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THANKS TO THE grant money, the scientists were able to dine a few
steps up from freeze-dried hummus. The first night after Arches, they
headed to Moab’s finest (and only) Thai restaurant. Art Kramer, a
neuroscientist, had arrived from the University of Illinois, where he
directs the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology.
In his early sixties, he’s clearly the senior yoda of the group. He
greeted us and dove into the pad se. Smallish and solid, he’s a man
who gives the impression of intensity in all pursuits. “He talks at
squirrel speed,” one of the others had warned me. At one time or
another, nearly everyone here (except Gazzaley) studied with him or
worked in his lab. Strayer was his first doctoral student, back when
they were studying pilot error. Kramer has always been fascinated by
how humans learn skills and what makes them screw up. He’s
consulted for the military, NASA and the Federal Aviation
Administration, among others.
But what Kramer is really known for—indeed, famous for, in the
world of neuroscience—is showing how exercise protects the brain
from cognitive decline in aging. Among his dozens of influential
studies are those showing that exercise causes new brain cells to
grow, especially in areas related to memory, executive function and
spatial perception. Before Kramer’s work, no one really believed
physical activity could lead to such clear and important effects. Now
people everywhere are routinely told that exercise is the single best
way to prevent aging-related cognitive decline. Kramer’s studies
helped change the way the profession and society think. They are
what scientists dream of.
“In 1992, the exercise/brain literature was where the nature
literature is now,” said Strayer. “My goal in the next ten years is to do
for nature what he did on exercise and cognition.”
If you draw a Venn diagram of the scientific interests of everyone
around the vinyl-draped dinner table, the circles would overlap over
one central theme: attention. Other scientists studying the effects of
nature may be interested in other things, like emotional regulation, or
stress, or the immune system. But in Team Moab’s worldview,
attention is the lingua franca from which all mental states spring. I’d
be hearing a lot more about it.
Kramer sipped a lassi and briefly checked his phone. I asked him
if he would be following Strayer’s advice and taking a three-day tech
break while in Moab. He peered at me rather severely.
“I brought four computers.” He paused. “I can do it though. I lived
in a snow cave for a month.” Several heads swiveled his direction.
“He’s a sensation-seeker,” Strayer explained.
“Definitely,” Kramer said.
“Do you still have your Harley?” someone asked.
“Yep.” Kramer pulled up a photo of a red motorcycle on his
phone.
“Still wearing leather?” asked Strayer.
“Yeah, a jacket.”
“No pants?”
“Well, I always wear pants.”
AND SO THE skeptics and the believers marched out of the Best
Western. I drove to the trailhead with Paul Atchley and Strayer. As
the strange, folded landscape revealed itself, I found myself
wondering about the significance of attention, and its role in why
nature makes us smarter, as Strayer contends. Psychologists have
been fascinated by the concept of attention for a long time, although
it’s now enjoying a resurgence in our age of distraction, or what Paul
Atchley has called “the attention economy.”
Attention is our currency, and it’s precious. William James, the
philosopher, pioneering experimental psychologist and brother of
Henry James, devoted an entire chapter of his classic The Principles
of Psychology to attention, published in 1890. In it, he writes, “Every
one knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind. .
. .” and “My experience is what I agree to attend to . . . Without
selective interest, experience is an utter chaos.” Notably, James
divided attention into two basic types that continue to define the way
we think about it: voluntary, active attention (such as when we attend
to tasks) and involuntary or reflex attention, as when something
demands our focus, like a noise or sound or play of light or even a
wayward thought. Decades before text alerts, philosophers were
concerned by what James refers to as the “confused, dazed, scatter-
brained state which in French is called distraction.” (Before I leave
James, I can’t resist mentioning that he suffered from depression and
experienced a transformative experience while hiking in the
Adirondacks in 1898. As he wrote to his wife, he “got into a state of
spiritual alertness of the most vital description.” Emerson was his
godfather, so perhaps he was primed to attend voluntarily to this
possibility.)
