This Is Your Brain on Nature

This is great. Particularly appreciate the "forest kindergarten". As I grew up, I felt so much of my schooling missed out on applying the knowledge we learned in the class room, and of course, the scope of what we learned in class felt at times arbitrary and irrelevant.

My parents would takeus camping from a very young age every summer. We learned how to fish, set up tents, and all the tools associated with those tasks. We learned to respect the meat we'd catch, not be afraid of the water, be innovative with the tools around us when we forgot something, and of course -- be adventurous.

I'm a large fan of the urban environment and I think raising children in cities has clear social benefits. We must also respect, and embrace the nature in and around our cities to foster that other side of the spectrum.

Articles like this frustrate me because they almost always conflate a bunch of very different things (e.g. being near trees, being away from loud noises, being in an environment that has no deliberate function, increased exposure to sunlight) under the umbrella of "nature", which turns out to be a largely inconsistent and culture-bound concept. There are clear hints of researchers actually wanting to understand the underlying processes or play with other manifestations of whatever "nature" might be giving us, but they're treated like footnotes to the narrative of "Hooray, we knew all along that nature is great, but now science proves it!".

And then there's this:

> “Imagine a therapy that had no known side effects, was readily available, and could improve your cognitive functioning at zero cost,” the researchers wrote in their paper. It exists, they continued, and it’s called “interacting with nature.”

I can't adequately explain how deeply I loathe this kind of claim (free, no side effects, huge benefits; similar claims are often made about exercise, optimism, or just about anything else that an author thinks is wholesome and virtuous). Anything that has effects has side effects. Anyone who says differently is selling something.

Hah! I know that smiling naked skinny-dipping couple. They certainly epitomize the natural high of being out in nature.

I'm not too surprised to read this. I get a little antsy if I haven't been on a hike in a while. It's more than just exercise. Urban walks, including ones with a lot of greenery like in Golden Gate Park, stave it off, but don't completely take care of it [1]. Even a place like Muir Woods, which does have beautiful trees and a creek but is so heavily travelled that people are supposed to stay on a roped off path, doesn't quite do it. Fortunately (recent tweets from a high profile investor notwithstanding), SF has a lot of this available within a 90 minute radius.

Some researchers did find that natural walks have a stronger effect on blood pressure and stress than "urban" walks (the link was here on HN, but unfortunately I don't remember it right now). However, they took a walk down el camino real in suburban sprawl as their "urban" experience. I have really enjoyed taking very very long walks in places like Paris or New York, highly urban areas, and depending on where you go, it's actually pretty fantastic. So my guess, again this is just based on my own experience, is that highly urbanized areas aren't necessarily lacking in whatever that element is that brings a sense of calm and contentedness from long walks or hikes.

[1] I know, GGP has a reputation for having lots of addicted or mentally ill people camping in the bushes. This isn't undeserved, unfortunately, but SF's problems, while pretty bad, can still be overstated. It depends on where you go in the park.

I started really getting into nature, hiking and camping this year. If you aren't careful, it can quickly become an addiction. Although it's probably the healthiest addiction you can have. Most of the time while I'm in my 9-5 box, I'm yearning for the mountains and planning my next adventure.

There's a book called The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram, and a sequel called Becoming Animal, that I think are relevant. They aren't based on neuroscience but philosophy (mostly Merleau-Ponty phenomenology, a little bit of McLuhan, plus an interesting critique of alphabetic writing) and some field anthropology. Basically he is defending the importance of embodied cognition within non-man-made environments.

From the first book:

> Today we participate almost exclusively with other humans and with our own human-made technologies. It is a precarious situation, given our age-old reciprocity with the many-voiced landscape. We still need that which is other than ourselves and our own creations. The simple premise of this book is that we are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human.

I bet there's also a bunch of articles written from a Heideggerian perspective about being-in-the-world as a hiker. I'd expect the "three day effect" to work very well when you are hiking from place to place, engaged in that kind of simple and "primordial" activity.

There's a NASA report that I can't find that was about psychological requirements for long-term living on space stations and one thing they recommended was an explorable space with height differences creating a shifting horizon, so you get that nice free feeling of walking in a landscape.

