>> Amy Draves: My name is Amy Draves and I'm pleased to welcome J. Nichols to the Microsoft
Research Visiting Speaker Series. J. is here to discuss his book Blue Mind: The Surprising
Science That Shows How Being near, in, on or under Water Can Make You Happier, Healthier,
More Connected and Better at What You Do. His research and expeditions have taken him to
coasts and waterways across the planet where he continually finds that emotional connection
to waters of all kinds is what keeps people working hard to understand and restore or planet. J.
is a research associate at California Academy of sciences and a cofounder of several
organizations devoted to advocacy and conservation. They include Ocean Revolution, See the
Wild and LivBlue. He has authored or co-authored more than 50 scientific books, or papers and
his work has been featured in numerous media outlets and magazines including NPR, BBC,
National Geographic, Time, Newsweek and GQ. Please join me in giving him a very warm
welcome. [applause].
>> Wallace J. Nichols: Thank you. How's everybody doing? Good? I want to make sure that
everybody who has come in has gotten one of these, or I guess the better way to ask that
question is does anybody not have one of these blue marbles? Nice work in passing those out.
What I want to do, this is the first adult book that I've written. My previous book was a kid’s
book and so this is the first book tour that I've done for adults. Doing a book tour for kids is
very different. You pull the chairs in a circle and you read the story about the sea turtles
together and it's quite intimate and fun and unpredictable. But this is a little bit different, so
I'm learning about book talks and I have decided to make every single book talk I do on this
book tour different from the others in some way. And I call it my deconstructed book tour, and
so the way I want to start out today is if you've got your blue marble, take it out and look
around and find somebody that you didn't walk into the room with that you are not sitting with
on purpose, maybe that you don't know so well and pair up or get into a group of three
because sometimes the number is a little bit off. And what I want you to do is just trade your
blue marbles with that person. Make sure you know their name and I want you to answer a
very simple question. Tell them where you fell in love with water. What's your water? What
was that place where there was a lake or a river or a swimming pool or maybe an ocean, maybe
a blowup pool maybe a puddle. Who knows? But go back, dig back into your earlier years or
maybe it's more recent, and just described that place and what it was like, how it felt, who you
were with and what it may mean to you. And then we will take about five minutes and then
we'll get back together and continue the conversation. Over to you guys, go for it and I'll let
you know when your five minutes is up. [multiple speakers]
>> Wallace J. Nichols: You can talk to each other. It's all right. [multiple speakers]
>> Wallace J. Nichols: All right. If you have not heard the other person's story, please make
sure that you have and wrap up your short conversation on a little bit there and we'll focus
back on Blue Mind. I'm going to ask you not to tell your own story, but if anybody listened to
an intriguing or interesting story, I'm sure there were quite a few, but I just want to ask a couple
of people if they would like to share a short version, a summary of what they just heard.
>>: I'm Brian and I spoke with Kate just now. One thing we both shared was we both grew up
on the coast; Kate from nearby Boston, and the point where she realized that she fell in love
with the water was when they visited Tennessee, I believe it was, and realized that there was
no ocean nearby and started getting claustrophobic. And all they had was a brown river going
through the middle of town. And just where is the water was kind of the overwhelming
thought and feeling.
>> Wallace J. Nichols: Very good. Another story or another insight from this side. I need
someone itching to speak, and I'll call on you if you don't raise your hand. [laughter].
>>: I talked to Wasco and he lived in Hawaii for about ten years he said some time ago and he
has two favorite places there. One is Salt Pond Beach where you can see the salt every day.
The second was Turtle Bay which seems also to be a nice place and which was where he had his
first date with his wife.
>> Wallace J. Nichols: Very nice. I think one of the common things is you ask that simple
question and everybody's got an answer to it. Everybody can find something in their
background, something in their childhood or even in their recent history that connects them
and their life story to water in some way. And it may be in Tennessee. It may be in Hawaii. It
may be in Boston. It may be here around the sound. For me when I think about that question I
think of my dad and it's more of a series of waters, but always from a very young age, always
with him and that's sort of a very personal and poignant thing to share right now because right
now he is in the hospital hanging on. I think he's going to be all right, but we talk every day and
I say Dad, when you get out we're going to swim. We're going to go for a swim. We're going to
go to a lake. We're going to go to the ocean and we're going to swim together and my earliest
memories that I maybe remember from photographs even are my dad holding me in the ocean.