James knew that staying on task was hard, hard work, and that
without this ability, as Nass confirmed, we become dumber, at least
by certain measures (by other measures, the distractions of the digital
age may be a reasonable trade for what our brains gain in access to
more information and more memory storage). But interestingly, we’re
also limited in our ability to take in our surroundings, because
otherwise our brains would be overwhelmed by stimuli. Our field of
vision is surprisingly narrow; our hearing isn’t great either, and most
of what we hear and “see” we don’t actually process at all. We get on
in the world because our brains are pretty good at automatic triage.
“Most of the time your brain can filter things out,” said Strayer,
driving the black 4Runner over an increasingly rough dirt road. “It’s a
strategic process. If traffic is heavy, your brain literally stops
listening to NPR. Radio is a passive signal, but talking is a whole
different thing, and if you’re on the phone talking to your spouse,
that’s more difficult to shut out.” Hence your inability to respond as
quickly as you should to traffic signals, signs and pedestrians. Social
information, as all Tweeters, texters and emailers know, draws our
attention and is tough to shut out. I was reminded of a funny
automated email response sent by a scientist on vacation (which I
learned about through, of course, Twitter): “I am away from the office
and checking email intermittently. If your email is not urgent, I’ll
probably still reply. I have a problem.”
“Attention is everything,” explained Paul Atchley, pivoting
around in the front seat. “Without it, we don’t see, hear, taste. Your
brain keeps track of about four things at once. How do you prioritize
what’s important and what’s not? Through inhibition. I’ve always
found it interesting that most connections in the brain are inhibitory
functions. We have far more information than we can deal with. Most
of what the brain is doing is filtering, tuning stuff out so we can focus
in on things that are relevant.”
Because of this interplay of observation, selective attention and
inhibition, humans are able to achieve higher-order cognition, which
includes creative problem-solving, goal-following, planning and
multitasking. The problem is that all this inhibition and filtering uses
up cognitive fuel. It wallops us. As Stanford neuroscientist Daniel
Levitin points out in The Organized Mind, our brain’s processing
speed is surprisingly slow, about 120 bits per second. For perspective,
it takes 60 bits per second just to understand one person speaking to
us. Directed attention, or voluntary attention, is a limited resource.
When it flags, we make mistakes; we get irritable. Moreover, task-
switching, which is something we do an awful lot of these days, burns
up precious oxygenated glucose from the prefrontal cortex and other
areas of the brain, and this is energy we need for both cognitive and
physical performance. It’s no wonder it feels pretty good to space out
and watch a butterfly. Of course, that requires brain real estate too,
but it’s different real estate, and that’s a key point.
As we neared the trailhead, the brilliant sky contrasted
dramatically with the red cliffs through the front window. A corridor
of green creek bed emerged from a seam in the landscape. “From my
perspective,” Atchley continued, sweeping his hand across the view,
“what this environment is doing to us right now is giving us fewer
choices. And by having fewer choices, your attentional system
functions better for higher-order things. In the office environment,
you’ve got emails, alerts, sounds. That’s a lot of filtering and so it’s
harder to think deeply. Here the filtering requirements are not
demanding so you have the capacity to focus on deeper thought.”
LATER THAT NIGHT, Gazzaley mixed martinis by the rooftop fire pit. If
Kramer is the senior member of Team Moab, Gazzaley is its boy
wonder. At forty-six, his premature bright white hair belies his
youthful face. It’s so incongruous that people sometimes ask him if
he dyes his hair.
“Dye it this color?” he pointed to his head, barking a laugh.
Extroverted and optimistic, Gazzaley is refreshingly unapologetic
about his affection for technology. He believes it is not our curse but
very possibly our salvation. He employs his gadgets with ease and
fluency, from his cameras to the brain-wave monitoring machines and
85-inch high definition screens in his multimillion-dollar laboratory
at the University of California, San Francisco. There, he is designing
and testing “neurological” video games built specifically to increase
cognitive performance in adults. The games, he believes, can help
prevent dementia, treat ADHD, and even make us all better
multitaskers, and he has data to back it up. This is the world we live
in. We might as well get better at it.
