaving their neighborhood and going to a museum or something like that.

00:44:37.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And we wanted to correlate that with crime.

00:44:40.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And sure enough, we found that neighborhoods where people leave their neighborhood and go and visit a park.

00:44:46.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: There's actually that predicted less crime in those neighborhoods.

00:44:49.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: But the museum visits didn't predict that.

00:44:53.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And this was controlled for, I don't know, like a socioeconomic background.

00:44:57.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

00:44:58.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I mean, more or less.

00:44:59.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I mean, again, it's a correlational study, so I can't claim causality, but we also controlled for age, education, income, all those demographics.

00:45:07.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So there it seemed like there was something special about the park visit versus the museum visit on at least aggression.

00:45:16.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: But I do believe that going through a museum might have a similar effect to nature.

00:45:22.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I'm not sure it'll be as strong, but I think it has the museum maybe has a lot of the same elements that that nature walk might have.

00:45:31.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I mean, I think I'm just obsessively starting to drop into the trench of, you know, what sorts of things are attention depleting and what sorts of things are attentionally restorative.

00:45:43.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Because I personally believe that our ability to attend is like the hallmark of building a great life.

00:45:49.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yes.

00:45:50.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And so much so that, you know, on hikes and walks, I will listen to audio books and podcasts.

00:45:55.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

00:45:56.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: But there are times when, for instance, I will exercise with silence.

00:46:01.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yep.

00:46:02.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And then I'll use music as something to like push me through some particularly hard moments in the exercise, but then I'll turn it off and bring it back.

00:46:10.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I don't just kind of like head out the whole time blasting music.

00:46:13.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

00:46:14.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Sometimes I'll do that.

00:46:15.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: But I'm starting to become kind of a experimentalist with this idea of, you know, attention as this resource that we deplete each day.

00:46:23.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Sleep, it's restored mostly.

00:46:25.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Go back again.

00:46:26.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: You know, looming in the backdrop of this conversation is a conversation about social media.

00:46:32.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

00:46:33.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Before we go there, if you were at this point to give a kind of a best recommendation in terms of how to reset one's attentional abilities, what are the basic requirements?

00:46:45.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So I think there's a lot there too.

00:46:47.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I think you have to be really mindful about directed attention fatigue.

00:46:52.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So if you're trying to study or you're at work and you're having a really hard time concentrating, I would recommend not just trying to power through.

00:47:05.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: If you have the ability and the time to take a break, I recommend that you stop and you take a break.

00:47:12.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And what kind of break do I recommend you do?

00:47:15.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I recommend that you go and try to find some nature and walk in nature.

00:47:18.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: What if you're having a hard time getting into a focused state at all?

00:47:22.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

00:47:23.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: It's not that you fatigued it that day.

00:47:25.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

00:47:26.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: You know, so many people that I hear from who listen to the podcast and elsewhere will say, you know, they get up.

00:47:33.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

00:47:34.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: They did their best to get their sleep.

00:47:35.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: They get their morning sunlight.

00:47:36.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: They hydrate.

00:47:37.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: They drink their caffeine.

00:47:38.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: They sit down to their computer and they just can't focus.

00:47:41.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

00:47:42.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And then they start thinking like, do they have brain fog?

00:47:45.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:47:46.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Do they need a nootropic?

00:47:47.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: You know, all these questions start to arise.

00:47:50.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: What are your thoughts?

00:47:51.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I think in some sense, even though you might be very well slept and very well fed, you could still be in a directed attention fatigue state.

00:47:59.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So I think, yeah, if you can't concentrate right in the beginning of the morning, then you should go for a walk.

00:48:04.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: That should be the first thing you should do.

00:48:06.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Or if you don't have access to nature, maybe listen to some nature sounds or watch a nature video or something like that.

00:48:13.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: We find that all those things can beneficial.

00:48:15.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Even looking out the window to nature can be beneficial.

00:48:18.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Looking at a picture, you've got a picture of nature here.

00:48:21.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Looking at a picture of nature can be beneficial.

00:48:23.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So I would say anytime you're having trouble concentrating, it doesn't matter if it's at the beginning of the day or the end of the day or the middle of the day, I would recommend that you take some kind of break with nature.

00:48:36.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And it could be simulated nature, like listening to nature sounds, watching a nature video, looking at nature pictures, or even better is if you can actually get out and interact with nature.

00:48:48.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Because Steve Kaplan used to also talk about these other elements that might be important for a restorative environment.

00:48:55.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: One was that the environment had to have extent, meaning that it had to have enough interesting things to look at.

00:49:03.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Now, it doesn't mean that it has to be Yosemite Valley, which has incredible spatial extent.

00:49:09.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I mean, it's huge, it's enormous, but you know, like near my office at the University of Chicago, we have this Japanese garden, the Garden of the Phoenix.

00:49:21.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: It might be only like 100 square meters, it's pretty small, but man, it's still got a lot of extent.

00:49:27.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: You know, it's got a walking path, it's got a little waterfall, you can see Lake Michigan.

00:49:32.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So that's one element. Another thing about the nature is that you want it to be compatible with your goals.

00:49:43.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So what do I mean by that? If you've got a big exam and you haven't studied, I'm not sure going for the walk in nature is going to work.

00:49:51.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: You better use that time to study. But if you can't concentrate, you know, trying to power through, I don't think it's gonna be compatible with your goals.

00:50:01.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I think going in for the nature walk is compatible with your goals. So that's another thing that's going to be really important.

00:50:08.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And the other concept that Steve used to talk about being important is that the environment needs to give you the sense of being away.

00:50:16.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: That you're kind of removed from your current environment, almost like a change of mindset.

00:50:23.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And again, that doesn't mean you have to go really, really far away, but you might want to go to a location that's not at your desk.

00:50:30.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So maybe don't sit at your desk and look at the nature, but maybe you want to go somewhere else and look at the nature pictures and this kind of distance I think could be helpful.

00:50:39.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I don't know if Cal Newport talks about this and his deep work, but you know, I've heard people talking about in an office, you might want to have like a separate area of your office for deep work.

00:50:48.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And I think this kind of sense of being away is related to that. You kind of want to get out of your current state and go into this other environment that might be able to replenish those resources.

00:50:59.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So I'm hearing that there are two sides of the coin. One is to designate an area for work that's truly for deep work.

00:51:06.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yes.

00:51:07.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I followed Cal's recommendation and now I have an area in my basement, believe it or not, and there has never been a phone in that basement.

00:51:15.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: There's no phones allowed in that basement. That's not a rule. It's not a protocol. It's a policy.

00:51:19.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right. And I remember he talked about in his, he has this library office that he goes to, and I very much agree with that.

00:51:26.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah. Now I do get internet access down there a little bit.

00:51:28.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

00:51:29.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: If I need to look for papers, but I've been turning off wifi on my computer when I go down there to work.

00:51:34.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

00:51:35.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And I get more done in three hours down there.

00:51:37.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

00:51:38.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Than I would in three weeks.

00:51:39.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

00:51:40.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Above ground.

00:51:41.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

00:51:42.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I swear, it's a huge effect.

00:51:43.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

00:51:44.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: The other side of the coin is this business of getting out into a different environment.

00:51:48.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And it sounds like these walks or these ventures into nature don't take terribly long.

00:51:54.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: How long does one need to do this in order to get the enhancement and focus and working memory?

00:51:58.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Like what do the data say?

00:51:59.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

00:52:00.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I mean, when we did the, our walking study was 50 minutes, but I've seen other studies with as little as 20 minutes, you can get the effects.

00:52:07.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: For cognitive enhancement.

00:52:08.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: For cognitive enhancement.

00:52:09.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Um, and there's actually been some interesting studies with kids with ADHD and they find attention benefits, uh, for these kids with ADHD after just a 20 minute walk in nature that actually was similar, um, to like a dose of Ritalin.

00:52:24.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So that was pretty incredible.

00:52:26.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

00:52:27.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So it doesn't have to be super long.

00:52:28.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Uh, and when we were doing the, the slideshow of nature pictures, that was only for about 10 minutes.

00:52:34.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So it doesn't have to be a really, really long immersion.

00:52:37.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: There've been other studies that have suggested like overall, uh, you might want to get about two hours a week in nature.

00:52:45.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, AG1.

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00:55:59.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: You know, I've been long obsessed with this difference between what happens in our brain stem,

00:56:06.340 | you know, the areas involved, as you know, with levels of arousal and stress versus calm,

00:56:13.340 | when we look at a fixation point versus a horizon or when we go into panoramic vision.

00:56:19.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And there are now ample data to support the idea that when we fixate on a small box, like a phone or a computer,

00:56:26.340 | or we, you know, we're fixated on something, we're reading or paying attention to it, that our level of autonomic arousal creeps up.

00:56:33.340 | It doesn't creep up indefinitely, but this makes sense, right?

00:56:36.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

00:56:37.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Visual attention matches the cognitive attention.

00:56:38.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

00:56:39.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: You need arousal, aka alertness to get cognitive attention.

00:56:40.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

00:56:41.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: But that when we go into panoramic vision, which is, you know, for the aficionados,

00:56:45.340 | you can look up magnocellular vision.

00:56:46.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

00:56:47.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: What you're essentially doing is you're taking bigger pixels of the visual environment.

00:56:50.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yes.

00:56:51.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And when we look at a horizon, we naturally go into panoramic vision,

00:56:55.340 | unless we're looking at our phone and taking a picture of that horizon.

00:56:58.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yes.

00:56:59.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So take note.

00:57:00.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: It's interesting to me to think about visual environments such as nature that have us taking larger bins, pixels,

00:57:09.340 | if we're talking about visual space, but that we're also perhaps, this is a question I'm obsessed with,

00:57:15.340 | perhaps taking larger time bins.

00:57:17.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Hmm.

00:57:18.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: What do you think about a kind of a general idea that what we need to do in order to be focused

00:57:24.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

00:57:25.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: is to allow our mind to go into these kind of like time drift states.

00:57:29.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

00:57:30.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And I kind of think, you know, you're talking about it from a visual perspective,

00:57:34.340 | but I think it's also from a cognitive mental perspective.

00:57:37.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So I think also to being in nature kind of widens your cognitive, you know, landscape.

00:57:45.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And that's why I think people sometimes, you know, you hear all these anecdotes where people are struggling to solve a problem.

00:57:51.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: They can't figure it out.

00:57:53.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: They go for a walk in nature and then boom, they solve the problem.

00:57:56.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Because the brain is still churning on that.

00:57:58.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

00:57:59.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: But maybe being out in nature sort of inspires this widening of attentional space internally.

00:58:06.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: We had a guest on this podcast, Michael Platt from the University of Pennsylvania.