And when I think of that, when I just think of that photograph right now I can feel his back. I
can feel his shoulders. I can feel what it feels like to hang on to someone you love in the water
and those are great memories and they are so much a part of being a kid and being in the water
together as adults and then as his health fails, that water still being a thing in our lives together
that heals both of us. Jumping forward, my daughter, I have two daughters. One is nine and
one is twelve. Julia, the younger daughter came home from kindergarten, and by the way, I
told this story recently and she corrected me. I said that it was first grade and then afterward
she pulled me aside and said dad, good story, but it was kindergarten. She was learning to
write and had written her first sentence, her first full sentence and she came home from school
and handed me this scrap of paper. And it said my favorite thing to do is swim with my dad,
and she handed me that piece of paper and I read it and she had written it with help. It was
quite an accomplishment, but her first sentence was that same sentiment that I would have
said that myself at her age and I would have written that and I probably even did write that in
kindergarten. As a marine biologist my background, I fell in love with water at an early age and
somehow fell in love with turtles at a slightly later age, catching snapping turtles in the
Chesapeake Bay and releasing them as a kid and then sometimes recapturing them and
painting numbers on their shells and letting them go. And then sometimes catching a few
turtles with numbers painted on their shells, and then in just a pure sense of play I was also
kind of a math geek, so we would do basic algebra to try to figure out how many sea turtles
were in this branch of the Chesapeake Bay so basic mark, recapture statistics, but we didn't call
it that. It was a game for us. But I would stay awake at night trying to figure out different ways
not only to catch the turtles and tag them with paint, but also to calculate the population size
and just very rudimentary, early math turtle geekiness at about twelve years of age. And then
later found myself going into marine biology and following that passion and going to grad
school and studying economics and studying ecology for a doctorate and studying sea turtles
and putting it all together and getting involved in tracking sea turtles around the ocean, doing
genetic research. Basically, we learned everything you might want to ask about that population
of sea turtles off the Pacific coast of Baja, what they eat, how they digested, how far they swim,
how long they live, how fast they grow, their migratory routes and so on and so forth, piles of
research. But the thing that I realized is that pile of science was getting bigger. My CV was
getting longer. Our team was winning awards and getting involved in higher levels of
professional societies, but that science wasn't saving sea turtles. It didn't just translate to
action, because the regulatory agencies were not just sitting there waiting for science and
ready to act with adequate funding. It was just kind of nonexistent. I realized that in order to
do what I thought I was there to do, which was to make sure these animals didn't go extinct, I
needed a whole different set of skills that involve communication with people who didn't look
like me, who didn't have the same backgrounds that I did, who made a living hunting sea turtles
and selling their meat, who grew you eating sea turtles and living in coastal communities, who
also had an appreciation for and a love of the ocean, who grew up swimming in the ocean and
climbing on their parents shoulders, but thought about sea turtles in a very different way. And
that led me to start to communicate with people outside of my department, and I think you
probably can relate to that here as you try to solve new problems. Sometimes you need to go
knock on a door of a different building. Sometimes it's not even an adjacent building and talk
to people in different departments with vastly different skill sets. What I realized is the
departments I needed to talk to were folks in geography, anthropology, sociology, not just
evolutionary biology and ecology. But even more fields, people in the cognitive sciences,
neuropsychologists, because the emotional drivers of the problems we were trying to solve and
the emotional drivers of the solutions to those problems were probably best understood in a
technical sense by the people who study the human brain. And so that made logical sense to
me, but my committee, my graduate school, my doctoral committee, you know, basically rolled
their eyes at that idea. They said, you know, don't go there, son. That is career suicide. You're
talking crazy talk. Just stick to turtle ecology, publish your papers. You've got a nice career I
had. You can be a turtle biologist. Our job is to keep you within the lines. Just keep doing that
stuff. Get your peer review publications out and everything will be okay. But I had this idea
that it wouldn't be okay unless we started reaching across the aisle or across the campus and
pulling disciplines together. And so that's kind of the early lead up to this project that I now call
Blue Mind and I started to hang out with neuroscientists and asked them what they thought
about the ocean, what they thought about water. What did they think it was that compelled
people to feel these feelings that we just discussed? And maybe water was no different than
say, you know, a dry erase board on the wall or maybe swimming in the ocean was no different
than say bowling with your parents. Maybe there's nothing special about it, but what was
special was the interaction with those you love. So as I started to dig into it I realized that no.
It seems that there's something about water that is different than bowling, or different than a
painting on the wall. There's something about having that water experience that changes our
brain, changes our physiology in a unique way. And as we started to get neuroscientists
together and have these Blue Mind summits, as we called them, and started to connect the
dots, a story emerged that has become this book. I remember having the feeling that I was
completely unprepared to be the convener of this conversation. I was certainly not the guy to
write this book. I had a PhD in ecology and evolutionary biology, not cognitive science, not
neuroscience. I was trying to get quickly up to speed and attend neuroscience conferences and
listen to neuroscience lectures on, you know, recorded, while swimming laps. In fact, I listen to
MIT neuroscience lectures underwater while swimming laps was the way I took neuroscience
courses. And for two years I tried very hard to give this project away. I was convinced that this
was not really something that I would be doing myself in that there were other people that
should probably be the ones who would better take this forward. Let me read a little passage.
