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Dr. Marc Berman on Huberman Lab: How Nature Restores Focus

Nature restores depleted attention via involuntary attention systems; Berman covers fractal patterns, optimal break timing, and urban vs. nature brain effects.

Andrew HubermanhostMarc Bermanguest
Jul 14, 20252h 11mWatch on YouTube ↗

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  1. 0:00 – 2:14

    Marc Berman

    1. AH

      Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Mark Berman. Dr. Mark Berman is a professor of psychology at the University of Chicago, where he directs the Environmental Neuroscience Laboratory. His research focuses on how our physical environments, particularly natural environments, impact our brain function, mental health, and cognitive performance. During today's episode, we discuss the fascinating and actionable science of how your physical surroundings indoors, and in particular, your relationship and interactions with nature, can shape your biology and your cognitive abilities. Dr. Berman explains how exposure to very common features in nature, such as fractal patterns, increase your ability to focus, reduce your stress, and improve your mental and physical health metrics, and not just while you're in nature, but after you return indoors for many hours and even days afterwards. During today's episode, you'll learn about something called attention restoration theory, which turns out to be very important for understanding how different types of indoor and outdoor environments either deplete or restore your cognitive resources. We also discuss practical science-based strategies that anyone can implement regardless of where you live. So if you're in an apartment or a house, if you have ready access to nature or if you don't, today's episode explains how to design your indoor space, the optimal duration and timing of nature exposure, and the specific visual and auditory elements that will provide you with the greatest cognitive and health benefits. 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, today's episode provides clear, actionable protocols based on rigorous scientific research. 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. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. 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. In keeping with that theme, today's episode does include sponsors. And now for my discussion with Dr. Mark Berman.

  2. 2:14 – 6:59

    Direct vs Involuntary Attention, Mental Fatigue, Attention Restoration Theory

    1. AH

      Dr. Mark Berman, welcome.

    2. MB

      Great to be here, Andrew.

    3. AH

      I love being out in nature, so I'm excited about today's conversation, which is taking place indoors-

    4. MB

      (laughs)

    5. AH

      ... 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. 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 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. What is this notion of recapturing attention?

    6. MB

      Yeah, I think it's a really fundamental concept. Um, 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 in school," or, "Oh, it's trying to pay attention at work," but it's actually deeper than that. We kind of think that, uh, elements of attention are sort of involved in controlling all of our behaviors. Um, and when our attention is depleted, um, we don't have as much impulse control, we might behave more aggressively. Um, you know, we may not be able to achieve our goals. Um, and (laughs) 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. And I think that's kind of the entry point why I s- I sort of got into, interested in this, and one of my mentors, Steve Kaplan, would talk about this directed attention fatigue problem, uh, that a lot of us are facing. You know, our ancestors, you know, thousands of thousands of years ago were not bombarded with so much information (laughs) like we are now. Now, the modern human has to sort of pick and choose what to pay attention to, and it's, it's kind of overwhelming. And Steve, uh, Kaplan had this idea that humans kind of have two different kinds of attentions. So, uh, one kind of attention is called directed attention, and that's kind of the attention that I've been talking about, uh, just recently here, and that's the kind of attention where you as an individual person are deciding what to pay attention to. So presumably, Andrew, you're deciding to pay attention to what I'm saying, uh, even though there's many other things you could find that might be more inherently interesting than what I'm saying. And this is kind of a very, you know, unique human capability. There may be other species that can kind of decide what to pay attention to, but we're really good at it. 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, uh, finish this math problem. But we can't do it forever. Uh, and I, I think everybody kind of has had that sensation where, uh, at the end of a long work day, maybe three or four o'clock, you might be just staring at the computer screen, and you can't focus anymore. And we call that a directed attention fatigue state, where you can't really control your attentional focus anymore, and I (laughs) , I, I see this all the time when I'm lecturing at the University of Chicago. Uh, and I think I'm a decent lecturer. First five minutes of class, all the students' eyes are on me. They're engaged, you know? I see they're nodding along with me. And, you know, 45 minutes into my lecture, I kind of see people nodding back (laughs) like this. They're getting tired. It's just hard for people to direct their attention for long periods of time. So that's, that's kind of the special attention, directed attention.We think there's this other kind of attention that we call involuntary attention, and that's the kind of attention that's automatically captured by interesting stimulation in the environment. So bright lights, loud noises, those things automatically capture our attention, and we don't really have much control over it. And we think that kind of attention, this involuntary attention, is less susceptible to fatigue or depletion. So you don't often hear people say, "Oh, I can't look at that beautiful waterfall anymore. It's just too interesting. I, I gotta step away." Or, "Oh, I have to stop watching this movie. It's just too interesting. I'm too tired out." So that's a different kind of, uh, kind of attention, and, and we think what's happening, um, in modern times is that our directed attention is being fatigued, um, but, uh, maybe we can restore directed attention, uh, by going into environments that can softly capture our involuntary attention.

  3. 6:59 – 11:26

    Attention Fatigue, Focus & Vision, Tool: Restoring Attention in Nature

    1. MB

    2. AH

      Do we know the basis of attentional fatigue? I mean, uh, I could imagine it's something in the noradrenergic, uh, dopamine, catecholamine world, listeners to this podcast will recognize those terms, at least crudely. Uh, I could also imagine that it's literally a fatigue of the visual system and/or the auditory system. You know, it's hard to maintain fixation, as we say-

    3. MB

      Yes.