00:58:09.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

00:58:10.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: He's a neuroscientist and he told us about this experiment.

00:58:12.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: It's pretty wild.

00:58:13.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So this still blows me away.

00:58:14.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: You're probably familiar with it, but I wasn't, which is that if you have human subjects in a lab, do a connect the dots task where the dots are placed very close together.

00:58:22.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

00:58:23.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Versus a connect the dots task where the dots are placed much further apart.

00:58:28.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And then you give them a creativity task.

00:58:30.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: The people who do the task, and it's well controlled for folks, connecting dots that are further apart in physical space show significantly elevated levels of creative insight.

00:58:42.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: To solving problems.

00:58:43.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yes.

00:58:44.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And so there's something about visual space and time.

00:58:46.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yes.

00:58:47.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And our ability to link things in cognitive space and time.

00:58:51.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yes.

00:58:52.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And this is why when you said earlier that when you're out in nature, there aren't as many words to describe things.

00:58:58.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right, yes.

00:58:59.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: What that means to me, if I think about the results that Platt was talking about, is that perhaps it isn't just that there's a dearth of language.

00:59:09.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: But perhaps then your brain starts to drop into other modes of cognition.

00:59:14.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I don't want to sound too nerdy just to sound nerdy here.

00:59:16.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yes.

00:59:17.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: But there are all sorts of things in your brain that can't have words assigned to them.

00:59:22.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

00:59:23.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Like for instance, your childhood, you could give the whole story, but it still wouldn't capture it, right?

00:59:27.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right, right.

00:59:28.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: But there was your trauma.

00:59:29.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: There was your wins.

00:59:30.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: There were your falling in love.

00:59:33.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: You know, we have these words, but they don't capture the experience.

00:59:37.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: They don't capture like the visceral experience, the smells, the tastes.

00:59:41.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And so I love the idea that in nature things are sparse enough yet rich enough that maybe these networks get triggered.

00:59:51.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right, right.

00:59:52.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And I think, you know, this is kind of another, if we want to get into the neuroscience a little bit, we have some of these ideas that for what a brain looks like when it's kind of at rest.

01:00:04.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And when we talk about fractalness, you know, most of us think about like a spatial fractal.

01:00:12.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So if there's a snowflake, it's got a characteristic shape.

01:00:16.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: If you put that snowflake under a microscope and zoom in, it still kind of has that same shape.

01:00:21.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: If you zoom in some more, it's still got that same shape.

01:00:23.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So it doesn't matter what scale you look at the snowflake, it's got the same shape.

01:00:28.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So that's called as a snowflake is sort of scale free spatially or another way to say it is that it's fractal.

01:00:34.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: It's got this repeated patterning at these different spatial scales and nature is filled with fractals.

01:00:39.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Could you tell us more about some of those?

01:00:41.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I recall hearing about fractals of Mandelbrot.

01:00:43.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah, Mandelbrot.

01:00:44.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: That came up with fractals.

01:00:45.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yes.

01:00:46.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: But despite the fact that I remember Mandelbrot's name, all that tells you is that my brain is filled with meaningless information.

01:00:51.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Because what I want to know is not who came up with it, right?

01:00:55.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: This is the problem with the hippocampus, right?

01:00:57.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: You can encode perfectly useless information, no discredit to Mandelbrot.

01:01:01.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: But where in nature, aside from snowflakes, do fractals show up?

01:01:05.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Are they in tree bark?

01:01:06.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Everywhere.

01:01:07.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I mean, a tree is also quite fractal, right?

01:01:11.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So you have the trunk of the tree and then it breaks off into branches, which breaks off into smaller branches,

01:01:17.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: which breaks off into leaves and the leaves have the veins that also branch off.

01:01:21.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So it's very, very fractal.

01:01:23.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: It's got the same branching structure at all these different scales.

01:01:26.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Really?

01:01:27.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:01:28.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So when I look at like sand in the desert, you're telling me that this regularity exists at every scale?

01:01:34.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah, pretty much.

01:01:35.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I think a desert would also be fractal in terms of, you know, how the wind, because the wind is also kind of a fractal sort of process.

01:01:44.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So the sand will be somewhat fractal.

01:01:46.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: A mountain scape will also be quite fractal.

01:01:49.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: A coastline will be fractal.

01:01:51.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Well, tell me for a mountain.

01:01:52.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So where am I going to look at a smaller scale?

01:01:54.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I can see, I can imagine a mountain.

01:01:55.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Mountain.

01:01:56.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:01:57.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Now if you zoomed in on a different portion of the mountain, it would have some of the same structural properties as the zoomed out version.

01:02:02.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Really?

01:02:02.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:02:03.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Wild.

01:02:04.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:02:05.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So, and again, this kind of, you know, to return back to like compression, again, if you have this repeated pattern, patterning,

01:02:11.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: that might be easier for our brain to process because you really, you just have to only kind of encode one structure because that structure is repeated at all these different scales.

01:02:21.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Whereas human beings and advertisements and all that, we try, you know, there's this thing in science, as you know, people are either lumpers or splitters.

01:02:29.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yes.

01:02:30.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:02:31.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And many a career has been made by splitting.

01:02:33.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:02:34.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: When lumping would have been sufficient.

01:02:36.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:02:37.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Human behavior, human advertising, music, I mean, I'm sure there's immense regularity.

01:02:41.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yes.

01:02:42.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: But when we're bombarded with that, now I'm sort of making the segue to something like social media.

01:02:47.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:02:48.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Where you're just bombarded with sensory information.

01:02:50.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yes.

01:02:51.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Like one movement of my thumb takes me from one cognitive landscape to a completely different cognitive landscape.

01:02:58.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:02:59.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I mean, if it were my preference, my entire feed would be dogs.

01:03:02.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:03:03.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I'm going from dogs to politics to fitness to, and then stuff that the algorithm is testing on me.

01:03:09.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And I mean, it's amazing that we can do this.

01:03:13.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:03:14.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And yet, the more we talk about nature and how restorative it is.

01:03:17.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:03:18.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Or reading a book and what kind of a, following a common narrative.

01:03:21.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:03:22.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Drilling down into that.

01:03:23.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:03:24.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Or watching a movie, which hopefully has some continuity to the plot.

01:03:26.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: The more I realized that social media is, for lack of a better word, is kind of chaos.

01:03:33.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: It's like cognitive chaos.

01:03:35.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Or it's definitely not fractal.

01:03:37.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: It's definitely not fractal.

01:03:39.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Well put, yeah.

01:03:40.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: It's not fractal.

01:03:41.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And if we kind of return to fractalness too.

01:03:42.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So we think, so we talked about fractalness in terms of space.

01:03:47.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Like there's that this shape and you zoom in, same shape, zoom in some more, same shape.

01:03:52.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: You can also talk about fractalness in time.

01:03:54.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So you can have like a signal oscillating in time, fluctuating in time.

01:04:00.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And you can also quantify how fractal that signal is in time.

01:04:04.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Mm-hmm.

01:04:05.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So it's like, if you look at the signal at one millisecond, 10 milliseconds, 50 milliseconds,

01:04:11.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: 10 seconds, 30 seconds, an hour, does that signal look the same or does it look different?

01:04:19.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: If the signal looks the same at all those different temporal windows, we say the signal is fractal in time.

01:04:28.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Can you give me an example from a nature environment and one by comparison from a urban environment?

01:04:34.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I'm thinking a car alarm in an urban environment is like the most alerting, I mean, it grabs our involuntary attention.

01:04:41.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And it's not fractal, it's periodic.

01:04:42.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: It's just wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, you know, over and over again.

01:04:47.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Like a fractal signal will kind of have low frequency stuff will be, have a lot of power, but it also has all of the different frequencies are represented.

01:04:57.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: But their, um, how their amplitude is, this is going to get a little nerdy is proportional to their frequency.

01:05:04.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So low frequency stuff will have higher amplitude or higher power and high frequency stuff will have lower amplitude or lower power.

01:05:11.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And a lot of natural sounds and stuff are also more fractal.

01:05:16.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: But what's interesting is that you can also look at brain signals.

01:05:19.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Like I can take a, put a person in an MRI machine and look at like, how are the brain areas fluctuating?

01:05:26.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Or I can have an EEG cap on them and look at how their electrical activity is, is fluctuating.

01:05:31.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And it turns out when brains are more fractal in time, brains are exerting less effort, less cognitive effort.

01:05:39.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So, you know, it's kind of depressing, but as we age, our brains kind of get less fractal.

01:05:47.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Um, if you're learning, uh, a new task for a first time when it's harder, uh, the brain is less fractal than when you're well-practiced at the task.

01:05:57.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: If you're doing an easy task, the brain is more fractal than when you're doing a harder task.

01:06:02.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And so we think that maybe nature is kind of pushing the brain into this like higher fractal state that might be like this sort of critical rested state.

01:06:18.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Um, that's, that's kind of a really, uh, that's gonna, that's gonna, that's gonna allow you to actually have a lot of directed attention.

01:06:28.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: When you need it.

01:06:30.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: When you need it.

01:06:31.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: When you need it versus like the social media stuff is just pulling grabbing.

01:06:34.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: It's, it's not letting you get into this fractal rested state.

01:06:37.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: It's, it's, it's driving fractalness down.

01:06:42.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:06:43.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Well, the social media platforms, not to paint them as evil because I teach on social media, learn on social media, enjoy social media, but it's a business.

01:06:50.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:06:51.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: They're not doing it for free.

01:06:52.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: No.

01:06:53.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: They're not doing it out of the goodness of their hearts.

01:06:54.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:06:55.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And, um, I basically think of social media as the reality TV show that we've all,

01:07:00.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: either chosen to be a part of.

01:07:04.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:07:05.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: We've cast ourselves in it.

01:07:06.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:07:07.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: The idea here is that it is not designed to be relaxing.

01:07:10.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: No.

01:07:11.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: It's designed to capture your directed attention.

01:07:13.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: That's right.

01:07:14.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: If it just grabbed your involuntary attention, it wouldn't work.

01:07:16.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Now that might seem a little bit counterintuitive because I and everybody else has the experience of, you know, picking up your phone.

01:07:22.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:07:23.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: You're like, okay, I'm only gonna spend a minute.

01:07:24.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:07:25.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I'm gonna just kind of check what's on Instagram.

01:07:26.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:07:27.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And all of a sudden you're taking down this-

01:07:27.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:07:28.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: This rabbit hole of one thing.

01:07:29.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:07:30.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And then, you know, it's 30 minutes later and you're like, goodness.

01:07:31.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:07:32.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: You know, I gotta get ready for work or something like this.