As a non-neuroscientist, I composed a rather good proposal about blue mind and submitted it
to the foundation. In this case the foundation was Pew Charitable Trusts, and I had been
nominated for a Fellowship. The first round, the first time I was nominated for that Fellowship,
I wrote a proposal about sea turtles and I had been denied it because I was "too young." This
time, the second time I was nominated the response was "too creative." So too young and too
creative not so bad but unfunded. Despite these setbacks both projects have moved forward
and I have greatly enjoyed the many collaborations and contributions that have come from
them. Now I am neither too young nor too creative, but I am patient, persistent and truly
enamored. I love water. I love the ocean and that's kind of the driver of the whole thing. This
book is the result of that mix, a life driven by a love of water, some patience and persistence
and a lot of collaboration and conversation with fellow water lovers and scientists, a truly
excellent group of people. So the initial part of this project was to really try to give it away to
someone better prepared, smarter with a different skill set more appropriate for this project,
and I was unsuccessful in doing that. But as we started to bring people together and connect
the dots, what we found were two things. The leading neuroscientists that were invited to the
Blue Mind summits all said when they were first invited with the phone call, all said I think
you've got the wrong person. I don't study the brain on water. I don't study the brain on
oceans. I don't study the brain on blue. I don't think I'm the right person to come to this
conference. And then a little bit later in the conversation they would say I really want to be at
that conference. I really want to be in the room. I understand and I think I can contribute.
Even though the research right on top of the question was nonexistent, we started to place
dots all-around our dot and then we started to connect those dots. And the way we would do
that is we would take a water practitioner, somebody perhaps with the last name Cousteau or a
big wave surfer like Jeff Clark who served Mavericks by himself for ten years or an adventurer, a
river guide, somebody who spent their life in, on or under water and we would tear them up
with a neuroscientist and we would give them a new question that neither of them had thought
about. In the case of Jeff Clark, the guy exudes ocean. He exudes confidence in the water. He
surfs mountains of water and is somewhat fearless about it and highly skilled and still alive to
tell his story. I paired him up with Howard Fields who is a neuroscientist from UCSF who
studies pain and pleasure feedback loops, the dopamine system. He's a very well known
neuroscientist and very well respected. And paired them up, put them on stage together with
microphone and said Howard, can you explain to Jeff something about what's going on inside of
him when he is pulled to the water. Why does he insist on going out and out and out into these
big waves that nobody else has the guts to surf ever since he was very little? And so to listen to
them converse, Howard becoming more interested in the neuroscience of surfing, if you will, or
surf addiction would probably be a better description for Jeff, at least, and Jeff becoming more
interested in his own brain and what really is going on behind the scenes. And so each year we
would bring together neuroscientists and probably not the best term for them, but nonneuroscientists and psychologists and non-psychologists and pair them up sometimes in groups
of three and pose these questions. Four years of that, this past year a guy named Paul Piff from
UC Berkeley used to study the science of awe, now there's a cool job description. What do you
do? I study the science of awe. Well what do you mean? I hang out with people who are
feeling that feeling of awe and wonder and I tried to figure out what is happening
physiologically to create that feeling. That's his job. We paired him up with a musician named
Alexi Murdoch whose music is inspired by natural awe and wonder. If you listen to his music
there's a song called Orange Sky and another one called Blue Mind about, really, that's created
out of that relationship that he has with wild nature. We paired them up and let them go at
this conversation about the science of awe and the practice of awe, and how Alexi through his
music makes awe portable, which is an interesting way to think about art and music. So when
you listen to a song it takes you to that place, perhaps. If you look at a painting, if you look at a
photograph, it takes you to that original place, makes awe portable. Those are another chapter
of the Blue Mind conversation. I'm going to read a little bit since this is a book reading, but
before that, so speaking of awe, I know I'm supposed to talk about my book, but I love talking
about the other books that I'm reading, or the books that I'm reading at the moment. Here's a
book by James Nestor. It's called Deep. James is a journalist and writer. He works for Outside
Magazine and the New Yorker and the Atlantic Monthly and others. He decided that he would
just go in search of these incredible free divers and spend time with them and then learn to
free dive himself and pushed his own limits and go further underwater and work on his breath
hold and start to investigate the physiology of free diving. And what emerged is this kind of
wild story of traveling around the world with people who are addicted to free diving on some
levels, but also people who use free diving to study wild animals, who free dive with sperm
whales in order to get closer to them in ways that you can't if you are breathing through a noisy
apparatus. What he discovered wasn't so much the desire to go deeper and further and longer,
but the desire to find that place inside himself where he was deep enough for long enough and
had this Blue Mind feeling where he felt completely disconnected from our material, busy sort
of online world and could just get away and hit that big blue reset button. So his is a Blue Mind
journey though he doesn't quite name it that, that occurs deep underwater holding one's
breath. And then Philip wrote this book, Philip Hoare, H-o-a-r-e, British guy, great writer wrote
this book called The Sea Inside and he explores the world, the ocean on the surface mostly and
describes different kinds of interactions with the natural oceanic world. I grabbed this book not
only because I really like it, but he wrote a review of Blue Mind in The Guardian that was rather
glib and very British and I say that in a loving way, perhaps. As a guy who loves to swim, he
called himself a wild swimmer. He swims year-round off the coast of the UK. He loves whales.