    4. AH

      ... as visual neuroscientists, to focus on a target.

    5. MB

      Yes.

    6. AH

      It's challenging. You know, i- um, if we allow our eyes to rest, it actually gets easier to look back at a- and fixate on a target. So what is the basis of the attentional fatigue for this focused attention, or, uh, what you call directed attention?

    7. MB

      Yeah, it's a really great question. I'm not sure I have a great answer yet. Uh, maybe you'd have some ideas, Andrew. You know, one thing that, 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. But if you're asleep or if you're doing a hard calculus problem, I think the brain is still using 20% of metabolism. So it's sort of this puzzle, why do we get this mental fatigue state? I, I'm, it's gotta have some kind of neurological component. At this point, I can't point to it, so I'm gonna talk about it more at this psychological level, it's this sensation that we have that we can't focus anymore. If I was to talk about brain areas, I would say probably this ability to direct attention is most likely in frontal cortex. Um, whereas this involuntary tension, sometimes we call it more bottom-up attention or exogenous attention, where it's activated by external stimulation, 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.

    8. AH

      I'm not gonna lean everything on the visual system, but I've been listening to this book, uh, that unfortunately is only available as an audiobook, called Daily Rituals, which-

    9. MB

      Mm-hmm.

    10. AH

      ... it's got two-minute chapters, and it describes the daily rituals of writers and artists and creatives. And, um, 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-

    11. MB

      Yeah.

    12. AH

      ... but caffeine, and then something to restrict their, uh, visual world, make it more tunnel vision. In fact, there are certain, um, painters, I, I forget the, the particular painter that they described, who literally built, uh, cardboard blinders-

    13. MB

      Ah.

    14. AH

      ... onto his glasses when things weren't going so well.

    15. MB

      (laughs)

    16. AH

      Um, now, the reason I bring this up is not as a suggestion-

    17. MB

      (laughs)

    18. AH

      ... although I suppose it could. Um, I actually used to read papers, maybe I need to go back to this, I'd put a, like a baseball cap on, put a hoodie on, and you'd-

    19. MB

      Yeah.

    20. AH

      ... re- restrict your visual world.

    21. MB

      Yep.

    22. AH

      And it makes perfect sense if, in fact, involuntary attention, which presumably comes from the periphery-

    23. MB

      Right.

    24. AH

      ... is inexhaustible.

    25. MB

      Right.

    26. AH

      So, you know, I think what's interesting about the digital interface-

    27. MB

      Yeah.

    28. AH

      ... that we exist in now is that the whole world is brought right in front of us.

    29. MB

      Yes, yes.

    30. AH

      So presumably, we evolved to move through space and direct our attention to particular locations and let the rest of the world fall away.

  4. 11:26 – 13:50

    Sponsors: Helix Sleep & BetterHelp

    1. AH

      I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, Helix Sleep. Helix Sleep makes mattresses and pillows that are customized to your unique sleep needs. Now, I've spoken many times before on this and other podcasts about the fact that getting a great night's sleep is the foundation of mental health, physical health, and performance. Now, the mattress you sleep on makes a huge difference in the quality of sleep that you get each night. How soft it is or how firm it is all play into your comfort and need to be tailored to your unique sleep needs. If you go to the Helix website, you can take a brief two-minute quiz, and it will ask you questions such as, "Do you sleep on your back, your side, or your stomach? Do you tend to run hot or cold during the night?" Things of that sort. Maybe you know the answers to those questions, maybe you don't. Either way, Helix will match you to the ideal mattress for you. For me, that turned out to be the Dusk mattress. I started sleeping on a Dusk mattress about three and a half years ago, and it's been far and away the best sleep that I've ever had. If you'd like to try Helix Sleep, you can go to helixsleep.com/huberman, take that two-minute sleep quiz, and Helix will match you to a mattress that's customized to you. Right now, Helix is giving up to 27% off all mattress orders. Again, that's helixsleep.com/huberman to get up to 27% off.Today's episode is also brought to us by BetterHelp. BetterHelp offers professional therapy with a licensed therapist, carried out entirely online. I've been doing weekly therapy for over 30 years. Initially, I didn't have a choice, it was a condition of being allowed to stay in school. But pretty soon I realized that therapy is an extremely important component to overall health. In fact, I consider doing regular weekly therapy just as important as getting regular exercise, which, of course, I also do every week. There are essentially three things that great therapy provides. First of all, great therapy provides a great rapport with somebody that you can trust and talk to about any and all issues with. Second of all, great therapy provides support in the form of emotional support or directed guidance. And third, expert therapy can provide useful insights. Those insights can allow you to make changes to improve your life in immeasurable ways, not just your emotional life and your relationship life, but also your professional life. With BetterHelp, they make it very easy to find an expert therapist you resonate with and that can provide you these benefits that come through effective therapy. Also, because BetterHelp allows for therapy to be done entirely online, it's extremely time efficient and easy to fit into a busy schedule. If you'd like to try BetterHelp, go to betterhelp.com/huberman to get 10% off your first month. Again, that's betterhelp.com/huberman.

  5. 13:50 – 15:54

    Focused Work, Tool: Pre-Work Nature Breaks to Enhance Focus

    1. AH

      I want to talk about interaction with nature. I just want to, it- it's not a pushback on what you just said, but maybe just to probe a little bit deeper. I think a lot of people struggle with getting into a focused state at the outset.