Still, as a nature photographer and adventurer, he is loving the
desert. He had his vertical-panorama revelation yesterday, and he had
another spark of insight today in Hunter Canyon. “I had such a rich
experience of flow today,” he told us around the fake campfire. “I was
walking in the sandy canyon. Dave took off in front of me, and I
found myself alone taking pictures of desert flowers. I made myself
receptive to the stimuli around me. It was so bottom-up, moving
through the environment and it was all fitting together. I usually have
trouble not being top-down, but without trying to, I was picking up
things that were beautiful and salient. I realized how natural and
comfortable and smooth it felt to do photography. I’m always
thinking about top-down versus bottom-up, and I usually present it as
conflict, basically, over cognitive control, but the insight was as it
relates to flow and it’s that maybe it happens when these parts of the
brain are in perfect balance. I hadn’t felt it in years and it felt really
good.”
There was more, because his analytical top-down mode was in full
force now. Gazzaley the neuroscientist was back. He had, essentially,
experienced Kaplan’s theory about attentional restoration. The
Queens techie was drinking the Kaplan Kool-Aid, along with the
martinis: “Nature is restorative because it frees up the top-down part
of your brain in a way that allows it to recover. I don’t think you have
to be in nature for this to happen, but I think there’s something
special about nature. It’s what makes it interesting. Nature has this
not totally unique but more powerful ability to capture your attention
in a different way. Evolutionarily, nature is a powerful bottom-up
experience for us.” He paused and then laughed. “Although a lot of
people freak in nature. I’ve seen it countless times.”
Ruth Ann Atchley piped up. “I was not restored while hiking the
fins yesterday. I do not like heights.”
Lisa Fournier apologized for the route.
Strayer: “There are always going to be individual differences.”
Here I couldn’t help thinking of Woody Allen: “I love nature, I just
don’t want to get any of it on me.”
Fournier was thinking. “Nature is pretty novel in lots of ways.
You’re immersed and enriched.”
Dyre, the skeptic: “Maybe it’s the active exploration that’s
important.”
“Yes!” said Jason Watson, a young researcher and associate,
another attention scientist who’d become captivated by the nature
effect and whose shyness dissipated under the night’s half-moon. “It’s
what Kaplan calls mystery.” Watson told us about a recent study he’d
done that largely confirmed Kaplan’s mystery element. He and his
colleagues showed a couple hundred subjects images of nature scenes,
some with flat, predictable trails and some with winding or partly
obscured scenery, the kind of images that compelled the viewers to
want to peek around the corner. Even though the subjects saw the
images very briefly, just a matter of seconds, they remembered the
mysterious scenes better. In other words, there was something about
mystery that improved cognitive recall.
Ruth Ann Atchley saw a good transition point. “Okay, I have one
question: what kind of studies should we do now?”
“What I’d like to know more about is creativity. We can do
cognitive tests, but we also need biomarkers,” said Strayer.
Art Kramer had helped find a beautiful biomarker, the neural
growth factor BDNF, which spritzes the brain like Miracle-Gro during
exercise. Could nature exposure unleash some similar, visible
molecule? Until recently, it’s been hard to see inside the brain in real-
world settings or under more sophisticated lab conditions. Some
studies show a drop in hemoglobin levels (a proxy for blood and
oxygen) in the prefrontal cortex during time in nature. It’s still
debatable where the blood is going instead. At least one MRI study
(using photographs of nature) shows it’s going to parts of the brain
like the insula and the anterior cingulate that are associated with
pleasure, empathy, and unconstrained thinking. By contrast, when
those same subjects viewed urban pictures, more blood traveled to the
amygdala, which registers fear and anxiety.