His Twitter handle is PhilipWhale. He's a brilliant writer, but in his review he tries so hard to
deny his emotional connection to the water throughout the review. You just feel him and his
Britishness resisting the emotional connection to water and the poetry of it, and for lack of a
better word, the spiritual feeling and just trying so hard, and then finally, at the end of a, you
know, 500 word mini review, he sort of relentless and gives him and says well. That guy from
California just may be onto something and I just thought that was just the classic and wonderful
skeptical resistant but ultimately acquiescing to this idea that this is who we are. We are, in
fact, water beings and that sounds so cliché and corny and woo woo and metaphysical and I'm
coming at it not from that point of view, but coming at it from a point of view of an
evolutionary biologist and bringing that conversation a little bit further forward. Tim Beatley is
the head of urban planning at the University of Virginia and has written a book called Blue
Urbanism that just came out, so very serious academic guy, head of a department. He's an
architect and a planner and a director of a whole department at UVA and he writes about how
to build cities and how to create buildings that are more compatible with water, more
compatible with living on the coast, living by rivers, living by lakes and how to bring those
feelings and those activities inside and how to make sure the people in those buildings, in those
communities are maximizing the cognitive, emotional and social capital that's at our doorsteps
when we live along waterways. I think here in Seattle, the greater Seattle area, the lakes -- I
swam in your late this afternoon right before I came over here. The ocean, the sound, we're
surrounded by waters that are world-class and then certain times of the year we are
surrounded by waters from above that fall on our heads and those can be appreciated as well. I
want to give you a little idea of what, where the practice of Blue Mind can go. There's a guy
named Van Curaza, who is a former pro surfer, former drug addict who it turned his career in
surfing and his recovery are his in process recovery into a way to help people. And what he
does is he and his team take veterans who have various kinds of injuries and posttraumatic
stress, takes them out and they go surfing, and in some cases it's quite a good therapy. There's
a passage right here that I want to share. I had my own accident. I was driving a tractor at our
little farm back in California, clearing a trail, hit a log and the tractor rolled as they tend to do,
but in this case it rolled off of a 30 foot cliff and landed in a creek at the bottom of the cliff and I
was intact but pretty banged up, my head, my body. The tractor was completely totaled, so
there we are in the bottom of the cliff in the creek and went to the hospital and, you know, did
all the right things, but this connects to Van’s work. So the doctor diagnosed posttraumatic
stress. All I knew was that my brain and body were both a mess. I was an all-around lifelong
athlete with excellent balance and ordination and yet now I couldn't walk down steep stairs or
to send an escalator without the feeling of rolling off a cliff. I'd been an impeccable speller, but
now I was making mistakes on the simplest words. The months since the accident were marked
by slow recovery aided by water. I took long soaks in the bathtub with tons of Epsom salts at
first. Then later I could get into the hot tub, my girls beside me to lift my spirits. I hobbled
around on crutches for a month and a cane for a couple of months after that. I went
swimming, well bobbing, in the cold Pacific, therapy for both my banged up body and mind.