    2. MB

      Yeah.

    3. AH

      And I myself am familiar with, uh, the sitting down to do some work and it taking some time to kind of warm up, and that agitation.

    4. MB

      Yeah. Yeah.

    5. AH

      I always think about it as literally, um, climbing over or through barbed wire.

    6. MB

      Yes. (laughs)

    7. AH

      Sometimes it actually feels like that, right?

    8. MB

      Yes.

    9. AH

      And then e- either side of the barbed wire is a steep slope. On one side is distraction that can come from-

    10. MB

      Yes.

    11. AH

      ... surfing the web or social media.

    12. MB

      Right.

    13. AH

      And then on the other side is any sort of drama.

    14. MB

      Yes.

    15. AH

      And then, of course, our mind starts creating all these things that we think we need to do. And the idea is to get through the barbed wire.

    16. MB

      Yes.

    17. AH

      And then on the other side of it is that focused state.

    18. MB

      Yes.

    19. AH

      For most people, I think what I described is not terribly different from that.

    20. MB

      Yeah.

    21. AH

      I- I'm making a lot of assumptions here, but I don't know many people that can just sit down to work-

    22. MB

      No, and just ...

    23. AH

      ... and just drop in-

    24. MB

      Right.

    25. AH

      ... like a s- like a ...

    26. MB

      Yes.

    27. AH

      You know, like a trench.

    28. MB

      That's right.

    29. AH

      Um, can you do that?

    30. MB

      No. But I can do it better after a walk in nature. So, I think almost, like, the walk in nature is sort of like a preparatory-

  6. 15:54 – 21:31

    Nature Walks & Cognitive Benefits, Comparing Nature vs Urban Environments

    1. AH

      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. Um, I think intuitively people appreciate, okay, a nice walk in nature, not looking at one's phone, it's very pleasant, it's relaxing, and then you get back to your desk and you can really focus. What about the laboratory data that support this? Or out of laboratory data that support this?

    2. MB

      Yeah.

    3. AH

      Maybe you could describe a few of the incredible studies that you've done, because they are really incredible and they're very pioneering in the way that you've brought real laboratory technology into nature as well. So, pick your favorite study about this, and then I'll ask you about a few others as well.

    4. MB

      Sure. Thanks. Well, I think the, the kind of the seminal, uh, experiment that we did, um, was back in, you know, 2008. And at that time, um, when people did these sort of nature walk studies, they would ask people, "How do you feel after the walk?" And it was very subjective. And I- I'm not against, uh, subjective accounts. And people reported, "Yeah, I feel much more refreshed after the walk in nature." Um, but I always felt a little bit dissatisfied by that. I, I wanted to see, well, does objective performance change? Just like we would probably be dissatisfied if I gave you a pill and I said, "This pill is gonna, uh, get you stronger. You're gonna be able to lift more weight." And if we just had people say, "Yeah, I feel like I can lift more weight," I don't think that'd be satisfying. We'd actually wanna see, can people actually lift more weight? And so what we did is we designed a study, um, that was experimentally controlled that would have objective measures. Uh, how do people perform cognitively before and after going on a walk in nature? So what we did is we brought people into the laboratory, uh, and then we gave them some challenging working memory and attention tasks. So one of the task- task was called the Backwards Digit Span Task, where you would hear digits, um, out loud at a pace of about one digit per second, and then the participant would need to repeat them back in backwards order. So if I said, uh, "Five, six, seven," the participant would have to repeat back, "Seven, six, five." Pretty easy task at three digits, but we keep increasing the number of digits all the way till about nine digits. At about five digits, you're ready to pull your hair out. It's a challenging task. So we gave participants, uh, this Backwards Digit Span Task. And then, uh, we gave them a map of a walk. Uh, it could be ... The first studies were through, uh, the Ann Arbor Arboretum, which was a nature walk, uh, kind of by the psychology building at the University of Michigan. Or participants went for a walk, uh, on busy Washtenaw-...uh, street in downtown Ann Arbor. Uh, the walks were both, uh, about 2.6 miles, so it took people about 50 minutes to do the walk. Uh, we also took participants' cell phones (laughs) because we didn't want them texting or chit-chatting on the walk. We wanted their attention to be fully focused on the environment. And we also did one other thing. We also gave them a GPS watch. Uh, why did we give them a GPS watch? Well, we did it for two reasons. One, we wanted to make sure they went on the walk, they didn't just go to Starbucks. And two, um, we wanted to see, did people get lost? Because if people got lost on the walk, maybe that wouldn't be restorative. Okay, so people do the backwards digit-span task. We send them on a walk in nature, or we send them on a walk, uh, through an urban environment. They go on this 50-minute walk. They come back to the lab. We give them that same backwards digit-span task again to see if there is any performance change or not, measure that. Then we have people repeat the whole procedure again, and they come back to the lab a week later. So, if they walked in nature the first week, uh, they walked in the urban environment the second week or vice versa. So it was all within subject, very, uh, tight experimental control. And what we found was pretty incredible, that people's working memory capacity and their ability to direct attention improved by about 20% after the walk in nature versus the walk, uh, in the urban environment. And people might be thinking, "Well, maybe it's just because, uh, the nature walk was just more pleasant. They just liked the nature walk more." And people did tend to like the nature walk more, um, and we did measure improvement in mood, how much did mood improve on the walk? We didn't find very strong correlation between improvements in mood and improvements in the working memory and directed attention performance, suggesting that people weren't just getting better because they were getting into good moods. But the even stronger demonstration that this wasn't mood driven is that we had people walk at different times of the year. So some of our participants walked in June when it was, like, 80 degrees Fahrenheit. People said, "Mark, I can't believe you're paying me to go (laughs) for a walk in nature." Really healthy mood benefits, really healthy working memory and attention benefits. We also had participants walk in January, 25 degrees Fahrenheit. People said, "Mark, I was freezing my butt off out there. I did not enjoy that walk." But incredibly, the people that walked in January when it was freezing cold and they didn't enjoy the walk obtained the same working memory and attention benefits as the people that walked in June. So, you didn't even have to like the nature interaction to get this directed attention benefit. So that, I thought, was pretty interesting and counterintuitive, that this isn't just about liking or pleasantness. 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.