01:07:33.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:07:34.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:07:35.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: The involuntary attention that you were talking about before is the kind of thing that cues you to something and then you go down that direction.

01:07:41.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:07:42.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Or I would say that the social media, it's not softly fascinating, it's harshly fascinating.

01:07:46.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Mm.

01:07:47.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: It's grabbing you and not letting you mind wander or think about anything else.

01:07:52.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: It's grabbing all of your attention and resources.

01:07:54.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And I would say it does that not by taking us typically down rabbit holes, but it's not like you spend a lot of time on one post.

01:08:01.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:08:02.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: You might go into the comments section if you're interested in that, but it's the fact that you have, I'm imagining now that there's some resource in the brain that's a combination of catecholamines, dopamine, norepinephrine, certainly.

01:08:15.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:08:16.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Plus a bunch of neural network metabolism stuff.

01:08:19.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:08:20.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: It will never be one thing, right?

01:08:21.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:08:22.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: It's not gonna be like a molecule.

01:08:23.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:08:24.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And that depending on how well rested we are, we go into the day with a certain amount of directed attention units that we can spend.

01:08:31.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:08:32.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And everything you're telling us today is that going into a fractal AKA nature environment allows us to come off the sort of spending.

01:08:45.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:08:46.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Of our directed attention.

01:08:47.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: That's right.

01:08:48.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And it also seems to reset the directed attention account.

01:08:50.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yes.

01:08:51.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Are there any data that speak to whether or not it just allows us to not spend or whether or not it actually replenishes this directed attention capability?

01:09:00.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:09:01.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: It's a good question.

01:09:02.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Or does it even like extend capabilities?

01:09:05.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Like, does it take you above your baseline?

01:09:07.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:09:08.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Is it an investment?

01:09:09.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:09:10.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Lately, I think not so much about dopamine per se.

01:09:12.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:09:13.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I think about are you spending your dopamine down or are you investing your dopamine?

01:09:17.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:09:18.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:09:19.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And I would say, I mean, unfortunately, I don't have a good answer for it.

01:09:22.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I'm, I'm not sure it might actually, it's possible that it might expand your store.

01:09:27.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: It might, it might, you might be getting interest.

01:09:30.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Mm-hmm.

01:09:31.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So, so one of the things too, that we kind of struggle with a little bit is like, is nature boosting us a lot?

01:09:36.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Or is urban fatiguing us or depleting us?

01:09:40.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:09:41.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And I think both things are kind of at play there.

01:09:43.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I have a whole set of questions popping to mind about sleep states and deep sleep being more like fractal environments and rapid eye movement sleep being more like reality and therefore more challenging.

01:09:54.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: But I'm going to just shelve those and maybe we'll get back to them.

01:09:57.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Okay.

01:09:58.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Maybe we won't.

01:09:59.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I want to make sure that I understand correctly what the protocol, for lack of a better word, would be.

01:10:04.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Get out into nature, ideally move.

01:10:08.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yes.

01:10:09.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: For about 20 minutes minimum.

01:10:10.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yep.

01:10:11.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And ideally you remove yourself from phone.

01:10:16.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: What if you have to make a phone call while you're doing it?

01:10:18.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I mean, that's just, you don't want to do it.

01:10:20.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And I'd even say too, I know you were saying you like to put the earbuds in.

01:10:23.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Sometimes I would say you don't want the earbuds in.

01:10:25.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: You want all of your attentional capacity or involuntary attention to be captured by that environment.

01:10:33.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Okay, great.

01:10:34.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: You know, it's kind of, I kind of joke with my students about this a little bit where I would say, you know,

01:10:39.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: How many of you study with listening to music?

01:10:44.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And a lot of students raise their hand.

01:10:45.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah, I study listening to music.

01:10:46.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I said, okay.

01:10:47.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: How many of you want to take the exam listening to music?

01:10:50.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Nobody.

01:10:51.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Nobody raised your hand.

01:10:52.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Well, that's not consistent, you know?

01:10:55.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Mm-hmm.

01:10:56.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And it's not because, you know, the students are not smart.

01:11:02.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: It's that studying sucks.

01:11:04.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Mm-hmm.

01:11:05.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And, you know, listening to music just makes it more pleasurable, but you're not, you know, you're taking away attentional resources that could be used for the studying by listening to music.

01:11:19.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And I think, you know, on the flip side, I want you to be fully engaged with nature.

01:11:26.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I want your involuntary attention to be just automatically captured by this nature stimulation.

01:11:31.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I don't want anything else interfering with that.

01:11:33.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I think that's how you're going to get the most bang for your buck.

01:11:36.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And in fact, you know, you know, we did these studies where I wasn't sure how it was going to work.

01:11:42.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So we did some studies where we took participants who were diagnosed with clinical depression.

01:11:48.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And this was kind of mean, but I think important.

01:11:52.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: We had them walk in nature too.

01:11:54.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: But before these participants went for a walk in nature, we had them think about a negative thought or memory that's been bothering them to try to induce rumination to get them ruminating.

01:12:07.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And we thought, you know, maybe if you go for a walk alone in nature and you're restoring your attention, maybe they're going to ruminate even more.

01:12:13.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: That is going to be, you know, not good.

01:12:16.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Maybe it's going to hurt performance.

01:12:18.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And we found just the opposite.

01:12:21.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: That actually these participants with clinical depression who we had induced to ruminate got even stronger benefits walking in nature than our non-clinical sample.

01:12:31.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: On working memory.

01:12:33.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: On working memory.

01:12:34.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And you can imagine participants that are struggling with depression and rumination, their working memory is not as good because you've got cognitive resources devoted to these negative thoughts that are just repeating over and over again.

01:12:47.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: You don't have your full bank account of attention because you're spending it on the rumination.

01:12:54.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And we found that for these participants, the effects were stronger in improving their attention and working memory.

01:13:04.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And I think part of that might be that it's actually giving them some of the attention resources necessary to deal with the rumination.

01:13:11.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Super interesting.

01:13:13.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I know rumination is something that many people, depressed or not, struggle with.

01:13:17.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And I've long thought, and I'm certainly coming to this conclusion with each successive year of my life, that distraction is the enemy.

01:13:26.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:13:26.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Like the ability to drop into work, creative work, or for me, prepping a podcast or reading papers or taking a walk with somebody, having a conversation with somebody, because relationships are important too, of course, and just being able to be fully present to that.

01:13:40.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:13:41.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Is the basis of a great life.

01:13:45.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:13:46.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Even if you're dealing with challenge.

01:13:47.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right, right.

01:13:48.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: That when we spread ourselves out across all these different modalities, that no good comes of it.

01:13:55.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: That's right.

01:13:56.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And like any destructive force that's really bad, it's the fact that we don't notice that we were absent for large swaths of it.

01:14:07.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:14:08.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And that it becomes so pervasive in society that it's not also frowned on.

01:14:11.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:14:12.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I actually put social media on an old phone.

01:14:14.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:14:15.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So I have social media accounts on an old phone.

01:14:17.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:14:18.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And that's the only way I can access social media.

01:14:20.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:14:21.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Somebody sends me something by way of social media, I don't do it because, I mean, it's the, I don't know what the best analogy is.

01:14:26.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: It's like someone who's trying to eat clean and you're constantly handing them junk food.

01:14:30.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right, right.

01:14:31.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: You know, and I enjoy social media, but I like to make it a designated time.

01:14:35.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:14:36.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So getting out for a walk in 20 minutes.

01:14:38.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And put the, I would say, put the phone in the box.

01:14:40.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Put the phone away.

01:14:41.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Put the phone away.

01:14:42.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: The whole basis here seems to be allowing your brain to go into kind of, if I take it to its logical conclusion, to kind of its necessary state to reset.

01:14:54.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:14:55.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Maybe.

01:14:56.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: This state of getting into nature and let's call it high fractal environments is similar or should be similar to the way that we've started to talk about sleep.

01:15:07.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: You know, prior to 2015, maybe it was 2018, the notion was sleep when you're dead.

01:15:18.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: You know, Matt Walker, UC Berkeley.

01:15:21.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:15:22.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: With the book Why We Sleep transformed what we now understand.

01:15:26.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And I and others have been, you know, arguing that people need sleep.

01:15:29.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:15:30.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Now, I think everyone understands if you don't sleep, your mental health, your physical health.

01:15:34.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yep.

01:15:35.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Your performance.

01:15:36.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:15:37.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Drops dramatically.

01:15:38.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:15:39.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: You need sleep.

01:15:40.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And Matt has educated us that you need slow wave sleep.

01:15:42.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: You need rapid eye movement sleep.

01:15:44.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Maybe we also need these high fractal environments and the fact that they come in their best form through walks in nature when we're not doing anything else.

01:15:55.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: It's just like you wouldn't want to, I don't know, you don't want to bring the phone into the bedroom kind of thing.

01:15:59.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: No.

01:16:00.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Late at night because you're not going to get your deep sleep because you're going to go to sleep too late and then you miss out on the opportunity for deep sleep.

01:16:05.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:16:06.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I love the idea that these waking states become better understood as, and perhaps even requirements.

01:16:15.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I feel like we understand so much about sleep, slow wave sleep, growth hormone, REM sleep, emotional repair.

01:16:22.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:16:23.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And everyone now is like, cool, we need sleep.

01:16:24.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:16:25.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Here are the different states of sleep.

01:16:26.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:16:27.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: We actually know very little, it seems, about waking states.

01:16:28.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:16:29.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: It's a requirement for different waking states.

01:16:30.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:16:31.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Because if you stay up all night, you entirely expect to not be at your best the next day.

01:16:37.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: That's right.

01:16:38.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: But I have a feeling that, based on your work, that we're doing all sorts of things that are making us far less than our natural best.

01:16:45.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: That's right.

01:16:46.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And that some of us who are clinically diagnosed with things.

01:16:49.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:16:50.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I haven't been clinically diagnosed with ADHD.

01:16:53.340 | If anything, I'd probably veer more towards the OCD side of things when it comes to work.

01:16:57.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:16:59.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: But my guess is that if we understand and engage in the proper waking states, that our lives are going to improve markedly, irrespective of whether or not we need medication.

01:17:09.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I mean, that can only be determined, it seems, when we're doing the right behavioral things.

01:17:13.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:17:14.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So what are your thoughts?

01:17:15.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: This is a big question.

01:17:16.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:17:17.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: But what are your thoughts on really starting to understand what the different waking states are?

01:17:23.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:17:24.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And our requirements for waking states, because I feel like that's pretty much what your work's about.

01:17:29.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah, that's right.

01:17:30.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: That's right.

