9 hours ago
We know time in nature fixes our brains. Here's why.
I hiked the Appalachian Trail last week.
I hasten to add, for those who remember a certain former governor of South Carolina, that this is not a euphemism. My brother and I really were hiking the trail through Shenandoah National Park, albeit rather slowly and covered in moleskin and kvetching constantly about an expanding catalogue of muscle and joint pains.
As we lumbered toward Brown's Gap one day, we heard a commotion behind us, and three men approached us at a speed suggesting they were being chased by a bear. It turned out to be extreme trail runner John Kelly and his escorts. Kelly is attempting to break the record for the fastest traversing of the 2,200-mile trail by doing it in less than 40 days — which requires him to complete between 55 and 60 miles per day, every day.
I called out some encouragement to Kelly as he blew past us.
'Enjoy your hike,' he replied.
I was enjoying my hike. But was he? Kelly is running more than two marathons each day and climbing the equivalent of Mount Everest nearly every other day as he runs from Georgia to Maine, enduring rain and hail and stealing a few hours of sleep here and there in the back of an SUV that his crew drives to rendezvous points.
True, he's achieving a superhuman feat, and possibly a world record. But I seriously doubt he's feeling the sense of awe that I felt walking that same path.
Kelly had no time to pause and gape at the mountain laurels in full bloom, which turned the path into a colonnade of pale, pink blossoms that gave the illusion of a June snowfall. He had no time to stop and listen to the flutelike call of the wood thrush, or of the otherworldly veery, which sings descending trills as if through a metal pipe. He didn't have the luxury of pausing to smile at the wobbly fawns following their mothers, or to laugh at the wild turkeys breaking awkwardly into a run when they saw us.
I wandered happily along the trail last week spotting the colors of the forest in spring: the red columbine, the lavender wild geranium, the lacy maple-leaf viburnum, the tiny daisies of the Philadelphia fleabane, the ubiquitous white petals of the blackberry, and the little pink bells of the Eastern beardtongue. I found myself talking back to the birds that seemed to be following us: the Eastern towhee (drink-your-TEA), the red-eyed vireo (Here I am. Where are you?) and the occasional chestnut-sided warbler (Pleased, pleased, pleased to meetcha.)
Turning one bend, I found acres of wild hydrangea blooming delicate and white. Around another, I spotted a mourning-cloak butterfly on a rock, then watched the shy forest creature flutter into the canopy to join half a dozen of its brethren in a twirling dance. I stopped and admired the American chestnut saplings, doomed to succumb to the chestnut blight but still persisting, determinedly, in resprouting. A stand of sweet birch presided over a forest floor of hay-scented fern, followed by an old-growth forest of northern red oak above a spicebush understory. Looking up at various times, I saw shagbark hickory, black cherry and, improbably, white ash that hadn't yet been felled by the emerald ash borer. Looking down, where my hiking poles kept sinking into vole tunnels under the path, I saw the tiny white teardrops of Virginia waterleaf and a carpet of dainty bluets.
I stumbled upon a patch of puffy white flowers garnished with lily-like leaves. Stumped, I checked my iNaturalist app and identified it as fly poison. I saved the observation and, with my phone already out, checked my progress on All Trails. It had taken me 37 minutes to walk a single mile. I put my phone away and continued dawdling in the forest.
This is what keeps me going during this terrible time for our country, for our world and for our planet. Each morning on the farm, I sit on the porch and listen to the birds. Each evening, I sit on the porch and watch the fireflies. On clear nights, I gaze into the blackness until my eyes adjust and the Milky Way appears. Thus restored, I am ready to face whatever man-made (or AI-made) calamity the next news cycle brings.
'We need the tonic of wildness,' Thoreau wrote nearly two centuries ago. He knew what all human generations have known, intuitively. Time in nature improves our mood and clears our head. Now, we have a rich reservoir of experimental science to prove it. Study after study has found that a connection to nature enhances our hedonic well-being (sense of happiness) and our eudaimonic well-being (sense of worth and purpose), while lifting us from anxiety and depression and boosting our physical health. Contact with nature lowers our pulse, reduces cortisol levels, improves immunity, lengthens our attention span and reduces stress. Walking in nature, or even viewing pictures of nature or hearing nature sounds, improves our cognitive functioning, measured by tasks such as repeating strings of numbers backward.
Less understood is why nature has such a profound effect on our well-being — but this, too, is coming into focus.
Time in nature often involves exercise, which has its own benefits. Being in nonthreatening natural environments, by reducing stress, improves mood. But the benefit goes much further than both of these.
One idea, called attention restoration theory, holds that nature captures our involuntary attention with 'soft fascination,' which allows our brains to recover from all of the screen-driven things that demand our attention and bombard our minds for much of the day. 'It helps reduce that cognitive fatigue,' says John Zelenski, a psychologist at Carleton University in Canada who studies nature's effects on well-being. 'It's an optimal flow of information, where there are things to be curious about but not constantly demanding all our attention, so our minds can restore.'
Another idea, the perceptual-fluency theory, holds that natural forms — non-straight edges, less color saturation, more variation — are inherently easier for the human brain to process. Studies have found that people are better able to solve puzzles after being shown images of visually complex natural environments than after viewing images of human-built environments.
Researchers are also finding that experiences in nature enhance feelings of well-being by giving us a sense of awe. A view of nature's vastness — a starry night, a mountain vista — make us feel that we are part of something larger than ourselves.