  7. 21:31 – 27:12

    Nature, “Softly Fascinating Stimulation”, Fractals

    1. MB

    2. AH

      Super interesting findings, and it leads me back to this, um, uh, finite resource of directed attention, whatever the underlying networks and chemicals-

    3. MB

      Right.

    4. AH

      ... happen to be. Could we speculate what might be occurring in the nature walks that is, um, enhancing or allowing restoration of directed attention? And I guess the neurobiologist in me wants to say, okay, uh, y- I'm walking in nature. That probably means some greenery, um, some dirt, uh, maybe some water. Um, and I could imagine one hypothesis that it's the, uh, kind of irregularity of nature environments, right? I mean, maybe trees are spaced out, you know-

    5. MB

      Yep.

    6. AH

      ... in perfect spacing, like, on Palm Drive at Stanford.

    7. MB

      Yep, yep.

    8. AH

      It's like, it looks like a, it- it speaks to the engineering department that they're s-

    9. MB

      (laughs)

    10. AH

      ... set at such even intervals.

    11. MB

      Yes. (laughs)

    12. AH

      Right? But, um, typically, when you're in the forest, um, or nature, there, there's also things to break up that regularity.

    13. MB

      Yep.

    14. AH

      Um, whereas indoor environments and city environments tend to have a lot of right angles, buildings can be different sizes, but city blocks are pretty fixed for a given neighborhood in terms of their size.

    15. MB

      Yep.

    16. AH

      So that's just one hypothesis-

    17. MB

      Sure.

    18. AH

      ... I'm coming up with this off the top of my head. Do we have any data, or do you, um, uh, have any preferential speculation as to what it is about nature in terms of its physical structure-

    19. MB

      Yep.

    20. AH

      ... 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, uh, set at a higher level? Um, I realize this is two questions kind of, uh, braided together, but that's what I'm curious about.

    21. MB

      Yeah, and I think, um, I think both elements are placed. So maybe I'll start first with kind of the, the resting directed attention element. So let's, let's pretend we're on these walks in nature or the walk on the urban environment, and I'll start with the walk on the urban environment. The walk in the urban environment, um, required people to cross a lot of streets. So you had to be vigilant, so you still had to use directed attention. Also had a lot of car traffic, so you're hearing the noise of cars whizzing by at probably, you know, 40, 45 miles per hour. There's also advertising. You're going by shops and billboards, and that, that kind of requires some directed attention. So you can't really just mind wander and, and let your mind kind of go in those environments. You still have to be vigilant. You still have to use directed attention. The walk through the Ann Arbor Arboretum, you didn't have a lot of those distractions. So, I think you only had to cross one or two streets, and then you're kind of, uh, getting towards the arboretum. You don't have to cross any more streets. Um, there's no advertising there. And then, and, and this is a thing I wanna talk about too, this idea of soft fascination. There's all the colors, fractalness, curved edges of nature that we think, um, sort of captures our involuntary attention in what we say is softly fascinating ways, and we think that......in combination with not placing a lot of demand on directed attention, is why nature is able to restore our directed attention. So, what do I mean by softly fascinating stimulation? So, let's pretend we're looking at a waterfall and the waterfall is really beautiful. You can hear the rush of the water going down. You can see all the, like the bubbles, and, uh, maybe some of the froth of the water going down. It captures our attention, but we can still kind of mind wander and think about other things at the same time. So, it doesn't really harshly capture all of our attentional resources. 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, in an all-consuming way that doesn't allow for any reflection or mind wandering or anything like that. 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, uh, involuntary attention in a softly fascinating way. And we think that's the way that's gonna be restful, eventually, of directed attention. So, we think two elements, uh, created why the nature walk was restorative. One, it didn't place as many demands on directed attention. And two, it had this softly fascinating stimulation that activated this involuntary attention, but not in an all-consuming way. So, we think those two things are critical. The other point that you bring up about, okay, well, what, what causes soft fascination to be captured? Or w- or why does something capture involuntary attention in a softly fascinating way? And that gets really interesting, where we think it could be elements of the structure of nature. So, it's interesting, Andrew, that we can get these effects of, um, nature-improving cognitive performance, people just looking at pictures of nature, versus looking at pictures of urban, uh, scenes, listening to nature sounds versus listening to urban sounds, watching nature videos versus watching urban videos. So there, you don't have to worry about getting hit by a car. 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, uh, constructed.