01:17:31.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And I think, you know, the social media and things on the phone are kind of like the junk food.

01:17:38.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: They're just ruining our waking states to a large extent.

01:17:42.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And I think what we're talking a lot about with this attention restoration theory and walking in nature is that we need breaks.

01:17:55.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: You need breaks during your waking time or if like you were talking about before that if we want to get into a state where we are going to be able to concentrate well.

01:18:06.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Maybe you have to take the nature walk first to kind of to kind of recharge the battery even, you know, right at the beginning of the day.

01:18:15.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So I think there's two elements there.

01:18:16.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: One is that there's a lot of stuff that we're doing during our waking hours that's depleting directed attention and we want to mitigate a lot of that stuff.

01:18:25.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: The other thing is that you can't work 10 hours straight.

01:18:28.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I mean, I don't, I mean, maybe some people say they can, but I just don't think people really can direct their attention for 10 hours straight.

01:18:34.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Not continuously.

01:18:35.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Not continuously.

01:18:36.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: In talking to a lot of writers, because I've been working on this book.

01:18:40.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:18:41.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Most writers who are like career writers will say that the most number of hours that they can do really focused writing per day on a regular basis is four.

01:18:52.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yep.

01:18:53.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And some even say three, some say five, but four seems to be the average.

01:18:58.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yep.

01:18:59.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And that's where their entire day and night is dedicated to creating that four hours typically in the morning, although some wrote at night, most wrote early in the morning.

01:19:08.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yep.

01:19:09.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And that after four hours, they are saturated.

01:19:11.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:19:12.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: That the brain just can't do it.

01:19:14.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Do it.

01:19:15.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:19:16.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So I think there's this element of during our waking hours, protecting directed attention and then also doing these nature interventions as your breaks.

01:19:27.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I mean, I love this.

01:19:28.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:19:29.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I mean, I'm big on getting sunlight in the morning.

01:19:31.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:19:32.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I try to see a horizon when I do it.

01:19:33.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:19:34.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I don't talk about that so broadly as many people don't live in environments where they can catch a horizon.

01:19:38.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Sure.

01:19:39.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:19:40.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And I go up on my roof through a trap door.

01:19:41.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:19:42.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: You know, and I don't want people falling off the roofs and EBMA is what people do with information.

01:19:44.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:19:45.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: At the same time, if I don't do that, I find it very difficult to ratchet into work in the same way.

01:19:53.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:19:54.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I mean, I think, again, to take a step back, what I think is so important about your work is that you've identified at least one and clearly several ways that we can reset our levels, maybe even improve our abilities at directed attention.

01:20:10.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And again, I don't want to demonize social media.

01:20:14.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:20:15.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: But social media is it's a commercial product that we're engaging in.

01:20:21.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:20:22.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And we get returns in likes, follows.

01:20:23.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:20:24.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And some people get paid on there.

01:20:25.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: But for the most part, it's a business.

01:20:29.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:20:30.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And we're the customer.

01:20:31.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:20:32.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And they're the owner.

01:20:33.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:20:34.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And I'm just saying it's using directed attention.

01:20:36.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Like it's not a restful activity is basically so you can choose to spend your directed attention allocation on that.

01:20:43.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: But then you're going to have less, you know, for your work or for other things.

01:20:47.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So is it fair to say that low cognitive demand activities are not always restorative?

01:20:54.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: That's right.

01:20:55.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I think people need to really understand that.

01:20:57.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Exactly right.

01:20:58.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And hear that.

01:20:59.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I think because when I think about like, okay, like yesterday I recorded a solo on the podcast.

01:21:02.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:21:03.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And those are extremely, I don't use a teleprompter except for ads because those have proper wording for legal reasons.

01:21:09.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: The amount of attentional demand is immense.

01:21:11.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:21:12.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So I didn't do this, but in the past I would finish up, go home and I would, you know, I find that scrolling social media, it feels relaxed.

01:21:19.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:21:20.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: You can do it reclined.

01:21:21.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:21:22.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: If I just want, it's passive participation.

01:21:23.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:21:24.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Unless I'm posting or commenting.

01:21:25.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:21:26.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Use my thumb.

01:21:27.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:21:28.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: You know?

01:21:29.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:21:30.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Like, you know, and like some things, but even though it's low cognitive demand, it's draining.

01:21:35.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: That's what you're saying.

01:21:36.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Exactly.

01:21:37.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Interesting.

01:21:38.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And I mean, that's, you know, Steve and I wrote this paper back in 2010, you know, then it was still television was still the kind of low cognitive load activity that we thought was not restful.

01:21:49.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And there's all these studies on television that people watching television after they watch for a couple hours, they report being fatigued and being irritable.

01:21:57.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Does cognitive performance decline after watching?

01:21:59.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And cognitive performance decline.

01:22:00.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So, so it's just, even though it's low cognitive load, it's, it's, it's depleting.

01:22:07.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: It's depleting of directed attention.

01:22:09.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Well, I'm really extreme about this stuff.

01:22:11.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And I'm, I'm excited to be able to incorporate more knowledge toward creating better opportunities for directed attention to the right things and not depleting that.

01:22:21.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I mean, I'm so maniacal that like before I do a solo, I'll tell my assistant when he comes to the house in the morning, like, please don't talk to me today.

01:22:29.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I'm sorry, I don't want to be rude, but I need to keep rehearsing it in my head.

01:22:32.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah, yeah.

01:22:33.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I need to keep, not the specific words, but the concepts.

01:22:36.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right, right.

01:22:37.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I need to be thinking about like the structure of the vagus nerve constantly for usually about 48 hours before in the same way that like you would obsess over something.

01:22:46.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:22:47.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And then once it's done, it's done.

01:22:48.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:22:49.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: But anything that's introduced there.

01:22:51.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:22:52.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Like, like having to make a decision about what to eat for breakfast.

01:22:54.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:22:55.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Is interference.

01:22:56.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:22:57.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: The brain is amazing, but we're not that great at using our brain to its best advantage always.

01:23:04.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah, or our bodies.

01:23:06.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Well put.

01:23:08.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:23:09.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I want to make sure that we get back into this discussion about rumination.

01:23:14.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So you discovered that depressed people ruminate about their problem in nature in a way that allows them to dump the problem?

01:23:22.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: We don't know if people with depression ruminate about the problems.

01:23:25.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: We in the experiment.

01:23:26.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: We we kind of forced them to to ruminate to see if people are in this ruminative state.

01:23:35.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Would nature still have a benefit?

01:23:37.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And it turns out that it did.

01:23:39.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Now, one thing that we were kind of wondering about is like, do people just maybe they just think less about their problems in nature than the urban environment?

01:23:47.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And we found that wasn't true.

01:23:49.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: We were also kind of this is actually work that we did with Ethan Cross.

01:23:54.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And actually, my my wife, Catherine Kirpin, was also an author on the study.

01:24:00.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: We also thought maybe that maybe interacting with nature might put you in this more third party distance kind of state.

01:24:09.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So instead of saying, you know, Mark is so unhappy or instead of saying I'm so unhappy, you'd say Mark is unhappy, you know, this distance state.

01:24:18.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: We didn't find evidence of that, too.

01:24:20.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: It wasn't that people thought about their problems from a more distance perspective in nature either.

01:24:25.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So so what I think is happening is I think we just increase their directed attention.

01:24:30.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And when you increase directed attention, you're able to do lots of things.

01:24:34.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And maybe they could just deal with the ruminations better because they had more cognitive resources to deal with those problems.

01:24:43.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, Element.

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01:25:20.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: To make sure that I'm getting proper amounts of hydration and electrolytes, I dissolve one packet of Element in about 16 to 32 ounces of water when I first wake up in the morning.

01:25:29.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And I drink that basically first thing in the morning.

01:25:31.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I'll also drink Element dissolved in water during any kind of physical exercise that I'm doing, especially on hot days when I'm sweating a lot and losing water and electrolytes.

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01:25:48.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I hate to say that I love one more than all the others, but this lemonade flavor is right up there with my favorite other one, which is raspberry or watermelon.

01:25:56.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Again, I can't pick just one flavor.

01:25:57.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I love them all.

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01:26:10.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Again, that's drinkelement.com/huberman to claim a free sample pack.

01:26:15.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: You mentioned impulsivity, aggression, and the probability of committing a crime.

01:26:21.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:26:22.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: You have some data that there are these ways of reducing impulsivity more broadly.

01:26:28.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:26:29.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right?

01:26:30.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I don't think impulsivity is something that most people think they deal with.

01:26:34.340 | Dr. Mark Berman:

01:26:35.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: But I'll tell you, if you've ever found yourself picking up your phone just because everyone else did.

01:26:38.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:26:39.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: That's impulsivity.

01:26:40.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:26:41.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And by the way, I think perhaps I've been a little bit unfair to social media, and I've spared that equally or maybe even more pernicious thing of modern life, which is texting.

01:26:53.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:26:54.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I mean, it's amazing to me on a plane how hard it is for people to disengage from texting.

01:26:59.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:27:00.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And it's also amazing to me how we can all get into like three or four conversations over text or three or four conversations with one person within a text thread.

01:27:07.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:27:08.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I mean, if that were converted into like actual dialogue.

01:27:12.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:27:13.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: It would be crazy.

01:27:14.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:27:15.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: It would be like switching back and forth between four different conversations.

01:27:18.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:27:19.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I mean, that party is nuts.

01:27:21.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:27:22.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: But in the form of texting, it's like we're doing it.

01:27:26.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Are there any data on on what texting is doing to directed attention?

01:27:29.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I haven't seen any on it.

01:27:31.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: But I again, I would say it's it's got to be depleting.

01:27:34.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: There were some interesting work.

01:27:36.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Actually, I think by one of your colleagues at Stanford, Anthony Wagner, who did work on these multimedia multitaskers.

01:27:43.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So people that text and are doing email or social media and, you know, something on the computer, like you're using multiple media devices simultaneously.

01:27:57.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Does that train attention or does it deplete attention?

01:28:01.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And I think those studies is quite evident that it depletes attention.

01:28:04.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: It's not training people's attention.

01:28:06.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: It's just depleting their attention.

01:28:09.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So I would say, yeah, you know, managing all those conversations is going to be very taxing of of directed attention.

01:28:17.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Again, I'm not somebody who's totally against smartphones.

01:28:21.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I have a smartphone.

01:28:22.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I don't do social media, but I do text a lot.

01:28:25.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I guess I try not to always be so fast.

01:28:30.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: You know, I say sometimes I'm just going to have my time and not not always be so fast to respond.

01:28:38.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: But it's it's hard.

01:28:40.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: It's very difficult.