All of these ideas, in turn, are compatible with a much deeper hypothesis: that a connection with nature is innate, programmed into us by evolution. Four decades ago, the great naturalist E.O. Wilson termed this the 'biophilia' hypothesis. 'For more than 99 percent of human history people have lived in hunter-gatherer bands totally and intimately involved with other organisms,' he wrote. 'In short, the brain evolved in a biocentric world, not a machine-regulated world. It would be therefore quite extraordinary to find that all learning rules related to that world have been erased in a few thousand years, even in the tiny minority of peoples who have existed for more than one or two generations in wholly urban environments.'
Rachel Carson, credited with launching the modern conservation movement, said much the same thing in 1954: 'Our origins are of the earth. And so there is in us a deeply seated response to the natural universe, which is part of our humanity.'
The evidence for this is all around us, from the common fear of snakes and spiders that can be found in all cultures to the ways in which we design our parks and gardens. We like to be near water, and we like landscapes that give us a clear field of view while also providing trees or other elements of shelter. In other words, we are re-creating the savannas on which our ancestors chose to live for 2 million years.
'People seem to have an inherent, and I would argue hardwired, preference for nature scenes over a metropolis or a built landscape or geometric patterns or something abstract,' says Cindy Frantz, a professor of psychology and environmental studies at Oberlin College. 'We really gravitate towards natural stimuli. When you're trying to run a study and you want to expose people to nature or something else, it's very hard, in fact I would say impossible, to find a controlled condition that people like as much as nature.'
Research backs this up. Office workers without windows are far more likely to have plants and nature pictures at work than workers who have windows. Study participants who take nature walks with expansive views gain more cognitive benefit than those who take walks with limited views. Even in restaurants, our preference for booths over tables in the open seems to have an origin on the savanna.
Whatever causes our need for the tonic of nature, we now know how to maximize the benefit. Those who know more about the plants and animals they are viewing, those who interact more with nature or those who simply are more mindful about their nature experiences tend to derive more cognitive and mood improvements. Rich nature environments, with greater biodiversity, also tend to provide more mental lift than depleted green spaces.
Yet even the most hardened urban dweller can get the sense of well-being that comes from contact with nature. 'We know that spending as little as 15 minutes in nature, a 15-minute walk in the park, can help people restore their cognitive function,' Frantz argues. And if even that is too much, you don't have to leave your apartment. Zelenski says a minute-long nature video 'is enough to give a pretty substantial mood boost.' Because of technology, we as humans have never been more disconnected from nature — yet, paradoxically, that same technology makes it easier than ever to reconnect with nature.
This is encouraging not just for human happiness but also for the planet, for those who maintain some connection to nature are more likely to embrace conservation and to join the struggle to arrest the collapse of biodiversity. That is the truest expression of biophilia. As E.O. Wilson wrote: 'It seems possible that the naturalist's vision is only a specialized product of a biophilic instinct shared by all, that it can be elaborated to benefit more and more people. Humanity is exalted not because we are so far above other living creatures, but because knowing them well elevates the very concept of life.'
I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue.
Israel attacked Iran. President Donald Trump attacked Los Angeles protesters with the National Guard and Marines. A maniac targeted Minnesota lawmakers for assassination, killing two people. And, as the country and the world continued to spiral into chaos and violence, Trump celebrated the Army his birthday with a parade.
But even this level of mayhem didn't breach the calm of the trail.
Our plan had been to do the 107.5 miles of the Appalachian Trail that runs through Shenandoah National Park in six days. We started out strong — too strong, it turns out. My brother's knee gave out early on Day 4 and we called it quits after 63 miles, with plans to finish in the fall. Though we failed to reach our goal, the hike was a triumph in other ways, some of them unexpected.
I only started learning bird calls this spring, but after a couple of days in the woods, I could identify all of the usual suspects of the forest: the towhee and the ovenbird, the American redstart and the indigo bunting, the eastern wood pewee and the tufted titmouse. Whenever I heard an unfamiliar call, I opened my Merlin app, which uses AI to turn any novice into an expert birder. It alerted me to the presence of a scarlet tanager and a blue-headed vireo and all manner of warblers: worm-eating, chestnut-sided, cerulean, hooded and black-and-white.
After a couple of years of practice, even my aging brain can now identify many of the trees and shrubs of the forest, the oaks and hickories, the witch hazel and striped maple, the tulip trees and the black locust. The rest I could identify with iNaturalist, which is like carrying a biologist in your pocket. Here, it told me, was the mayapple and the hairy-jointed meadow parsnip. There was the black cohosh and the waxy meadow-rue. The tiger swallowtail butterfly I knew by sight, but the app told me that the huge blue insect I found was an oil beetle, the large snail was an eastern whitelip, and the tiny snake with a yellow collar the northern ring-necked snake. The furry scat I found told me there were larger carnivores — coyotes? bobcats? black bears? — who weren't allowing themselves to be seen.
There was a time when I would have worried with every step on the trail that a bear or a copperhead was about to strike. But as I have spent more time in the woods and in the meadows, I have come to understand that, while some critters are capable of hurting us, virtually none of them mean us harm. I was in the forest, and I was among friends.
Before I left the trail, I paused at an overlook. From there I could see the Shenandoah Valley and, before that, massive outcroppings of the 1.2-billion-year-old granite that once pushed the Blue Ridge as high as the Himalayas. I felt that sense of awe that the researchers talk about — and I was ready to go back to work.