  8. 27:12 – 30:03

    Nature Images & Sounds, Cognitive Benefits

    1. MB

    2. AH

      I have to ask. If you are exposing people to nature images versus, um, 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? I- I'm headed in a particular direction-

    3. MB

      Okay.

    4. AH

      ... with this question, um, because I have a head hypothesis as to what nature could be doing, um, to not deplete directed attention.

    5. MB

      Mm-hmm.

    6. AH

      Uh, but before I ask you about that, I'm just curious what the experimental setup is.

    7. MB

      Yeah.

    8. AH

      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."

    9. MB

      (laughs)

    10. AH

      "I don't have to get outside," and as you mentioned, there are so many things in a, in an actual nature environment that, uh, provide a rich experience of soundscape, et cetera. But-

    11. MB

      Yeah.

    12. AH

      ... uh, what's the format?

    13. MB

      Yeah. So, it's, uh, basically the same format as the walk. Uh, it, the walking study that I described. So, people come into the lab. We give them, uh, the backwards digit-span task, but then we take them into a room in the lab where they just have a computer screen that's flipping through, uh, nature scenes or urban scenes. They look at the scene for a couple seconds. 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. Uh, that whole procedure takes about 10 minutes. Uh, they come out of the laboratory room that had the pictures, and then they take the backwards digit-span task again, um, to see if there are changes in, uh, performance. And then we'd have them come back to the lab a week later, repeat the whole procedure again. If they saw the nature pictures the first week, they see the urban pictures the second week or vice versa. And they're, even just seeing the pictures of nature, we see, um, improvements in working memory and directed attention. However, I would caution that the effects are not as large as they are for the actual walk. Um, so it's harder, uh, y- or I would say, I guess, the, the intervention is not as strong as actually walking in nature, right? Just seeing 10 minutes of nature pictures, it's incredible that it works, you can get some of these benefits, but the benefits are not as strong as they are for the real thing. And the same procedure happens when we test, um, sounds of nature versus urban sounds. We test people, uh, 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. Then they do the backwards digit-span task again, um, and we find that when people listen to nature sounds, they also show improvements on, um, on working memory performance and directed attention. We don't do anything, uh, special in terms of having it being a panoramic view. It's basically just looking at a, a slideshow of nature pictures or urban pictures on a computer screen.

  9. 30:03 – 40:44

    Urban vs Nature Images, Complexity & Image Compression; Semantics

    1. MB

    2. AH

      So, I'm hearing this. I'm starting to wonder whether we have brain areas and/or circuits that are devoted to nature. Uh, which, you know, 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 y- you know, your eye and low level visual system cares about-

    3. MB

      Yeah.

    4. AH

      ... uh, circles and angles-

    5. MB

      Yeah.

    6. AH

      ... and then your higher level cortex-

    7. MB

      Yeah.

    8. AH

      ... puts it into-

    9. MB

      Yeah.

    10. AH

      ... like, the recognition of a person or a building, et cetera. It's literally built up from, from elementary units. You know, in the sound domain, it's built up from different frequencies-

    11. MB

      Yep.

    12. AH

      ... et cetera.

    13. MB

      Yeah.

    14. AH

      But, you know, there's something about-This problem. Uh, here, here's what's on my mind here. If I walk through a neighborhood, an urban neighborhood-

    15. MB

      Yep.

    16. AH

      ... where it's a bunch of warehouses-

    17. MB

      Yep.

    18. AH

      ... um, with some cyclone fence-

    19. MB

      Yep.

    20. AH

      ... and some signs, and it's a weekend, maybe it's a Sunday-

    21. MB

      Yeah.

    22. AH

      ... and they're all closed. There aren't trucks coming in and out-

    23. MB

      Yeah, yeah.

    24. AH

      ... and not, not a whole lot's happening.

    25. MB

      Yep.

    26. AH

      This is, uh, reminds me of, uh, like, West Oakland near the shipyard on a Sunday.

    27. MB

      Yep.

    28. AH

      Right? Not a place I recommend people go unless you really like kind of bland, urban environments on a Sunday-

    29. MB

      Yeah.

    30. AH

      ... 'cause not much is happening. It's a shipyard. It's Sunday. It's closed. Versus a trail in Yosemite. I used to work up in Yosemite in the summers. But it's not one of the most magnificent trails. Uh, meaning, it's not Yosemite Falls, Half Dome, or Clouds Rest, my favorite trail. It's a kind of barren environment. But there might be a meadow and there might be a mountain. You would never say, "You know, this trail up in Tuolumne that I'm on right now is... it's kind of boring."

  10. 40:44 – 45:32

    Time Perception & Nature; Art Galleries

    1. AH

      any data as to whether or not people track time better or worse when they are in natural versus urban environments?

    2. MB

      So, I don't have direct evidence to this, but I have a, a few other little pieces of evidence that I think will kind of get us there. So, we've done some studies where we send people, uh, this one was actually, uh, sending people to a nature arboretum, an in- 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. And, uh, we actually gave, uh, participants here, uh, cellphones that we had in the lab that would ping them, uh, and ask them questions while they were going on the walk in the conservatory or the walk in the mall. And we asked them, you know, "What are you thinking about?" And it turns out, when people are walking in, uh, nature, they actually think more about the past (laughs) uh, than walking, um, in the mall. So, that was kind of interesting.