01:28:41.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: You have to be really mindful and protective of your directed attention.

01:28:46.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And people get angry if they have kind of an expectation of response latency and then you depart from that.

01:28:54.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:28:55.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Which is just nerd speak for sometimes I'll text back fast.

01:28:58.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:28:59.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Sometimes it will take me several weeks or months.

01:29:00.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:29:01.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I think that's starting to normalize a little bit out there because of the sheer volume of communication that people are getting.

01:29:07.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:29:08.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: A few years ago, that was considered rude.

01:29:09.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:29:10.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I've heard more and more discussions that I have no, you know, no real knowledge of what the discussions were.

01:29:17.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: But there was a there's a very popular podcast in particular for women where the host was talking about this the other day.

01:29:25.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Someone sent it to me.

01:29:26.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: They're like, oh, it's it's the the texting three weeks later thing is becoming a norm.

01:29:31.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I think some people are just bombarded with text messages.

01:29:34.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I guess our species is really good at creating technologies and then figuring out like, darn, like we need to backtrack a little bit.

01:29:41.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:29:42.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Because all the programs to like the program freedom, for instance, which shuts down the internet for a certain interval of time on your computer.

01:29:50.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:29:50.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: That was great.

01:29:51.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Hardly anyone uses it.

01:29:52.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:29:53.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And hardly any of the people I know who used to use it use it anymore.

01:29:56.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Forgive me, freedom designers.

01:29:58.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: But it's like it starts to just disappear because the culture drifts in a new way.

01:30:03.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:30:04.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And people like Cal Newport or you who don't have social media or me who put social media on a separate phone and takes a month to reply to a text.

01:30:14.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:30:15.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Unless it's urgent.

01:30:16.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:30:17.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: We're considered the weirdos.

01:30:18.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:30:19.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So it's hard.

01:30:20.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: But again, it's, you know, I've seen people that like an email where they'll have an auto reply that just says, I'm not going to respond really quickly.

01:30:27.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Or I only respond to email, you know, at this time and this time, you know, and I think that makes sense.

01:30:34.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: You know, again, because we have to protect our directed attention.

01:30:38.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: We're just not going to be good functioning humans if we're just constantly being depleted.

01:30:45.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I read a study from Wendy Suzuki's lab at NYU a few years ago that people that do 13 minutes a day of mindfulness meditation.

01:30:54.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So basically sitting or lying down, closing one's eyes, focusing on their breathing and constantly refocusing their attention as it drifts back to a location kind of like right in the middle of their forehead.

01:31:06.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: They observed improvements in memory tasks, but actually decrements in sleep were mentioned there, especially if they did too late in the day.

01:31:16.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And meditation to me always seemed like a focusing exercise.

01:31:20.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yes.

01:31:21.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And so while it's relaxing because you're not jogging or socially engaging, it's cognitively demanding because you have to constantly bring your attention back.

01:31:28.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yes, yes.

01:31:29.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So for many years, we thought of meditation as a reset.

01:31:32.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yes.

01:31:33.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I think of meditation as focus training.

01:31:35.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yes.

01:31:36.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Not a reset.

01:31:37.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:31:38.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: What you're talking about with nature walks is a reset.

01:31:40.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Reset, yeah.

01:31:41.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And it's interesting because, yeah, there was a paper, Tang, I can't remember first name, and Michael Posner.

01:31:48.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: They did some meditation results.

01:31:49.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And then they found these kind of improvements in attention after meditation.

01:31:53.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And they're kind of contacting me because I was doing this nature stuff.

01:31:57.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And they're asking me, do you think it's the same mechanism?

01:31:59.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And I was saying, no, I don't think it's the same mechanism.

01:32:03.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: That, as you're saying, Andrew, that this meditation is very, very focused.

01:32:08.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Lots of directed attention, right?

01:32:11.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Whereas what I'm talking about in nature is sort of like eliminating the need for any directed attention.

01:32:16.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: That it's all just kind of mind wandering and involuntary attention.

01:32:20.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So I think even though maybe you can get some of the same results at the end, I think they're very different mechanisms.

01:32:26.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: What I do find fascinating is that I think in a lot of ancient meditation practices, often they try to do it in beautiful nature.

01:32:35.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And I wonder if they knew something that actually they could meditate better in this beautiful nature, because while they were using directed attention to meditate,

01:32:45.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: being immersed in the beautiful nature was also sort of restoring directed attention at the same time.

01:32:50.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So I do kind of wonder sometimes if maybe combining them, you could get some really interesting results.

01:32:58.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: But exactly, you know, being in nature to me is not a meditative process.

01:33:03.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: It's a much more passive kind of cognitive process.

01:33:06.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So I think we need to distinguish between passive and restorative.

01:33:10.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:33:11.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And passive and depleting.

01:33:12.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:33:13.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And it should be obvious which things fall into which categories.

01:33:16.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:33:17.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And then there are things that are perhaps passive and restorative, but go beyond restorative.

01:33:23.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: They might even be passive, restorative, and cognitive enhancing when you get back to work.

01:33:29.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:33:30.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Back to focused attention on the real stuff.

01:33:31.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:33:32.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And then the scary thought, which is probably true based on just real-world observation,

01:33:39.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: is that passive and depleting activities, when you repeat them over time,

01:33:44.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: aren't just taking away your ability to engage directed attention later that day or the next day,

01:33:50.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: but that over time, the circuitry for directed attention in the brain is probably subject

01:33:55.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: to plasticity in both directions.

01:33:57.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: This is something that I've long been obsessed with.

01:33:59.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:34:00.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: You know, every neural circuit that we are aware of is available for plasticity.

01:34:05.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah, yeah.

01:34:06.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: It requires focus, it requires alertness, and it requires sleep.

01:34:10.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:34:11.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Those are the requirements, right?

01:34:12.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:34:13.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: But it's also possible that the circuits for focus can strengthen,

01:34:16.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: so you can get better at focusing by focusing.

01:34:19.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:34:20.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:34:21.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I certainly see that.

01:34:22.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: The more I do focused work, the better I get at it and the longer I can do it.

01:34:25.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:34:26.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I know there's a threshold there.

01:34:27.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:34:28.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: But also if I take time away from it for a while,

01:34:31.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: it gets, yes, I can replenish, but just like exercise, eventually you start to atrophy.

01:34:35.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:34:36.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And it could be that passive and depleting stuff repeated for enough years kind of brings you to a state of like really true ADHD.

01:34:44.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah, maybe.

01:34:45.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Like maybe you fall into clinical ADHD that probably existed before, but maybe we see it so much more now because people,

01:34:50.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:34:51.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I mean, this is the equivalent of mental obesity.

01:34:52.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:34:53.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Basically.

01:34:54.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right?

01:34:55.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Or mental metabolic syndrome.

01:34:56.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:34:57.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I don't know.

01:34:57.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Let's just be direct.

01:34:58.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Mental obesity, right?

01:34:59.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:35:00.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: For long enough.

01:35:01.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:35:02.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Chances are you're going to end up overweight or obese.

01:35:03.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:35:04.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Certainly with metabolic syndrome.

01:35:05.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:35:06.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:35:07.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And unfortunately, too, you know, like these technology things are addictive and, you know, most addictions just are not healthy.

01:35:13.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:35:14.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So then it's hard to get out once you start.

01:35:18.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: That is an interesting term, mental obesity.

01:35:22.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: There was this interesting paper that kind of looked at how our collective intelligence, how our collective attention span has sort of changed.

01:35:29.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: They've looked at just a short time window, but like tweet hashtags, you know, maybe they used to last for 40 hours, you know, be popular.

01:35:37.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Now it's down to 20 hours.

01:35:39.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Move, if you look at movie ticket sales, like the best, you know, the most popular movies, they were more popular, most probably for three months.

01:35:48.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Now it's like one and a half months.

01:35:50.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Like it's just maybe our collective attention span is kind of shrinking a little bit.

01:35:55.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And we've kind of been wondering, like, does that, does that mean has our like individual directed attention kind of shrunk a little bit?

01:36:02.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Or is there just, you know, too many other possibilities that we're just too overwhelmed that that's causing that?

01:36:08.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: But it is something that is a bit worrisome that, you know, it's not just that we're having a lot of things and I'm speculating now.

01:36:17.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: It's not just that we have a lot of things vying for directed attention.

01:36:20.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: But if we're being so bombarded so much, and as you say, we're kind of getting into these bad modes of thinking, could our directed attention span actually shrink?

01:36:30.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I believe it.

01:36:31.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:36:32.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: It can and it is out there.

01:36:33.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I mean, to borrow from the mighty David Goggins, who's kind of the, I don't know if you're familiar with David, but author of Can't Hurt Me and he's been on this podcast and a real proponent of doing hard things every single day, not because he wants to do them, but precisely because he doesn't want to do them.

01:36:47.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: You know, forcing upon himself like real discipline.

01:36:50.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:36:51.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: He's the, he's emblematic of that.

01:36:53.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: He's also said, and this should be reassuring to people that nowadays it's easier than ever to be exceptional because all you have to do is overcome the urge to be on your phone as much, run a bit more.

01:37:03.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I mean, maybe what we're going to select for the people who, who are very organized about their engagement with phones and social media.

01:37:12.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I mean, I will say coming from the Bay Area, I know a number of people who work for and have founded very large social media platforms.

01:37:19.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:37:20.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: They're not on their phones all day.

01:37:21.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:37:22.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: They're definitely not.

01:37:23.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And their kids aren't either.

01:37:25.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:37:26.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Their kids aren't either.

01:37:27.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So you're a father of four.

01:37:28.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:37:29.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Are there things that you do with your kids to encourage the buildup and reinforcement of these circuits?

01:37:35.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Certainly their brains are still plastic.

01:37:36.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:37:37.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And a lot of people listening to this have kids or are kids and would like to know what they should do.

01:37:44.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:37:45.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Is it exactly what adults should do?

01:37:47.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: You know, so I try to practice what I preach.

01:37:52.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: It's hard because all of their friends have the technologies to my oldest daughter does have a smartphone, but she doesn't have any social media.

01:38:01.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: She uses it mostly to text her friends and play Duolingo or something like that.

01:38:07.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: You know, I try to get them to go out in nature as much as possible.

01:38:12.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Sometimes they're hesitant or dad.

01:38:15.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: They don't want to do it, but we definitely try to get them outside as much as possible.

01:38:22.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And even, you know, when we get to go on vacation once in a while, my wife's family, we're fortunate.

01:38:28.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: They have like a little cabin in Northern Ontario that we go to and there's, you know, there's really no internet there or anything.

01:38:37.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And the kids are just running around with their cousins and playing in the lake and, you know, doing just normal kid things.