Which reminds me that The Spell of the Sensuous has an interesting discussion of Heidegger's use of the concept of a horizon, and how it relates to the experience of time...

Oh yeah and I've heard lots of people say, and I concur, that meditation retreats usually shift in character after around the third day, like it takes about three days for the mind to really get into the new situation, fully adjust to the rhythm. After that there's a different flow and meditation feels deeper.

BTW, I love hiking and meditation, but I'm a little wary of romanticism and religion. There's interesting critique of the concept "nature," for example Timothy Morton's Ecology Without Nature. Yet there's obviously lots of fascinating effects on mental health.

Then I'm also a little wary of "scientizing" or "psychiatrizing" both nature and meditation. It has to do with what Heidegger thought of as the technological mindset of treating the world as a big resource to use for various purposes.

I think there is some kind of truth in the way many hikers and meditators want to keep those things "sacred" in some way, regardless of what religious or romantic theoretical framework they use to justify that. If you try to use nature, or meditation, to alleviate the stress from your life, in an instrumental way full of expectations, I can easily see it gradually losing its efficacy, if it becomes yet another maintenance strategy and you lose the sense of noninstrumentality, free exploration, suspension of ordinary pursuits, etc.

Fair warning - this page autoplays audio, at least on Safari in OS X 10.11 (El Capitan).

‘[…] You once lived on Earth. You remember what it was like.’

‘I sort of remember. Still, it doesn’t seem to be easy to explain. Earth is just there. It fits people and people fit it. People take Earth the way they find it. Mars is different. It’s sort of raw and doesn’t fit people. People got to make something out of it. They got to build a world, and not take what they find. Mars isn’t much yet, but we’re building, and when we’re finished, we’re going to have just what we like. It’s sort of a great feeling to know you’re building a world. Earth would be kind of unexciting after that.’

[…]

[Two humans who live on Mars, Rioz and Long, are out on a mission close to Saturn and are at the moment relaxing by floating free in spacesuits outside the ship.]

‘You know, I’ve read Earth books—’

‘Grounder books, you mean.’ Rioz yawned and found it difficult under the circumstances to use the expression with the proper amount of resentment.

‘—and sometimes I read descriptions of people lying on grass,’ continued Long. ‘You know that green stuff like thin, long pieces of paper they have all over the ground down there, and they look up at the blue sky with clouds in it. Did you ever see any films of that?’

‘Sure. It didn’t attract me. It looked cold.’

‘I suppose it isn’t, though. After all, Earth is quite close to the Sun, and they say their atmosphere is thick enough to hold the heat. I must admit that personally I would hate to be caught under open sky with nothing on but clothes. Still, I imagine they like it.’

‘Grounders are nuts!’

‘They talk about the trees, big brown stalks, and the winds, air movements, you know.’

‘You mean drafts. They can keep that, too.’

‘It doesn’t matter. The point is they describe it beatutifully, almost passionately. Many times I’ve wondered. “What’s it really like? Will I ever feel it or is this something only Earth-men can possibly feel?” I’ve felt so often that I was missing something vital. Now I know what it must be like. It’s this. Complete peace in the middle of a beauty-drenched universe.’

Rioz said, ‘They wouldn’t like it. The Grounders, I mean. They’re so used to their own lousy little world they wouldn’t appreciate what it’s like to float and look down on Saturn.’ He flipped his body mass slightly and began swaying back and forth about his centre of mass, slowly, soothingly.

Long said, ‘Yes, I think so too. They’re slaves to their planet. Even if they come to Mars, it will only be their children that are free. There’ll be starships someday; great, huge things that can carry thousands of people and maintain their self-contained equilibrium for decades, maybe centuries. Mankind will spread through the whole Galaxy. But people will have to live their lives out on shipboard until the new methods of inter-stellar travel are developed, so it will be Martians, not planet-bound Earthmen, who will colonize the Universe. That’s inevitable. It’s got to be. It’s the Martian way.’

— The Martian Way, Isaac Asimov, 1952

Naturally, this articles’ photo of the mud-slaked Rubenesque woman was the image on my screen when my new co-worker dropped in on me… calling this piece NSFW feels a bit prudish but let my experience be your warning