Strayer would like to know what a brain looks like as it’s getting
restored. Can you see it? Does it look different in the real world
compared to in a lab that uses photographs? After some discussion,
Gazzaley proposed they use EEG—electroencephalography—to
measure brain waves, specifically one called frontal midline theta,
which his lab has found to be a reliable measure of executive-center
engagement. If it quiets down in nature, that could be evidence of
what he experienced on the trail: less top-down, and more bottom-up,
less executive network, more default network. It would indicate a rest
break for the frontal lobes.
“I love it!” Gazzaley said.
They discussed the complications: Strayer prefers field data and
not lab data. He wanted people wearing the caps in real nature, not
just looking at pictures of it in an air-conditioned room. But Kramer
and Gazzaley prefer the controlled environment of the lab. Kramer
would leave Moab with a plan to study whether creativity differed for
people walking on a lab treadmill looking at virtual-reality city
images versus nature images. I made a note to check back.
“It is messy, no doubt about it,” said Strayer of working outside.
“You can study this in the lab, but for the effects to be there, you have
to be in nature. People said we couldn’t measure the effects of driving
and distraction in the real world, because there are so many variables,
but we did it.” Strayer would leave with several experiment ideas: a
walking study in an arboretum measuring creativity, and another
using the EEG on a group in the wilderness. This I would have to see.
Gazzaley had a plan for yet another study. Nature, he saw from his
own Kaplanesque moment of “flow” out on the trail, could be useful.
It could improve not the way we enjoy nature but the way we use
technology. “My practical desire is to understand how to maximize
our brains,” he said. “If I’m going to build software to enhance
cognition, what if I routinely inserted recovery periods in virtual
nature? I’m a fitness buff. You have to rest between sets. Everyone
knows you can’t just blast your brain for hours with video games or
you get diminishing returns. Are all breaks equal? I’m going to try
nature.”
The Atchleys, for their part, would also soon run an experiment to
see if group problem-solving improved among workers outside versus
workers inside.
I’d have to stay tuned. The trip had crystallized for me some
critical questions to keep in mind as I moved ahead. If nature
environments have the potential to change both our emotional brains
and our cognitive brains, how would different doses of nature affect
us? How much of the benefits of nature are really because of what’s
in nature versus simply leaving behind the bad stuff of cities and
workplaces? And, based on what I would learn about our perceptual
systems, how could we improve our normal lives back at home?
For science, I was learning, you have to be patient. But maybe you
can draw a payoff like Gazzaley’s pursuit of an American three-toed
woodpecker in Rocky Mountain National Park. Before the moon set,
he pulled up some of his photographs on his laptop and scrolled
through them for us. The bird was coy, finally poking his spectacular
black-and-white-striped head out of a hole in a tree. But Gazzaley was
ready, camera in hand.
“I had to wait six hours for this fucker,” he said.
Together and apart, the group would be looking at the puzzle of
nature and the brain from many angles. As Paul Atchley put it at the
end of the evening, no doubt inspired by the night sky, the beverages
and a new laser focus in his attentional network, “It’s many fingers
pointed at the moon. If you look at all the different fingers, eventually
you can see where the moon is even though every perspective is
different. There won’t be a single piece of evidence. Science doesn’t
work that way.”
These and other emerging studies would make up the next frontier
in understanding nature’s role in optimizing human potential, many
aided by brain imaging. With more clues about what makes our brains
happy and keeps them running smoothly, that information can be fed
into public policy decisions, urban planning and architectural design.
The research has profound implications for schools, hospitals, prisons
and public housing. Imagine bigger windows, more urban trees,
mandated lie-on-the-grass sessions, minute-long birdsong breaks. Per
Gazzaley’s quest, it might even be possible to construct doses of
nature so palatable and efficient that we hardly notice them. This
approach, of course, is classically Western. Manipulate the
environment. Feel nature without even trying.
As for me, I would be looking for a more East-meets-West
approach. I would come close to finding it in Korea. That country has
wrapped a pervasive wellness philosophy around the senses,
particularly the sense of smell that builds on the work from Japan. It’s
a good place to start the next section, which looks at the immediate
benefits of nearby nature.