01:38:44.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And, you know, I think you've had Jonathan Haidt on the, on the podcast and he kind of talked about this.

01:38:50.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And he said, you know, the kids have to have more free play.

01:38:53.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And the thing that I would just kind of add to what Johnson is saying, I would say you want them to have more free play in nature and we want them getting out of nature more.

01:39:02.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And I think, you know, back to, um, uh, what's Goggins was his name?

01:39:06.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: David Goggins.

01:39:07.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: David Goggins.

01:39:08.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I do agree too, that we should do hard things.

01:39:11.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Um, and I think taking breaks in nature actually allows us to do more hard things.

01:39:17.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: That's, you know, just like you can't lift weights continuously all day long every day.

01:39:22.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: You got to rest and you got to take good rest.

01:39:25.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And I think the nature breaks are the good mental rest, which is going to allow you then to later do the heavy cognitive work better.

01:39:33.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So, but many of us are not taking good rest breaks.

01:39:37.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: We're taking bad rest breaks.

01:39:39.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And I think if we can eliminate those bad rest breaks and substitute in the good nature rest breaks,

01:39:44.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: people are just going to be much healthier cognitively, physically, you know, socially.

01:39:51.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Well, I'm going to offer something controversial, but with a purpose.

01:39:57.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I did a episode on alcohol about that.

01:40:00.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Basically the conclusion was zero is better than any.

01:40:02.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Okay.

01:40:03.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And two a week is probably fine and yes, it's poison and remains one of our most popular episodes.

01:40:09.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: But even though I'm not a drinker, you have to kind of wonder whether the kind of doing away with happy hour,

01:40:19.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: which by the way, used to be every day at the end of work.

01:40:22.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:40:23.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Created this gap for passive depleting stuff to come in.

01:40:30.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And it kind of raises this question of like, well, was happy hour restorative.

01:40:35.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Mm-hmm.

01:40:36.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And just to give people a clear sense of how pervasive happy hour with alcohol was.

01:40:41.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: When I first was a graduate student at Berkeley and was at Tolman Hall.

01:40:46.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So first I was at Berkeley and then I did a second graduate degree elsewhere.

01:40:50.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: But when I was at Tolman Hall, there was this library in the psychology building.

01:40:54.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And I was told that up until just three years before.

01:40:59.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So that was in 1998.

01:41:01.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: It was customary for people to gather in the library for drinks every day at the end of the day.

01:41:06.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And that for many, many decades prior, the founders of this of Frank Beach and all those guys used to get together and get like really drunk at the end of each day and go home.

01:41:16.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Walk home, hopefully not drive home and then spend time with their families and then get up the next morning, drink coffee and go back to work.

01:41:22.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And so, you know, alcohol culture, drinking culture.

01:41:25.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:41:26.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Was a big part of how people socialize and decompress at the end of the day.

01:41:29.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: We know it's not good for you.

01:41:31.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: You'll live a shorter life.

01:41:32.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And has a bunch of other issues with it and what happens when people drink together, et cetera, that can often not be good.

01:41:40.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: But the point here is, I think for many people who have families, but especially who don't have families, the sort of the number of healthy ways to reset in the evening.

01:41:54.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: To reset on a weekend in non-destructive ways.

01:41:57.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:41:58.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: It has become more limited.

01:41:59.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:42:00.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: In part because what's offered to us as passive restoration, I'm realizing today is passive depletion.

01:42:07.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:42:08.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So do we bring back happy hour?

01:42:11.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Maybe with non-alcoholic beverages or something.

01:42:14.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: You know, I think the happy hour is probably good socially, but I'm not sure it was so good for directed attention.

01:42:18.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Do they still do a happy hour in your department?

01:42:20.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: You're chair of a department at University of Chicago.

01:42:22.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: They used to do graduate student happy hour every Friday when I was a graduate student.

01:42:27.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Wow.

01:42:28.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And a volleyball game.

01:42:29.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And then people go out to dinner.

01:42:30.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:42:31.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And this was prior to smartphones.

01:42:32.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:42:33.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right at the right as smartphones showed up because it was 2000 was when I started my PhD.

01:42:38.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And it was really nice.

01:42:40.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I didn't always go.

01:42:41.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:42:42.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I was often in lab late working.

01:42:43.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:42:44.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: But I would go sometimes.

01:42:45.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:42:46.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I feel like being on one's phone is not that.

01:42:50.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: No.

01:42:51.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: It's not a volleyball game with friends.

01:42:52.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: No.

01:42:53.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: It was a friendly volleyball game.

01:42:54.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Meaning if you weren't good at volleyball, people didn't give you a hard time.

01:42:56.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:42:57.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And then people would go out for dinner and drinks.

01:43:00.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:43:01.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: We do do happy hours once in a while.

01:43:03.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I think it's kind of funny.

01:43:04.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: After COVID, I kind of felt like students didn't always know how to interact with faculty anymore.

01:43:11.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: It's kind of this weird dynamic.

01:43:13.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So the happy hours have been kind of a good way to kind of reset and, you know, show that we're all colleagues and, you know, kind of help students to interact more with faculty and faculty to interact more with students.

01:43:26.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I think one thing, you know, about the reset is I didn't say this, but I think the going in nature also has to be solitary to really get the benefit.

01:43:37.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: If you're going with a friend, you're going to be chit-chatting with a friend that's going to take directed attention.

01:43:43.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: When I take my kids in nature, it's good for my kids, but I don't count that as necessarily a restorative experience for me.

01:43:49.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: You're tracking their positions.

01:43:50.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: You got four little ones, so that's your evolutionary task.

01:43:54.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So I, I have to carve out time where I can go on my own.

01:43:59.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And, um, I think, you know, there's different buckets.

01:44:03.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I think there's a bucket for, you know, getting the good social interaction.

01:44:08.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So I don't, I'm not advocating that people do like throw and you build a cabin in the woods and you're just there solo.

01:44:15.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I'm kind of more advocating for these kind of micro doses of nature to kind of bump directed attention up.

01:44:24.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Can you bring a dog?

01:44:25.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I think a dog would, would work well.

01:44:27.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: A dog doesn't require conversation.

01:44:30.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: No words, no language.

01:44:32.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Um, you know, as long as a dog is pretty well behaved.

01:44:36.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I think that would work too.

01:44:37.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And dogs, you know, in some sense, that's also kind of, I mean, we're part of nature.

01:44:40.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Dogs are part of nature.

01:44:41.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And I, you know, and some elements to me too.

01:44:43.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I think dogs are kind of softly fascinating and, and interesting.

01:44:47.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Um, but I do think these nature, to get the really most bang for your buck for these nature experiences, they do have to be solitary.

01:44:54.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: All right, so minimum 20 minutes.

01:44:57.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Uh, but perhaps on the weekend you can get out for longer if you can't do it every day, because I, I'm not gonna say I can't, but I think many people aren't going to manage 20 minutes in nature every single day by themselves.

01:45:08.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:45:09.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: But if you can, it sounds like a terrific thing to do.

01:45:12.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And certainly people are gonna start thinking about new concepts like soft fascination and directed attention and the ability to restore directed attention.

01:45:22.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:45:23.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: If something is actually restorative versus passively depleting.

01:45:26.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:45:27.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I wanna make sure that I ask you about stroke, diabetes, and heart disease.

01:45:33.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Mm-hmm.

01:45:34.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: You have some really interesting data.

01:45:35.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:45:36.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: That people who take on this practice of getting into nature can actually improve their health outcomes beyond just being able to focus better.

01:45:43.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:45:44.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:45:45.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So there's, you know, there's all this incredible work on physical health benefits of nature.

01:45:52.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Now, of course, mind and body are united.

01:45:55.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And, you know, that's one thing that we talk about in the book, that it's mind, body are united.

01:45:59.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And then we have to deal with the environment, too.

01:46:01.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: But it's interesting that there have been these studies about these incredible physical health benefits that people get from interacting with nature.

01:46:11.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And one of the most incredible ones, I don't know if you're familiar with this, Andrew, was a study done by Roger Ulrich in the 1980s.

01:46:18.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And what Roger Ulrich was looking at was a hospital corridor in this hospital in Philadelphia.

01:46:26.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And he looked at, in these hospital rooms, what view did they have out of the window of these hospital rooms?

01:46:34.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And some of the hospital rooms had views of modest nature, like a tree and some shrubs.

01:46:41.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Others were just looking out to a brick wall.

01:46:44.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And it was interesting that patients who were recovering from gallbladder surgery, when they had the view of nature out of their window, this modest view of nature, they recovered from gallbladder surgery a day earlier,

01:47:01.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: and they used less pain medication compared to the people that had the view of the brick wall.

01:47:05.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And what's cool about this study is that it wasn't, you know, Ulrich didn't have the power to randomly put people in different rooms.

01:47:12.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: But essentially, patients were just randomly put into these different hospital rooms.

01:47:17.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So it's not like healthier people got the views of nature or wealthier people got the views of nature.

01:47:21.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: These patients were just randomly placed into these different hospital rooms.

01:47:27.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And the ones that have the modest view of nature recovered faster from gallbladder surgery and use less pain medication.

01:47:33.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And you got to be thinking, what's up with that?

01:47:36.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Like, what's the mechanism there?

01:47:38.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I don't think it's air quality.

01:47:41.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I don't think the people with the views of nature somehow exercised more.

01:47:47.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: There's something about the aesthetic of nature that can also be physically healing.

01:47:53.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I mean, that's pretty wild.

01:47:56.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: We kind of followed up on that in a study that we did in Toronto, which was kind of cool.

01:48:03.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: We had health data from about 30,000 people in Toronto.

01:48:08.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And then we had two incredible data sets to quantify green space in people's neighborhoods that then we then could relate to health.

01:48:17.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So the University of Toronto Forestry Department had a data set where they cataloged every single tree on public land in the city of Toronto.

01:48:25.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So we had data for 580,000 trees in the city of Toronto.

01:48:30.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: We knew the species of the tree and the diameter of the tree at breast height, basically saying how old the tree was.

01:48:38.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And then my student, Omid Cardan, calculated basically how much tree canopy each individual tree provided.

01:48:45.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Then we had this other data set that was satellite imagery of the whole city of Toronto where we could quantify

01:48:54.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: all the other trees that were like in people's backyards or something like that.

01:48:59.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And from those data, we basically related health, the health data to the tree data.

01:49:05.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And we found so for one variable subjective.

01:49:10.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So how healthy do people think they are?

01:49:14.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: How healthy do they feel?

01:49:15.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And we found that if you just added one tree on their city block, that was related to a one percentage of trees.