One day I walked back to the place where the tractor and I had landed. Standing in the icy
waters of Millcreek at the base of the cliff also helps to heal the mental trauma. Soon after the
accident, I embedded myself with Van Curaza’s team at Operation Surf. It didn't take long
before I was in the water side-by-side with guys like Martin Pollack who had lost limbs in the
Middle East. And so Martin is a British veteran. He has one arm and no legs, has a prosthetic
arm and then he calls them his stubbies that he can put on to walk around. And prior to joining
the Operation Surf team his plan, as he describes it, was to hang out in pubs at home and drink
with his buddies, with his mates and become, literally become a blob, as he puts it, a blob with
one arm. That was sort of his vision for himself. And then he got hooked up with Operation
Surf. It didn't take long before I was in the water side-by-side with guys like Martin Pollack who
had lost his limbs in the Middle East. Of course, I had all my limbs, a clear advantage in the
water, but a malfunctioning rattled brain doesn't care what did the rattling, tractor, IED, car
crash, falling off a cliff or down a flight of stairs. The guys accepted me into their motley band
of surfers, but each morning out in the waves I felt frustrated and weak. My balance was shot
and forward motion brought up that vertiginous feeling of rolling, falling, crashing and a need
to grab a rail. But still we were there; we were all there in the water having fun, cheering each
other on. Then Van said this one's yours, J.. Don't think, no mind, eyes on the beach. I paddled
hard, hopped up and rode it and Van gave me a little push so that helped a little bit. No
thoughts, no rolling, no falling, that wave felt like a never-ending exhale, the opposite of a
micro-moment, a time warp, jazz, a painless birth, summer in my soul, catharsis, a lifetime
somehow packed into a now. I looked over my shoulder and there was Martin surfing the same
wave all the way to the beach. Blue minded and fully stoked we smiled at each other and
paddled back out. The bath when I got home was pretty nice too. So that, a personal
experience interacting with a group of people who found something different by being in the
water and there are many stories about people who have been part of Operation Surf and
groups and organizations like Operation Surf. There's an organization called Heroes on the
Water that takes men and women with posttraumatic stress out kayak fishing. Have any of you
ever been kayak fishing? You may know that kayak is one small part of it and fishing is one
small part of it. Most of the time spent kayak fishing is spent sitting quietly in a boat on the
water, essentially meditating, if you will, but Heroes on the Water doesn't refer to what they do
as meditation because that might remove some of the people who may appreciate that work
because they might say I don't meditate. I don't want to meditate. I want to kayak fish, but
being out on the water is an incredibly calming experience. I'm going to read a couple bits
more. Here's just a quote and getting into a little bit of the explanation. What is going on? So
there are lots of anecdotes, lots of personal feelings, lots of poetry, but what is going on when
we step away from our indoor environment out to the water? What's going on in our brains?
What's the story? And I would go into the stacks in the library and in the bookstores and go
through the various books about the brain and there are many as you probably have noticed,
your brain on music, your brain on technology, your brain on happiness, certainly your brain on
stress. There's even books about your brain on chocolate, your brain on red wine. There are
studies in the literature about your brain on red wine. You can kind of find your brain on fill-in
the blank, just about everything. Your brain on magic is a whole book, on how magicians fool
you by knowing a little bit better how your brain works then you do, and certainly marketing,
the attempt to marry neuroscience and marketing giving marketers an insight into human
purchasing decisions. But I never found any references to water in all of those books. And then
in all of the books about water and the ocean no reference to the human brain, to
neuroscience, to psychology, to the mind, I thought that was a bit of a miss, a bit of a gap that
could be closed. But there was this one guy and his name is Oliver Sacks and he has written a
few books about the brain over the years and is quite beloved in terms of brain researchers and
he has written some popular books. He said there is something about being in water and
swimming which alters my mood, gets my thoughts going as nothing else can. So here's a guy
who studies the brain who writes about it quite famously saying that being in the water gets his
brain going like nothing else can. And he has tried a lot of things if you are familiar with Oliver
Sacks from some legal, some illegal, some dangerous and some a little bit edgy. Theories and
stories would construct themselves in my mind as I swam to and fro or round and around Lake
Jeff. Sentences and paragraphs would write themselves in my mind and at such times I would
have to come to shore every so often to discharge them. So all Oliver, Doctor Sacks would keep
a waterproof notebook, still does, on shore on the dock or on the side of the pool as the case
may be as he swims in lakes, Long Island Sound and swims laps in pools, so that when he has
these ideas that then become his theories and his books and his research, he would have a
place to jot them down and later transcribe them. So what's going on? What do we think is
going on? There are more questions than answers, but the basic story is that when we get
away from voices, so you are not listening to me and you're not processing language, when we
get away from visual distractions, when we get away from background music and the