    3. AH

      Mm-hmm.

    4. MB

      (laughs) Um, this is also kinda interesting. People also said that they felt more impulsive in the mall (laughs) -

    5. AH

      (laughs)

    6. MB

      ... than in the conservatory, which makes sense that, you know, mall designers want people to be buying things. Um, but this idea about thinking about the past, to me, suggested a little bit that time might be going a bit slower. Other people have found in cities, that the larger the city is, people, like, walk faster. Like, the pace of everything is a little bit faster. 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. I, I think that's something that'd be really super interesting to study. But that would be my hypothesis, that in nature, time does slow down a bit.

    7. AH

      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? I mean, it's so rich with information.

    8. MB

      Yeah. Yeah.

    9. AH

      You have options.

    10. MB

      Yeah.

    11. AH

      You have to decline certain things-

    12. MB

      Yeah.

    13. AH

      ... certain rooms, certain paintings, certain sculptures. There's a lot of decision-making.

    14. MB

      Yeah.

    15. AH

      And yet most people find galleries-

    16. MB

      Yeah.

    17. AH

      ... big galleries-

    18. MB

      Yeah.

    19. AH

      ... to be extremely calming.

    20. MB

      Yeah.

    21. AH

      Maybe it's also because everyone's quite quiet in them?

    22. MB

      Yeah (laughs) .I would say the, the gallery is- would have a similar effect to nature, would be my guess. Because, you know, Kaplan's Attention Restoration Theory really is not specific to nature. It basically just says you gotta find an environment that doesn't place a lot of demands on directed attention while simultaneously having softly fascinating stimulation. And an art gallery might meet those two criteria. 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, I think there's gonna be a lot of very softly fascinating stimulation in an art gallery. So, my hunch would be that, yeah, walking through an art gallery might have a similar kind of effect. Um, I would ... This is gonna be a little bit of a jump. There, there are some studies that we did where w- we're looking at the relationship between park visits and crime, and going to a museum (laughs) versus crime. Um, so these were, uh, uh, there's been a lot of actually interesting studies suggesting that interacting with nature can make people less aggressive, and we think it has to do with attention. So we, uh, (laughs) you know, we had this incredible dataset, um, this cellphone trace dataset where, from 100,000 people in Chicago, we knew where they lived, um, and we knew where they went for an entire month. So, what we did is we quantified how many times did people leave their neighborhood and go and visit a park versus leaving their neighborhood and going to a museum or something like that, and we wanted to correlate that with crime. And sure enough, we found that neighborhoods where people leave their neighborhood and go and visit a park, there's ... actually, that predicted less crime in those neighborhoods, but the museum visits didn't predict-

    23. AH

      Ah.

    24. MB

      ... that.

    25. AH

      And this was controlled for kind of, like, uh, socioeconomic background-

    26. MB

      Yeah.

    27. AH

      ... this kind of thing?

    28. MB

      I mean, and more or less. I mean, again, it's a correlational study, so I can't claim causality, but we also controlled for age, education, income-

    29. AH

      Mm-hmm.

    30. MB

      ... all those demographics. Um, so there, it seemed like there was something special about the park visit versus the museum visit on, at least, aggression. Um, but I do believe that, um, going through a museum might have a similar effect to nature. I'm not sure it'll be as strong, but I think it has ... the, the museum maybe has a lot of the same elements that a, that a nature walk might have.

  11. 45:32 – 52:47

    Tools: Resetting Attention & Nature Break; Features of a Restorative Nature Environments vs Focused Workspace; Length of Time in Nature

    1. AH

      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, um, because I personally believe that our ability to attend is, like, the hallmark of building a great life.

    2. MB

      Yes. (laughs)

    3. AH

      And I've ... So much so that, you know, on hikes and walks, I will listen to audiobooks and podcasts-

    4. MB

      Yeah.

    5. AH

      ... um, but there are times when, for instance, I will exercise with silence-

    6. MB

      Yep.

    7. AH

      ... and then I'll use music as something to, like, push me through some-

    8. MB

      Yeah.

    9. AH

      ... particularly hard-

    10. MB

      Yeah.

    11. AH

      ... moments in the exercise, but then I'll turn it off-

    12. MB

      Yeah.

    13. AH

      ... and bring it back. I, I don't just kind of, like, head out the whole time-

    14. MB

      Yeah.

    15. AH

      ... blasting music.

    16. MB

      Right.

    17. AH

      Sometimes I'll do that-

    18. MB

      Yeah.

    19. AH

      ... but I'm, I'm starting to become a, kind of a experimentalist with this idea of, you know, attention as this resource that we deplete each day. Sleep, it's restored, mostly. You go back again, uh, you know, looming in the backdrop of this conversation is a conversation about social media, but before-

    20. MB

      Yeah.

    21. AH

      But 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, uh, what are the sort of basic requirements?

    22. MB

      So, I think there's, there's a lot there too. Um, I think you have to be really mindful about directed attention fatigue. So, if you're trying to study or, uh, you're at work and you're having a really hard time concentrating, I would recommend not just trying to power through. If, if you have the ability, uh, and the time to take a break, I recommend that you stop and you take a break. And what kind of break do I recommend you do? I recommend that you go and try to find some nature and walk in nature. And-

    23. AH

      What if you're, wh- you're having a hard time getting into a focused state at all?

    24. MB

      Yeah.