01:49:23.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: It was related to a 1% increase in people's health perception.

01:49:27.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Now that sounds pretty modest, but to get that equivalent benefit monetarily, you'd have to give everybody

01:49:34.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: in that neighborhood $10,000 and have them move to a neighborhood that immediate income that was $10,000 wealthier,

01:49:41.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: or it was also related with being seven years younger.

01:49:44.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And again, the tree effect was controlling for age, education, income.

01:49:48.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So that was pretty interesting.

01:49:50.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: We also had data on more objective health measures.

01:49:53.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Does somebody have a stroke?

01:49:55.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Do they have diabetes or heart disease?

01:49:57.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And there we found if you increased the amount of trees on the street by one tree per neighborhood,

01:50:05.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: that was related to a 1% reduction in stroke, diabetes and heart disease.

01:50:10.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Again, sounds pretty modest, but to get that equivalent benefit monetarily,

01:50:14.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: you'd have to give every household in that neighborhood $20,000,

01:50:18.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: have them all move to a neighborhood that's $20,000 wealthier,

01:50:21.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: or it was also related to being one and a half years younger.

01:50:24.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So pretty incredible.

01:50:26.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Again, I can't say causality because it's correlational, but I'm fairly confident in the direction

01:50:33.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: because the worst case scenario is just healthier people choose to live in neighborhoods that have more trees,

01:50:39.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: but they can't be younger, they can't be wealthier, they can't be more educated because we controlled for that.

01:50:44.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Now for that study, maybe the mechanism could be air quality or maybe the mechanism could be,

01:50:51.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: you know, maybe people are more willing to exercise if there's more trees on the street.

01:50:56.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: But, but pretty incredible stuff that just increasing the tree canopy a little bit,

01:51:03.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: you could get these physical health benefits.

01:51:06.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: That is impressive.

01:51:07.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: For people that don't have the opportunity to plant more trees in their neighborhood,

01:51:11.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: would getting and tending to an indoor plant have any positive effects?

01:51:15.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So people have found some effects of having

01:51:19.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: indoor plants, not necessarily to these physical health benefits, but to some,

01:51:26.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: there's some attention benefits of having indoor greenery.

01:51:29.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: There's also been some benefits like hospitals now are starting to take this seriously,

01:51:34.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: that patients subjectively feel better when there's this greenery around.

01:51:40.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I've seen other work too that people that are having some procedures that are very painful,

01:51:48.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: that actually bringing greenery into the hospital rooms can be helpful for reducing feelings of pain.

01:51:59.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Interesting.

01:52:00.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:52:01.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah, I'm about to embark on putting a bunch of plants in my place.

01:52:06.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I'm also a big fan of fish tanks, as long as you take good care of them.

01:52:10.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Underwater scapes are really cool.

01:52:12.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yes.

01:52:13.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And I like to think, I don't have any data on this, but I like to think that they are passive and restorative.

01:52:17.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Staring at a fish tank is a lot like being in a dream.

01:52:21.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:52:22.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: There's a, in Toronto, there's a Ripley's Aquarium and they have this tank that's got kelp.

01:52:29.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Oh yeah.

01:52:30.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And you can see the kelp kind of moving in the water, it definitely feels very restorative.

01:52:35.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And watching the fish swim around also feels very, very restorative.

01:52:39.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah, the feeling that might be familiar to people that visited, for instance, the Monterey Bay Aquarium

01:52:44.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: or this aquarium that you're describing is when the tanks are at eye level or higher, it puts you into this other world, right?

01:52:54.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yes.

01:52:55.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Like you're at the bottom of the ocean or you're in the ocean.

01:52:57.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yes.

01:52:58.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: But the feeling that's always striking to me is when you leave an aquarium and you're out into the real world again, it feels so different.

01:53:05.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yes.

01:53:06.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: It's what you take away from it that's equally interesting.

01:53:08.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: In the same way that when you walk out of a really great movie, the world feels different.

01:53:13.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yes.

01:53:14.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: It feels lighter, brighter.

01:53:15.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yes.

01:53:16.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: It's, of course, physically brighter, but there's really something to it.

01:53:18.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yes.

01:53:19.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: The contrast between experiences, which is so much of what we're talking about today.

01:53:22.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yes.

01:53:23.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I think a lot of people who have some aesthetic sense will be familiar with the experience of, you know, like, seeing a building or walking into a space.

01:53:32.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: You're like, oh, this like feels good or this doesn't feel right.

01:53:37.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And sometimes they can point to the clutter or the lack of whatever it is.

01:53:40.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: You know, some people are more design oriented.

01:53:42.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: What's this phrase?

01:53:43.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: It's the fun thing.

01:53:44.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Feng shui.

01:53:45.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Feng shui.

01:53:46.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Feng shui.

01:53:47.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:53:48.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

01:53:49.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: What do we know about nature and physical spaces and how they impact how we feel or even how we think?

01:53:55.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

01:53:56.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: It's a really interesting question.

01:53:58.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And there's a couple interesting things that we've done that's related to this.

01:54:02.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So one design concept that people talk about quite a bit now is this idea of biophilic design.

01:54:09.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So kind of trying to mimic patterns of nature and architecture.

01:54:13.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And like you can imagine like a Gaudi building in Barcelona that's got all the curves and, you know, Gaudi was trying to mimic nature and a lot of his building and people really like that kind of architecture.

01:54:27.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And so we collaborate with this architect, Alex Coburn, and we basically took a bunch of building facades and had people basically look at these facades and rate how much they like these buildings and building interiors.

01:54:48.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And then we also had them do this kind of game on the computer where we'd show them a few of these architectural scenes on the screen and they'd have to move them around, like lumping the ones that are most similar together and lumping different ones somewhere else.

01:55:09.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And when we analyze the data, we saw something really interesting, which is that people kind of lumped together a lot of this architecture that had a lot of the fractal patterns kind of on one side and other kinds of architecture that was kind of more, you know, brutalist with the straight lines kind of on the other side.

01:55:28.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And when we had people actually another set of people rate these images for how natural they thought they were.

01:55:35.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: People were actually using naturalness to make these similarity judgments, suggesting that even in an architectural scene, people will like see nature in a building and it may not even be conscious.

01:55:49.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And they like that kind of architecture better.

01:55:52.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: They find it more comforting.

01:55:54.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And so, you know, again, when we're kind of talking about like a nature revolution like we do in the book.

01:56:01.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: It's maybe not just even about putting real nature in, but even building spaces, trying to mimic the patterns of nature that might also have some benefits.

01:56:13.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So we found that to be pretty interesting.

01:56:15.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Another student of mine, Kate Schertz, led another set of studies where we collaborated with this foundation that was called TKF Foundation.

01:56:22.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Now it's called Nature Sacred.

01:56:23.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And this was a foundation that built many parks in the Baltimore, D.C., Annapolis, Maryland area.

01:56:33.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And they built like a hundred of these parks.

01:56:37.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And what they also do in these parks is they would, they would put a bench, this characteristic bench in the park.

01:56:42.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And underneath the bench was a journal and people could write things in the journal.

01:56:50.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And so I found this foundation and I got a small grant from them to do some research with them.

01:56:57.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And they actually transcribed all these journal entries digitally.

01:57:03.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And we also had pictures of these parks.

01:57:06.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And so one thing that we did is we ran a topic model on these journal entries to kind of see what are some themes that people are talking about.

01:57:17.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: A lot of these parks were actually near churches or hospitals, so people wrote concepts related to religion.

01:57:23.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: They wrote things about nature and they also wrote things related to spirituality.

01:57:29.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So one analysis that we did, we also had another set of people rate the parks for how natural they were based on the pictures.

01:57:38.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And we found that if the park was rated as being more natural, people actually wrote more about things related to naturalness.

01:57:46.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Okay, not too surprising, but a nice sanity check.

01:57:49.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: What was even more surprising is with computer vision algorithms, we could quantify the amount of curved edges in these park pictures.

01:57:58.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And it turns out if the park had more curved edges in it, people wrote more about topics related to spirituality and their life journey.

01:58:07.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Wild.

01:58:08.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Pretty wild.

01:58:09.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: It gets wilder.

01:58:10.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So that was very correlational.

01:58:14.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And we kind of found, you know, like, I don't know, maybe there's some kind of confounding variables there.

01:58:19.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So we did another study where we actually manipulated.

01:58:24.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: We had images that had more curved edges or less curved edges and also images that were more natural and less natural.

01:58:31.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And we did an online study where we would show people one image and then had them select like, when you look at this image, do you think it's related more to nature or time or spirituality?

01:58:44.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And it turns out if the picture had more curved edges in it, people were more likely to say, yeah, this picture kind of has me thinking about spirituality in my life journey.

01:58:57.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So that's causal.

01:58:59.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: It gets even crazier.

01:59:01.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Because we were kind of wondering, you know, when we looked at some of the images, we were saying, you know, some of the images that don't have as much curved edge structure, they have more water in them.

01:59:11.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So maybe there's like something about having water that maybe makes you think less about spirituality.

01:59:16.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: You know, I don't know if I believe that, but maybe there's something in there.

01:59:19.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So we did something even crazier.

01:59:21.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: We took these images and we scrambled them.

01:59:25.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So we would like, we have this image and it looks like, you know, a park with trees and some water.

01:59:33.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And then we scramble all the pixels and now you can't really tell what it is anymore.

01:59:38.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: It just looks kind of like a Jackson Pollock painting.

01:59:42.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: It turns out if those scrambled images have more curved edges, people also say they think more about spirituality and their life journey.

01:59:50.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So there's something, you know, we don't know the mechanism, but there's something interesting there about just perceiving these curved edges that has people thinking more about spirituality.

02:00:01.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So it can't be object related because they're scrambled.

02:00:05.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: No, that's right.

02:00:06.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: This is almost reminiscent of this connect the dot experiment where if the dots are more distantly placed, it seems to trigger some different form of cognition related to creativity.

02:00:17.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

02:00:18.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: If nothing else, it's becoming increasingly clear that visual scenes have a profound impact on our cognition.

02:00:29.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And I don't even know what brain network to think of when we think about spirituality, probably somewhere down the temporal lobe.

02:00:34.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Because if you don't know where something is in the brain, you almost always say it's down the infrotemporal lobe where all the other sort of mysterious stuff is.

02:00:42.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Super interesting.

02:00:44.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: This also tells me that I need to introduce more curved edges to my home environment.

02:00:49.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And people seem to really like curved edges and even they find that in other species, that other species tend to prefer curvature and curved edges.

02:00:58.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: If you had a magic wand and you could wave that magic wand and have people change one, maybe two behaviors on a daily and weekly basis.