multitasking we attempt to do day in and day out and we get away from our smart phones and
our laptops and our desktops and quiet our minds, they change. They shift. One of the best
places to do that is just taking a walk outside. There's a quality of thinking, a quality of
conversation that can occur when you just step outside of the four walls, out through the door
and take a walk in the green space. And green space has been studied somewhat, but what the
researchers who studied green space and the brain have found is that when you add some blue
to the green space, when you add a water element to that nature experience it does what it
does even better. And what happens is you move from what’s referred to as the active mode
network to the default mode network, a different set of brain regions that are good for
different activities. So focused, intense number crunching, there's a time and a place for some
urgency and some fear and what I would call red mind to get you through a problem, to get you
out of trouble and then there is a time and a place for what I referred to as blue mind which is
that default mode network to where your cortisol level doesn't go up; it goes down. When
your breathing goes down, your heart rate goes down to a different feeling, that's what people
are paying for when they are paying a 40, 50 sometimes 100 percent premium for that house
on the lake and I drove by a few of them today. The houses on the lake are worth a lot more
than the ones just across the street that don't have that unobstructed view. People buying
those houses are pretty smart, pretty successful and have an extra million dollars in their
pocket to pay a premium and I assume they are not just throwing that money away, that they
think they are getting some value for that extra money for that water view. And what that
value is has to do with relaxation, letting that stress go, reducing your cortisol levels and having
your heart rate and breathing rate drop, so being able to wake up with that available is
important for some people. That whole dynamic is what we call blue mind. I bring Paul Piff
back who studies the science of awe and what he's finding is awe response is true feelings of
wonder lead people to be more altruistic, more compassionate, more connected to those
around them. His research is showing that when you feel awe you move from this me to we as
they say. You have a sense of oneness. And you can see how this conversation quickly can
sound very touchy-feely, very Santa Cruzy as I have been told. I do live near Santa Cruz. I was
born in Manhattan and I consider myself a North American, but it has that sense of being fuzzy.
But as you begin to dig in and connect the dots and talk to the scientists we're just beginning to
understand what's going on with our brains. You understand that there is something more
behind this connection with water. I want to switch over and have some time for questions,
but I want to read one last little bit. And it's I guess a bit of the inspirational piece of the ending
of the book and explains a little bit of why I wanted to give you a blue marble as well. In a
perfect world our waters run healthy, clean and free. Their waves and their currents and their
stillness welcome all of us to heal, to play, create and love abundantly. For many of us until
that moment of observance or submergence we work hard and struggle to maintain our
ancient personal connection to water. There's an interdependency with the natural world that
goes beyond ecosystems, biodiversity or economic benefits. Our neurons and water need each
other to live. All I really want to say is this. Get in the water. Walk along the water. Move
across its surface. Get under it. Sit in it. Leap into it. Listen to it, touch the water. Close your
eyes and drink a big glass. Fall more deeply in love with water and all its shapes, colors and
forms. Let it heal you and make you a better stronger version of yourself. You need water and
water needs you now. I wish you water. Thanks. [applause].
>> Wallace J. Nichols: Those blue marbles are meant as gifts to you and all we ask is that you
hold on to them and then at some point, whenever that may be. It could be tomorrow, could
be in ten years that you give them away to someone who is doing something good and with
whatever message you want to attach to it and then ask them to do the same thing. There are
now a million of them traveling from person-to-person without force. They're given away
freely. There's no agenda other than saying thanks and hopefully, supporting works to make
our planet a little bit healthier. James Cameron took his to the bottom of the ocean when he
built his submarine famously and dove with it. The Dalai Lama got one. The Pope got one, so
[indiscernible], tried to keep things even. Jane Goodall got one; lots of kids have gotten them
and shared them and I call it a killer app because it's socio-physical media, requires no device.
If your power is out, your battery is dead, it still works. You can still pass it on and they just
keep going, so just a simple reminder that we live on this little blue marble we call home and if
we don't take care of it and we don't thank those that do we are headed in a pretty bad
direction. We do have some time for some questions.
>>: I was kind of curious about with the four years you have been doing the combinations of
neurobiologists and others if there haven't been any brain scans involved in that showing real
differences between on and off water?
>> Wallace J. Nichols: Yeah. There's a range of studies -- the question is about if MRIs, brain
scans or EEG working, so there's a range of studies. Some of them are mobile EEG work, so as
you move out of the laboratory, things get a little bit fuzzier because you lose control. You get
somebody walking around through a city with a mobile EEG headset on, there's a lot going on.