    25. AH

      It's not that you fatigued it-

    26. MB

      Okay.

    27. AH

      ... that day.

    28. MB

      Yeah.

    29. AH

      You, you know, so many people that I hear from-

    30. MB

      Yeah.

  12. 52:47 – 55:59

    Sponsors: AG1 & Our Place

    1. MB

    2. AH

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  13. 55:59 – 1:02:21

    Nature, Time & Widening Attention; Fractals & Nature

    1. AH

      You know, I've been long obsessed with this, um, difference between what happens in our brain stem, you know, the areas involved, as you know, um, with levels of arousal and stress versus calm, um, when we look at a fixation point versus a, a horizon or when we go into-

    2. MB

      Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

    3. AH

      ... panoramic vision. And there are now ample data to support the idea that when we fixate on a small box-

    4. MB

      Yeah.

    5. AH

      ... like a phone or a computer-

    6. MB

      Yeah.

    7. AH

      ... or we, you know, w- we're fixated on something we're reading or paying attention to it, that our level of autonomic arousal creeps up. Doesn't creep up indefinitely, but this makes sense, right?

    8. MB

      Yeah. Yeah. Yes.

    9. AH

      Visual attention matches a cognitive attention.

    10. MB

      Yeah.

    11. AH

      You need arousal-

    12. MB

      Yeah.

    13. AH

      ... AKA alertness to get cognitive attention.

    14. MB

      Yeah.

    15. AH

      But that when we go into panoramic vision, which is, you know, for these aficionados, you can look up magnocellular vision, what you're essentially doing-

    16. MB

      Yeah.

    17. AH

      ... is you're taking bigger pixels of the-

    18. MB

      Yes.

    19. AH

      ... of the visual environment.

    20. MB

      Yes.

    21. AH

      And when we look at a horizon-

    22. MB

      Yep.

    23. AH

      ... we naturally go into panoramic vision, unless we're looking at our phone (laughs) -

    24. MB

      Yes. Yes. Yes.

    25. AH

      ... taking a picture of the horizon. So take note. It's interesting to me to think about visual environments such as nature that, that have us taking larger bins, pic- pixels if we're talking about visual space, but that we're also perhaps, this is a question I'm obsessed with, perhaps taking larger time bins.

    26. MB

      Mm-hmm.

    27. AH

      What do you think about a, a kind of a general idea that what we need to do in order to be focused-

    28. MB

      Yeah.

    29. AH

      ... is to allow our mind to go into these kind of, like, time drift states?

    30. MB

      Yeah, and I kind of think, you know, you're talking about it from a, a visual perspective, but I think it's also from a cognitive mental perspective. So I think also too, being in nature kind of widens your cognitive, you know, landscape. You... And that's why I think people sometimes, you know, you hear all these anecdotes where people are struggling to solve a problem, they can't figure it out, they go for a walk in nature, and then boom, they, they solve the problem, 'cause the brain is still churning on that, right? But maybe being out in nature sort of inspires this widening of attentional space internally.

  14. 1:02:21 – 1:09:44

    Nature vs Urban Environments & Brain, Social Media & Attention

    1. MB

    2. AH

      Whereas human beings and advertisements and all that-

    3. MB

      (laughs)

    4. AH

      ... we try, you know, th- there's this thing in science, as you know. People are either lumpers or splitters.

    5. MB

      Yes.

    6. AH

      Right? And, and many a career has been made by, uh, splitting-

    7. MB

      Yeah.

    8. AH

      ... when lumping would have been sufficient.

    9. MB

      Right.

    10. AH

      Human behavior, human advertising, music. I mean, I'm sure there's immense regularity-

    11. MB

      Yes.

    12. AH

      ... but when we're bombarded with that, now I'm sort of, uh, making the segue to something like social media-

    13. MB

      Yeah.

    14. AH

      ... where you're just bombarded with sensory information.

    15. MB

      Yes.

    16. AH

      Like, one movement of my thumb takes me from one cognitive landscape to a completely different cognitive landscape.

    17. MB

      Right.

    18. AH

      I mean, if it were my preference, my entire feed would be dogs.

    19. MB

      Yep.

    20. AH

      But I'm going from dogs to politics to fitness to... and then stuff that the algorithm is testing on me. And I mean, it's amazing that we can do this-

    21. MB

      Yep.

    22. AH

      ... and yet the more we talk about nature-

    23. MB

      Yeah.

    24. AH

      ... and how restorative it is- (laughs)

    25. MB

      Yeah.

    26. AH

      ... or reading a book and what a kind of a, following a common narrative-

    27. MB

      Yeah, yeah.

    28. AH

      ... like kind of drilling down into that-

    29. MB

      Yeah.

    30. AH

      ... or watching a movie-

  15. 1:09:44 – 1:14:56

    Depression & Rumination, Mental Well-Being, Attention & Nature

    1. AH

      all 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. But, um, I'm gonna just shelve those-

    2. MB

      Okay.

    3. AH

      ... and maybe we'll get back to them, maybe we won't. I wanna make sure that I understand correctly what the protocol, for lack of a better word, would be. Get out into nature, ideally move-

    4. MB

      Yes.

    5. AH

      ... for about 20 minutes minimum.

    6. MB

      Yup.