02:01:10.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

02:01:12.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: On the basis of everything that you've learned from your work and related work.

02:01:16.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: What would you wish with that wand?

02:01:18.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yeah.

02:01:19.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I think I would.

02:01:22.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So I think in a couple things.

02:01:23.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So one, I would just the easy one is just people need to get out into nature more.

02:01:30.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And they need to do it, especially when they kind of feel mentally fatigued.

02:01:35.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I think that's easier than saying, you know, get off of the devices.

02:01:41.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: It's not going to happen.

02:01:42.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

02:01:43.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Not entirely.

02:01:44.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Not entirely.

02:01:45.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So I think, you know, forget about that for a moment.

02:01:47.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Go out in nature and do it without your phone and be engaged with it.

02:01:52.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And if you don't have access to nature, try these simulations bring nature into your home.

02:01:58.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: You can even have fake plants in your home.

02:02:00.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: There's been some evidence even fake plants can work, you know, get some nature sounds going.

02:02:07.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Maybe think about where you're going to take your next vacation.

02:02:11.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Maybe think about going to a national park or something like that.

02:02:15.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So that's one thing.

02:02:17.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And, you know, it's kind of building up kind of, you know, in the book, I kind of want to start this nature revolution where we're really take this work seriously.

02:02:27.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And I think part of it is that I think everybody has this intuition that nature is good for us, but it's sort of like it's an amenity, not a necessity.

02:02:36.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: You know, it'd be nice to have, but we don't really need it.

02:02:39.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And I think if I wanted to wave my magic wand, I would want to change that to actually know nature, these experiences are a necessity, not an amenity.

02:02:50.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And it's not just a necessity because of climate change and things like that.

02:02:55.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: It's a necessity for us as humans to reach our full potential.

02:03:01.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: We can't reach our full potential without nature.

02:03:04.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So I think that's that's another critical element.

02:03:07.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And then I think when people start feeling it and feeling the effects, then I think we need to start changing a lot of things like, you know, schools like they want to take away recess and they want to take away playtime outside.

02:03:21.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

02:03:22.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And that's almost exactly counter to what I would recommend.

02:03:27.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I would recommend that we actually want to have more recess and more recess out in nature that, you know, think about this, Andrew.

02:03:35.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: What if this would be incredible, but what if, you know, school is like an eight hour day.

02:03:42.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: What if instead of eight hours of instruction, it was six hours of instruction and two hours of a nature break?

02:03:48.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I'd go back to school.

02:03:49.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Well, kids might perform better.

02:03:53.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I mean, it might be.

02:03:55.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: It actually might be revolutionary.

02:03:57.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Kids might actually perform better.

02:03:59.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: You know, sometimes talk to people, talk to me about nature schools and like doing all the learning in nature.

02:04:04.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Like, I'm not so sure about that, like doing calculus when wind is blowing my papers around.

02:04:09.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: But definitely to take a break out in nature, you know, give give the kids a break in nature.

02:04:16.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: They might actually learn more.

02:04:18.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: You know, it might be this win-win kind of thing where they would actually learn more from less.

02:04:23.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Same thing with work.

02:04:25.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: You know, we would need to redesign schedules around work that, you know, maybe your employees will be more productive if you can give them some of these nature breaks.

02:04:36.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And then, you know, I want to start building out from that.

02:04:41.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: It's like we have not built the built environment to improve people's psychological well-being.

02:04:47.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

02:04:48.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: We basically built the built environment to move goods efficiently, house people efficiently.

02:04:54.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: But when have you ever been in a place where they're like, you know, we built this school to increase people's directed attention.

02:05:01.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: Or we built this school to make people more cooperative.

02:05:05.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: What we're finding is that interacting with nature kind of does both things.

02:05:09.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: So we need, we need people.

02:05:12.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: I mean, there are architects that are starting to do this, but we need to incorporate these natural elements into all built spaces.

02:05:18.340 | Dr. Mark Berman: And then I think, you know, going on even more is that in a city.

02:05:24.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: You want to jam as much nature as possible into cities.

02:05:27.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: And I love cities.

02:05:29.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: Cities are great.

02:05:30.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: They're beacons of innovation, wealth.

02:05:34.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: We even find that bigger cities have lower racial biases, and we actually find that depression is lower in bigger cities per capita.

02:05:42.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: But we can do a lot more.

02:05:44.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: And I think by kind of naturizing cities can be really, really beneficial.

02:05:50.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: And then, you know, a lot of people don't live in cities, but you know, I have family that live in rural areas and often, yeah, they're surrounded by nature, but it's not really nature they can use.

02:05:57.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: You know, it might be more agricultural.

02:05:59.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: So I think even in these more rural places, you need to think about, hey, is a nature that's actually there really usable for people to get restoration?

02:06:08.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: Listen, I absolutely love the work you're doing.

02:06:11.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: I especially love it because it's grounded in data.

02:06:14.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

02:06:15.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: It's grounded in laboratory data, and it's grounded in real world data.

02:06:19.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: And I just asked you for two, and I'm actually very gratified that you offered six, I think.

02:06:25.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: That's very much the sort of answers I tend to give, right?

02:06:28.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: I'm going to ask you one question, but I end up asking you four.

02:06:30.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: So that's not just welcome, it's invited and encouraged here.

02:06:33.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: I think the work you're doing is extremely important because it's highlighting these principles of brain function and psychological health that are unaware to most people about themselves and others.

02:06:46.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: Certainly, even as a neuroscientist, I like to think of myself as psychologically minded.

02:06:50.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: I mean, this notion of passive but depleting, it just has never occurred to me until I got familiar with your work and more so during today's conversation.

02:07:00.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: I also am delighted, believe it or not, that you didn't use the word forest bathing.

02:07:07.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: I guess that's two words.

02:07:08.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: And I want to be very clear.

02:07:10.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: It's not because I don't think forest bathing is a wonderful concept.

02:07:14.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: I mean, what is more lovely than bathing in a forest?

02:07:17.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: I imagine, you know, people maybe with clothes, minimal clothes, maybe no clothes, who knows, in the forest, greenery everywhere.

02:07:25.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: And we've heard of this incredible set of discoveries and this concept from Japanese laboratories about forest bathing.

02:07:32.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: But the problem with the term forest bathing is that it implies you need a forest.

02:07:38.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right.

02:07:39.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: And it implies that you need to bathe, which sounds like a vacation.

02:07:44.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: It sounds like something that you really have to devote a ton of time to.

02:07:47.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: And so I'm a big fan of forest bathing as a concept and as a practice.

02:07:53.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: But I really appreciate that your work is focused on what people can do in a real practical sense as we bring more nature into cities, into homes, into rural areas that's accessible.

02:08:02.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: Hopefully people will forest bathe, continue to or go out and forest bathe.

02:08:06.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yes.

02:08:07.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: But what you're talking about is very practical and very feasible for people to get 20 minutes alone, nature walk, maybe with a dog, maybe just alone, disconnect as a way to be able to engage focused attention better.

02:08:21.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: Or who knows, maybe just to get back into life and enjoy non-focused attention, hanging out with your kids or your spouse or whatever it might be, friends.

02:08:29.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: Right, right.

02:08:30.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: So very excited about the book, which comes out soon.

02:08:33.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: We'll put a link to the book in the show note captions, of course.

02:08:37.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: And I'm delighted you're doing this work and that you're going to continue to do this work, even though you have the unfortunate honor of being a chair, which basically means you get a lot of administrative duties.

02:08:47.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: You've still kept up your research and are continuing to.

02:08:49.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: Yes.

02:08:50.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: If ever there was an example of where research can really be put to practical use for people and the book is helping disseminate that, certainly this conversation will as well.

02:09:01.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: It's you and what you're doing.

02:09:03.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: So thank you.

02:09:04.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: I really appreciate it.

02:09:05.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: And come back again and update us on the latest data when there are more data.

02:09:08.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: Great.

02:09:09.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: Great.

02:09:10.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: Thanks so much for having me on the podcast.

02:09:11.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: Great.

02:09:12.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: Great.

02:09:13.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: Thank you.

02:09:14.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Mark Berman.

02:09:16.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: To learn more about his work and to find a link to the presale of his new book, please see the show note captions.

02:09:21.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: If you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel.

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02:09:40.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: Please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode.

02:09:44.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: That's the best way to support this podcast.

02:09:46.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: If you have questions for me or comments about the podcast or guests or topics that you'd like me to consider for the Huberman Lab podcast, please put those in the comments section on YouTube.

02:09:55.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: I do read all the comments.

02:09:57.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: For those of you that haven't heard, I have a new book coming out.

02:09:59.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: It's my very first book.

02:10:00.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: It's entitled Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body.

02:10:04.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: This is a book that I've been working on for more than five years, and that's based on more than 30 years of research and experience.

02:10:11.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: And it covers protocols for everything from sleep to exercise to stress control, protocols related to focus and motivation.

02:10:19.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: And of course, I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included.

02:10:24.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: The book is now available by presale at protocolsbook.com.

02:10:28.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: There you can find links to various vendors, you can pick the one that you like best.

02:10:32.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: Again, the book is called Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body.

02:10:36.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: And if you're not already following me on social media, I am Huberman Lab on all social media platforms.

02:10:41.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: So that's Instagram, X, Threads, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

02:10:45.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: And on all those platforms, I discuss science and science related tools, some of which overlaps with the content of the Huberman Lab podcast, but much of which is distinct from the information on the Huberman Lab podcast.

02:10:55.240 | Dr. Mark Berman Lab: Again, it's Huberman Lab on all social media platforms.

02:10:59.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: And if you haven't already subscribed to our neural network newsletter, the neural network newsletter is a zero cost monthly newsletter that includes podcast summaries, as well as what we call protocols in the form of one to three page PDFs that cover everything from how to optimize your sleep, how to optimize dopamine, deliberate cold exposure.

02:11:15.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: We have a foundational fitness protocol that covers cardiovascular training and resistance training.

02:11:20.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: All of that is available completely zero cost.

02:11:23.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: You simply go to hubermanlab.com, go to the menu tab in the top right corner, scroll down to newsletter and enter your email.

02:11:29.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: And I should emphasize that we do not share your email with anybody.

02:11:32.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: Thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Mark Berman.

02:11:36.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: And last, but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.

02:11:40.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: Thank you for joining us today.

02:11:41.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: Thank you for joining us today.

02:11:42.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: Thank you for joining us today.

02:11:43.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: Thank you for joining us today.

02:11:44.240 | Dr. Mark Berman: Thank you for joining us today.

How Nature & Other Physical Environments Impact Your Focus, Cognition & Health | Dr. Marc Berman

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