There's a lot of influence. They are bringing a lot of baggage, so the data is messy. They're
moving so your EEG is going to be picking up muscle movement and so you have to do a lot of
filtering. There's some research of people moving through green space, through urban space
and then green space with blue added. And as I said, that suggests that green space is good for
a certain kind of thinking, but adding some blue to the green space is even better. You can tell
a story, and this is what evolutionary biologists do. They tell stories about the past because
nobody was around four million years ago to actually say this is true, but Ardipithecus’ remains
are found at the edge of a river, so you can kind of imagine that the earliest remains in the UK
in Europe are found at the end of an estuary. So early humans they would be cruising around
saying where are we going to put home. Well water is important. Water brings food. It brings
hydration and looking at that water would probably feel on some level good. I'll use the word
beauty, although they obviously did not use that word in describing the water, but it would feel
beautiful. It would feel like home, so they would put their camp, their settlement, their lives
within proximity perhaps visually, auditorily within proximity of water. That makes sense,
right? So now we fast-forward. We still have retained those signals. We didn't have, early
humans didn't have GIS. They didn't have any way to really have maps, but they had that
feeling of where to position themselves, and so now we carry that feeling forward. And if you
look at the psychology research you find that humans, across cultures describe images similarly
in terms of what they consider beautiful. A certain amount of vegetation and a certain amount
of water mixed together is considered somewhat universally a beautiful scene, high enough
vantage point to be safe, but also in proximity of water and in greenness. There's some
research that I'll say a little bit about. I can't say too much because it's in peer review, but it's
sort of like a watch this space message. University of Exeter medical school is doing probably
the best blue mind research. Interdisciplinary team of quantitative geographers, psychologists,
sociologists, toxicologists, human health experts, medical doctors and neuroscientists working
on this blue mind set of questions. And they have done some FMRI research and are
reanalyzing the data and that's going to come out shortly, but it provides some nice and
intriguing support for these ideas and it opens up a whole bunch more research. My goal with
this book has been, and has been successful in some ways, has been to prod some young
scientists who are interested in water, interested in conservation, interested in human behavior
and perhaps studied neurosciences as undergrads to connect some of those things and look at
the question that we started out in the beginning. Is being by nature, being by water just like
bowling or is it different in some way? Is there something about being by moving wild water
that changes the way our brains work? And I think that is one of the most fascinating set of
questions around. Yes?
>>: A common experience that divers have, which I would love a scientific explanation for, is
sometimes you're just down underwater scuba diving or using a snorkel and you see a picture
and it's just like this split image, but it's burned into your brain like a picture you've studied for
hours and hours. It doesn't happen all the time, but it's probably happened to me 50 times and
many divers I talked to have the same experience. What's the science behind that?
>> Wallace J. Nichols: I'm going to take a guess at that but I think part of it has to do with the
change in the sensory stimulation that you have. It's sort of like, has anybody ever gotten into
one of those sleep deprivation tanks? You have? Anybody else? Kind of interesting.
>>: They are making a comeback, by the way.
>> Wallace J. Nichols: They are making a comeback and they sound pretty far out and pretty
‘70s, I guess you might say, but it's just you turning off visual stimulation, auditory stimulation,
matching your body temperature with the water temperature and the air temperature and
floating, so gravity kind of goes away. You're not bumping into things. You don't have any
clothes on. You're not seeing anything, so you are turning off what you have become
accustomed to your whole life of this constant busy feed of information that's coming into your
brain. And now your brain is sitting there in the dark and wants to go to work on something
and so it goes to work on your own stuff and it can be a pretty trippy experience. Just standing
on the beach, going for a walk on the beach and standing there by yourself and paying
attention to the sound of the waves and looking at the horizon is a step towards that, sort of
sensory deprivation, flotation tank experience. Being, diving can be a step towards that, so you
have more capacity to create a clear memory, so I think that is some part of what's going on, is
that you're underwater. Things are somewhat simplified and your attention and also your
mask, so your range of you is limited and focused and outlined and framed and now you have
this brain capacity to really focus and create a deep snapshot memory, visual memory of an
animal.
>>: It's like when you are on a two-hour dive, it doesn't do it for the whole thing. It might be
every 30 dives you get that one. Nothing’s [indiscernible]
>> Wallace J. Nichols: When I dive, dives vary in terms of the challenges, the technical
distractions, the number of people that you may be with. If it's a scientific dive there are some
busy work to do. You may have a dive slate. You may have a computer. You have things to do
and stuff going on, sharks, other distractions. Those can keep you busy and perhaps contribute
to that happening. That's, I think, getting an FMRI on a dive boat for getting some of these
mobile EEG technologies out with divers and at the very easy end of things the basic physiology,
spitting in a tube and measuring cortisol levels in different scenarios would be an interesting
research project to work on with the dive community. A good question. Yeah?
>>: Besides writing the book, it seems that you have founded some institutes or organizations.
Can you tell us what those are and what the purposes of them are?
