The National Geographic Society: Imagine A Therapy That Had No Known Consequences

While walking along a city street did not, Bratman’s. Similar to short term memory.

Imagine a therapy that had no known aftereffect, was readily available, and could improve your cognitive functioning at zero cost, the researchers wrote in their paper. Remember, it exists, they continued, and it’s called interacting with nature. Utah trip, Strayer’s team sent me my results EEG test. The colorful graph charted my power brain waves at a range of frequencies and compared them with samples from the two groups that had stayed in the city. Actually the San soft fascination Juan River had apparently quieted my prefrontal cortex, at least for a while, My theta signals were indeed lower than theirs.

All this evidence for nature benefits is pouring in at a time when disconnection from it is pervasive, says Lisa Nisbet, a psychology professor at Canada’s Trent University. Per capita visits been declining since email dawn, we love our state and national parks. For example, have visits to the backyard. Nevertheless, one recent Nature Conservancy poll found that only about 10 American percent teens spend time outside every day. Ok, and now one of the most important parts. As indicated by research by Public Harvard School Health, American adults spend less time outdoors than they do inside vehicles less than 5 their day percent. Strayer is most interested in how nature affects higher order problem solving. Certainly, his research builds on the attention restoration theory proposed by environmental psychologists Stephen and Rachel Kaplan at Michigan University. Usually, they argue that it’s the visual elements in natural environments sunsets, streams, butterflies that reduce stress and mental fatigue. Fascinating but not too demanding, such stimuli promote a gentle, soft focus that allows our brains to wander, rest, and recover from what Olmsted called city nervous irritation life. Soft fascination. Kaplans and the benefit seems to carry over when we head back indoors.

While meaning most major towns should be near one, saneum is one of three official healing forests in South Korea, 34 more are planned by 2017. Basically the Korea Forest Service expects to appoint 500 health rangers in years next couple, Chungbuk University offers a forest healing degree program, and job prospects for graduates are good. It’s a cradle to grave operation. Just think for a moment. Programs include everything from prenatal forest meditation to woodcrafts for cancer patients to forest burials. Notice, sobaeksan National Park.

In a forest kindergarten in Langnau am Albis, a suburb of Zurich, Switzerland, children spend a bunch of the school day in the woods, weather regardless.

They’re able to explore, They learn whittling, fire starting, and denbuilding. Supporters say such schools foster selfconfidence and an independent spirit. Nature nurtures us. It boosts our mood too. Whenever in line with the attention restoration theory, spending time in nature relieves the stress and mental fatigue caused by the directed attention that work and city life require.

Engineer Matthew Sakae Forkin is back in the San Francisco area, after two years living in the wild. He still gets away to California’s Lost Coast to swing through trees. He says, I’m in a state of flow, full of energy and passion and calm, when I’m in the wilderness and feel part of it. In some countries governments are promoting nature experiences as a public health policy. Also, in Finland, a country that struggles with high rates of depression, alcoholism, and suicide, ‘governmentfunded’ researchers asked thousands of people to rate their moods and stress levels after visiting both natural and urban areas. On the basis of that study and others, Professor Liisa Tyrväinen and her team at the Natural Resources Institute Finland recommend a minimum nature dose of five hours a month a fewa few short visits a week to ward off the blues. It is kalevi Korpela, a professor of psychology at Tampere University. He has helped design a half dozen power trails that encourage walking, mindfulness, and reflection. Signs on them say things like, Squat down and touch a plant.

Perhaps noone has embraced nature medicalization with more enthusiasm than the South Koreans.

Many suffer from work stress, digital addiction, and intense academic pressures. As pointed out by a survey by electronics giant Samsung, more than 70 percent say their jobs. Make them depressed. Therefore, this economically powerful nation has a long history of worshipping nature spirits. Basically the ancient proverb Shin to bul ee Body and soil are one is still popular. Photographer Lucas Foglia grew up on a family farm in New York and currently lives in San Francisco. Furthermore, his work is exhibited and collected internationally. That’s interesting. This is his first feature for National Geographic magazine.

