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> the scientists randomly assigned half of the volunteers to walk for 90 minutes through a leafy, quiet, parklike portion of the Stanford campus or next to a loud, hectic, multi-lane highway in Palo Alto.

So waking through a particularly beautiful part of Stanford campus leads to better mental health than waking along a noisy highway. No shit.

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Yet, until these things are empirically verified, they're "common sense", not science.

Are we really still at the point in "Landscape and Urban Planning" research that we need to verify that walking in the woods chills you out and helps you focus more than walking down a busy street?

It's about looking at the underlying mechanisms.

Lots of science is about looking at "no shit, Sherlock" phenomena. The hope is you can find principles beneath the commonsense aspects. Ideally, you see the commonsense and allow yourself to get puzzled by it.

For example, physicists can't tell you much about what goes on outside your window; it's too complex. They isolate little things in highly controlled environments which remove as much as possible. ("Experiments".)

Yeah. And I thought this experiment was too stupid. I can't beleive how petty Hacker News has gotten to mark me down on this.

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But I wouldn't really call the groomed Stanford campus a natural area.

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