>> Wallace J. Nichols: I helped start several nonprofits and most of them are related to the
ocean. Many are related to protecting endangered species, particularly sea turtles. One
project we started is called SEE turtles.org and essentially it's about finding people who want to
see a turtle, want to go on a vacation with their family or with their friends and find a location
where they can see a sea turtle, be with it on the beach, be with it in the water and have their
vacation benefit conservation. It's a portal that connects people, travelers with those
opportunities and sometimes very small towns, coastal communities where turtle hunters are
looking for alternative incomes. That's one of the projects and I'm on a lot of different advisory
boards and work with several nonprofits that work on coastal protection and fixing fisheries,
reducing by-catch, helping fishermen get cleaner technologies and get a better price for their
seafood, so lots of different projects going on. Yes?
>> Amy Draves: I have an online question from Joslin. She says have you met people that don't
particularly like water and believe they don't have any attraction or special feelings about
water? What do you think about that?
>> Wallace J. Nichols: Very few people will say I hate the ocean. I don't like to look at water. I
don't want to be anywhere near it. A bigger group of people will say I don't like to swim. I
don't like to put my face underwater and that includes my mom. She doesn't like to swim in
the ocean. She doesn't like to swim in a pool. She had some experience as a kid. Some boys
were not particularly kind, a bad time in the water, so she associates swimming with that
experience. She went on her honeymoon with my dad and while they were in the ocean, which
took a lot for her to get in the ocean, he stuck a baby octopus down the back of her swimsuit
and it freaked her out. She doesn't want to go back in the ocean, not cool. And apparently,
Miss Hawaii was somewhere involved in this whole thing which made it even worse and he still
is trying to live that down. But we went on their 50th anniversary back to Hawaii and my
daughters and I convinced my mom to put on her swimsuit, go with us to the ocean, get in the
water and let us hold her as she floated. In my whole life I have never seen her that relaxed
and now she is interested in getting back into the water. The point being we have a biological
affinity for water. Obviously, we need it to survive. We have this attraction to those blue open
horizon spaces that help us relax, perhaps feel more creative, but we also have our culture and
our experiences and you combine all of that and you get us. And we're complex. Each of us has
a bunch of different things going on, so you can't just say everybody feels the same way about
the ocean or about swimming or about being in the dark in a flotation tank. Some people that
sounds like the most nightmarish scenario would be to be in a coffin like tank with the lights out
and the door closed. There's a lot of variation and as you try to study this idea of brain on
water, you have to control for all those different factors and choose what you want to study.
The problem there is how do you take the awesomeness of the ocean and bring it into a lab
inside an FMRI machine? How do you even begin to do that without drastically changing the
experience? That's part of the challenge and you can't scan somebody's brain in the field.
There are some technologies, but as I mentioned they are somewhat limited. You can show
people images, maybe 3-D. This is an interesting group to talk to about the technology, but you
can start to create a virtual ocean experience inside a laboratory while somebody is in an FMRI
having surround sound, a 3-D ocean experience and look at how they respond. Some folks at
Stanford are beginning to do that with virtual natural environments down in the basement at
Stanford Medical School and simulating those kinds of situations and seeing how people's
brains respond.
>>: Are there differences in responses to saltwater versus freshwater?
>> Wallace J. Nichols: Yeah. From a visual point of view it's similar. The differences seem to be
about the horizon and the feeling of open space. If it's a smaller body of water and you're
looking across a lake, those tend to be the freshwater bodies of water or a river. So in terms of
aesthetic appeal there's variation. Some people get a little nervous when the body of water is
enormous and the perspective is low, so they feel that they're potentially vulnerable to waves
or an image that doesn't reference land at all. You showed someone an open ocean image and
if it's an immersive enough image or piece of artwork, some people find that unattractive. It
feels a little scary. It reminds them of being at sea which they may not like. And if you can
reference the land in that image then they feel like okay. Here's the land right here even if it's
just part of the painting or the photograph or the film and they can have that sense. It's not so
much a freshwater or saltwater experience, but then upon immersion it's a different
experience. Your buoyancy, the feel of the water on your skin is different and there are
different levels of appeal of that, so some people really enjoyed the buoyancy and that's an
attractive thing about being in the ocean, being in a very salty sea. The extreme being the 850
pounds of salt put into a very small tank that you climb into and close the hatch is sort of the -people who use those tanks don't even call that water. They call it salt, liquid salt rather than
water with some salt in it. It's more that hyper supersaturated saline solution. But you can
kind of sense that this project has kicked the door open. We're standing in the doorway and
there's this array of fascinating, somewhat esoteric and also practical questions related to
healthcare, related to education, related to each of our well being and obviously related to the
environment, related to real estate, related to the travel industry, related to creativity and
more questions than answers for sure.
>> Amy Draves: I want to save time for book signings, so thank you so much.
>> Wallace J. Nichols: Right. Thank you. [applause]