    7. AH

      And ideally, you remove yourself from phone. W- what if you have to make a phone call while you're doing it, is that-

    8. MB

      I mean, that's why I would just, you don't want to do it. And I'd, I'd even say too, I know you were saying you like to put the earbuds in sometimes, I would say, you don't want the earbuds in. You want all of your attentional capacity, or involuntary attention to be captured by that environment.

    9. AH

      Okay. Great.

    10. MB

      Um, you know, it's kinda... (laughs) I kind of joke with my students about this a little bit, where I would say, you know, "Uh, how many of you study with, uh, listening to music?" And a lot of students raise their hand, "Yeah, I study while listening to music." I say, "Okay, how many of you want to take the exam listening to music?" Nobody. (laughs) Nobody raises their hand. I say, "Well then, that's a, that's not consistent," you know?

    11. AH

      Mm-hmm.

    12. MB

      And, and, and it's, it's not because, you know, the students are, uh, not smart. It's, it's that studying sucks. (laughs)

    13. AH

      Mm-hmm.

    14. MB

      And, you know, listening to music just makes it more pleasurable. But you're not, you know, you're, you're, you're taking away attentional resources that could be used for the studying by listening to, to music. And I think, you know, on the flip side, I want you to be fully engaged with nature. I want your involuntary attention to be just automatically captured by this nature stimulation. I don't want anything else interfering with that. I think that's how you're going to get the most bang for your buck. And in fact, you know, you know, we did these studies where I wasn't sure how it was gonna work, so we did some studies, um, where we took participants who were diagnosed with clinical depression. (laughs) And this is kind of mean, but I think important, we had them walk in nature too. 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. And we thought, you know, maybe if you go for a walk alone in nature and you're restoring your attention, maybe they're gonna ruminate even more, that it's gonna be, uh, you know, not good. It's gonna, maybe it's gonna hurt, hurt performance. And we found just the opposite, 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.

    15. AH

      On, on working memory?

    16. MB

      On working memory.

    17. AH

      Mm-hmm.

    18. MB

      And, uh, and y- and you can imagine participants that are struggling with depression and rumination, their working memory is not as good, 'cause you've got cognitive resources devoted to these, these negative thoughts they're just repeating over and over again. You don't have your full bank account of attention 'cause you, you've had... you're spending it on the rumination. And we found that for these participants, the effects were, were stronger in improving their attention and working memory. And I think part of that might be that it's, it's actually giving them some of the attentional resources necessary to deal with the rumination.

    19. AH

      Super interesting. I know rumination is something that many people, depressed or not, uh, struggle with. Um, and I've long thought, and I'm certainly coming to this conclusion with each successive year of my life, that w-... uh, distraction is the enemy.

    20. MB

      Yeah. Yeah.

    21. AH

      Like, the ability to drop into work, creative work, or pre- for me, prepping a podcast or reading papers or, um, 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-

    22. MB

      Right.

    23. AH

      ... is only the basis of a great life.

    24. MB

      Right.

    25. AH

      Even if you're dealing with challenge.

    26. MB

      Right, right.

    27. AH

      It's a- it, uh, that when we spread ourselves out across all these different, uh, modalities that, um, no good comes of it.

    28. MB

      That's right.

    29. AH

      And, um, like any destructive force, uh, that's really bad, it's the fact that we don't notice that we were absent for large swaths of it-

    30. MB

      Right.

  16. 1:14:56 – 1:24:44

    Sleep vs Wakefulness; Protecting Attention, Social Media

    1. AH

      This state of getting into nature and f- let's call it high fractal environments-

    2. MB

      Yep.

    3. AH

      ... is similar or should be similar to the way that we've started to talk about sleep.

    4. MB

      Hmm.

    5. AH

      You know, prior to 2015, maybe it was 2018, um, the notion was sleep when you're dead.

    6. MB

      (laughs)

    7. AH

      Um, you know, Matt Walker of UC Berkeley-

    8. MB

      Yep.

    9. AH

      ... with the book Why We Sleep transformed what we now understand. And I've, and others have been, you know, arguing that people need sleep.

    10. MB

      Yeah.

    11. AH

      Now, I think everyone understands if you don't sleep, your mental health, your physical health-

    12. MB

      Yep.

    13. AH

      ... your performance-

    14. MB

      Yep.

    15. AH

      ... drops dramatically.

    16. MB

      Yep.

    17. AH

      You need sleep. And Matt has educated us that you need slow wave sleep, you need rapid eye movement sleep. Maybe we also need these, um, high fractal environments. And the fact that they come in their best form through walks in nature when we're not doing anything else, just like you wouldn't want to... I don't know, you don't wanna bring the phone into the bedroom kind of thing-

    18. MB

      No.

    19. AH

      ... um, late at night because you're not gonna get your deep sleep because you're gonna go to sleep too late and then you miss out on the opportunity for deep sleep.

    20. MB

      Right.

    21. AH

      Um, I love the idea that these waking states become, uh, better understood as, and perhaps even requirements. I feel like we understand so much about sleep, slow wave sleep-

    22. MB

      Yeah.

    23. AH

      ... growth hormone, REM sleep-

    24. MB

      Yeah.

    25. AH

      ... emotional repair, and everyone now is like, "Cool, we need sleep."

    26. MB

      Right.

    27. AH

      "And here are the different stages of sleep."

    28. MB

      Right.

    29. AH

      We actually know very little, it seems, about waking states-

    30. MB

      Right (laughs) .

Episode duration: 2:11:45

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