Korean researchers used functional MRI to watch brain activity in people viewing different images. Their brains showed more blood flow in the amygdala, that processes fear and anxiety, when the volunteers were looking at urban scenes. In contrast, the natural scenes lit up the anterior cingulate and the insula areas associated with empathy and altruism. Now look. Maybe nature makes us nicer as well as calmer. In Sweden physician Matilda van den Bosch found that after a stressful math task, subjects’ heart rate variability which decreases with stress returned to normal more quickly when they sat through 15 nature minutes scenes and birdsong in a 3 D virtual reality room than when they sat in a plain room. Snake River Correctional Institution in eastern Oregon. That’s where it starts getting interestinginteresting. Officers there report calmer behavior in solitary confinement prisoners who exercise for 40 minutes a couple ofa couple of days a week in a blueish room where nature videos are playing, compared with those who exercise in a gym without videos. Michael Lea. He has experienced the difference. There’s a bunch of yelling really loud it echoes horribly, in the plain gym, he says. Seriously. In the blueish room they tend not to yell. Eventually, they say, ‘Hold on, By the way I got to watch my video.

Japanese researchers led by Yoshifumi Miyazaki at Chiba University sent 84 subjects to stroll in seven different forests, while volunteers same number walked around city centers. The forest walkers hit a relaxation jackpot. Certainly, overall they showed a 16 percent decrease in the stress hormone cortisol, a 2 percent drop in blood pressure, and a 4 percent drop in heart rate. Needless to say, miyazaki believes our bodies relax in pleasant, natural surroundings because they evolved there. Our senses are adapted to interpret information about plants and streams, he says, not traffic and highrises.

His claim was based less on science than on intuition, Olmsted was exaggerating. It was an intuition with a long history. It went back at least to Cyrus the Great, who some 2500 years ago built gardens for relaxation in Persia busy capital. A well-known fact that is. Paracelsus, the 16thcentury GermanSwiss physician, gave voice to that same intuition when he wrote, healing art comes from nature, not from the physician. Whenever sitting on the River banks Wye, William Wordsworth marveled at how an eye made quiet by the power / Of harmony offered relief from fever of the world the fever, in 1798. American writers similar to Ralph Waldo Emerson and John Muir inherited that outlook. With Olmsted, they built the spiritual and emotional case for creating the world’s first national parks by claiming that nature had healing powers.

Strayer’s graduate students tuck my head into a sort of bathing cap with 12 electrodes embedded in it, while the enchiladas are cooking. They suction cup another 6 electrodes to my face. On top of this, wires sprouting from them will send my brain’s electrical signals to a recorder for later analysis. Feeling like a beached sea urchin, I actually walk carefully to a grassy bank along the San Juan River for ten restful minutes contemplation. It’s easy to forget for a few moments that I ever had them.

Maddie Roark swims among lily pads in her family’s pond in western North Carolina.

Her father runs an outdoor education center. Only 31 their children percent do, In a recent study, some 70 percent of mothers reported that they played outside every day as children. On top of this, ‘ice hole’ bathing is a welcome release for the bold, when gray winter encloses Sweden. Joshua and Cecilie are enjoying a quick dip which feels much longer in Källtorpssjön, a lake near Stockholm, in February. That’s where it starts getting entertaining, right, right? It is the way I immerse myself in nature when the elements are unkind, Joshua says.

It may also make us nicer to ourselves.

Stanford researcher Greg Bratman and his colleagues scanned 38 brains volunteers before and after they walked for 90 minutes, either in a large park or on a busy street in downtown Palo Alto. Not the city walkers, showed decreased activity in the subgenual prefrontal cortex a brain part tied to depressive rumination and from their own reports, the nature walkers beat themselves up less, the nature walkers. Bratman believes that being outside in a pleasant environment takes us outside of ourselves in a good way. Nature, he says, may influence how you allocate your attention and if you focus on negative emotions.

Delaney Doyle holds edible daylilies she picked from her family’s land in eastern mountains Kentucky. The Doyles live off the grid, surrounded by forest. Scientific evidence indicates that even a trip to the backyard or a city park provides health and psychological benefits. In England researchers from Exeter University Medical School recently analyzed mental health data from 10000 city dwellers and used high resolution mapping to track where the subjects had lived over 18 years. They found that people living near more light green space reported less mental distress, even after adjusting for income, education, and employment. In 2009 a team of Dutch researchers found a lower incidence of 15 diseases including depression, anxiety, heart disease, diabetes, asthma, and migraines in people who lived within about a half mile of light green space. In 2015 an international team overlaid health questionnaire responses from more than 31000 Toronto residents onto a city map, block by block. Nonetheless, those living on blocks with more trees showed a boost in heart and metabolic health equivalent to what one would experience from a