Friday, May 06, 2011
Get Your Mind Dirty
In 2005, the author introduced us to the idea of childhood nature-deficit disorder. With The Nature Principle, he's back with a
prescription for adults.
By: Richard Louv
Even in small doses, exposure to nature can measurably improve our psychological and physical health.
Photo: Photo by Kahn and Selesnick/Gallery Stock
PERHAPS YOU RECALL A TIME when you took in more of the world. You were new and the
world was new. As a boy, I would go out in the woods and sit under a tree, then lick my thumb
and wet each nostril. I had read somewhere that people—perhaps pioneers or American
Indians, I don't remember—did this in order to keen their sense of smell for approaching game
or danger. I held perfectly still, my back against rough bark, all of my senses waiting. And
slowly, animal life returned. A rabbit appeared under a bush, birds swooped low, an ant went on
a walk-about over my knee. I felt intensely alive.
Can we be new again? In 2005, when my book Last Child in the Woods was published, I wasn't
prepared for the movement that would follow, and for the reaction of adults when they
considered their own lives.
In the book, I introduced the term nature-deficit disorder—not as a medical diagnosis but as a
way to describe the growing gap between children and nature. By its broadest interpretation,
nature-deficit disorder is an atrophied awareness, a diminished ability to find meaning in the life
that surrounds us. When we think of the nature deficit, we usually think of kids spending too
much time indoors plugged into an outlet or computer screen. But after the book's publication, I
heard adults speak with heartfelt emotion, even anger, about their own sense of loss.
That truth seems obvious to some of us, though it has yet to take root in the wider culture.
However, in recent years an emerging body of research has begun to describe the restorative
power of time spent in the natural world. Even in small doses, we are learning, exposure to
nature can measurably improve our psychological and physical health.
While the study of the relationship between mental acuity, creativity, and time spent outdoors is
still a frontier for science, new data suggests that exposure to the living world can even enhance
intelligence. At least two factors are involved: first, our senses and sensibilities can be improved
by spending time in nature; second, the natural environment seems to stimulate our ability to
pay attention, think clearly, and be more creative.
By contrast, I believe the future can be shaped by what I call the Nature Principle, which holds
that in an age of environmental, economic, and social transformation, the future will belong to
the nature-smart—those individuals, businesses, and political leaders who develop a deeper
understanding of nature and balance the virtual with the real.
The skeptic will say that this prescription is at best problematic, given the rate at which we're
destroying nature, and the skeptic will be right. This is why the Nature Principle is about
conservation but also about restoring ourselves while we restore nature; about bringing back
natural habitats where they once existed or creating them where they never were—in our
homes, workplaces, cities, and suburbs. It's about the power of living in nature—not with it but in
it.
The more high-tech our lives become, the more nature we need.
MANY OF US DESIRE a fuller life of the senses. We city dwellers marvel at the seemingly
superhuman or supernatural abilities of "primitive" peoples like the Australian Aborigines but
consider those talents vestigial, like that remnant tailbone. Here's another view: such senses
are in fact latent in all of us, blanketed by noise and faulty assumptions.
In separate research, the U.S. military has studied how some soldiers seem to be able to use
their latent senses to detect roadside bombs and other hazards. The 18-month study of 800
military personnel found that the best bomb spotters were rural people—those who'd grown up
in the woods hunting turkey or deer—as well as those from tough urban neighborhoods, where
it's equally important to be alert. "They just seemed to pick up things much better," reported
Army Sergeant Major Todd Burnett, who worked on the study for the Pentagon's Joint
Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization. "They know how to look at the entire
environment." And the other enlistees, the ones who'd spent more time with Game Boys or at
the mall? They didn't do so well. As Burnett put it, they were focused on the proverbial "screen
rather than the whole surrounding."
The explanation may be partly physiological. Australian researchers suggest that the troubling
increase in nearsightedness is linked to young people spending less time outdoors, where eyes
must focus at longer distances. But more is probably going on here. Good vision, acute hearing,
an attuned sense of smell, spatial awareness—all of these abilities could be operating
simultaneously. This natural advantage offers practical applications. One is an increased ability
to learn; another is an enhanced capability to avoid danger. Still another, perhaps the most
important, is the measurement-defying ability to more fully engage in life.
BUT LET'S BE REALISTIC. Even if we're lucky enough to have bonded with nature when we
were young, maintaining that bond is no easy thing. Information has infiltrated our every waking
minute. Unctuous personalities squawk at us from flat-panel TVs on gas pumps. Billboard
companies replace pasted paper with flashing digital displays. Screens pop up in airports,
coffeehouses, banks, grocery-store checkout lines, even restrooms. Advertisers hawk DVDs for
preschoolers on the paper liners of examination tables in pediatricians' offices. This info-
blitzkrieg has spawned a new field called interruption science and a newly minted condition:
continuous partial attention.
There's no denying the benefits of the Internet. But electronic immersion without a force to
balance it creates a hole in the boat, draining our ability to pay attention, think clearly, be
productive and creative. To combat these losses, our society seems to look everywhere but the
natural domain for the building of better brains, whether through supplements like ginkgo biloba
or nootropics—so-called smart drugs—like Ritalin, the amphetamine Adderall, and Provigil.
Some people need such medication, of course, but overreliance on these substances remains a
massive experiment with long-term side effects that have yet to be determined. And an
immediately available, low-cost intelligence-enhancing supplement already exists.
Environmental psychologists Rachel and Stephen Kaplan began foundational work in the study
of nature's healing effect on the mind in the 1970s. Findings from their nine-year study for the
U.S. Forest Service and later research suggested that contact with nature can assist with
recovery from mental fatigue and can help restore attention. It can also help reboot the brain's
ability to think. The Kaplans and their team followed participants in an Outward Bound–like
program, which took people into the wilderness for up to two weeks. During these treks or
afterwards, subjects reported experiencing a sense of peace and an ability to think more clearly;
they also reported that just being in nature was more restorative than the physical activities, like
rock climbing, for which such programs are mainly known.
Over time the Kaplans developed their theory of directed-attention fatigue. Paying conscious
attention to something demands voluntary effort, they found, which can erode mental
effectiveness and get in the way of forming abstract long-term goals. "A number of symptoms
are commonly attributed to this fatigue," Stephen Kaplan and his colleague Raymond De Young
wrote in 2002. "Irritability and impulsivity that results in regrettable choices, impatience that has
us making ill-formed decisions, and distractibility that allows the immediate environment to have
a magnified effect on our behavioral choices."
The Kaplans hypothesize that the best antidote to such fatigue is involuntary attention, a kind of
"fascination," which occurs when we are in an environment that fulfills certain criteria: for
instance, the setting must transport the person away from their day-to-day routine and allow the
opportunity to explore. Furthermore, they found, the natural world is a particularly effective place
for the human brain to overcome mental fatigue.
+Taking this even further, can time in nature nurture genius itself? Creative genius is not the
accumulation of knowledge; it's the ability to see patterns in the universe, to detect hidden links
between what is and what could be.
When public-radio commentator John Hockenberry reported in 2008 on research at the
University of Michigan that indicated greater mental acuity after a nature walk, he pointed out
that Albert Einstein and the mathematician and philosopher Kurt Gödel, "two of the most brilliant
people who ever walked the face of the earth, used to famously, every single day, take walks in
the woods on the Princeton campus."
SO DOES THIS MEAN that we should dispense with electronic media entirely? No, and for
most of us that would be close to impossible. But we can cultivate a third way.
When my sons were growing up, they spent a lot of time outdoors, but they also played plenty of
video games—more than I was comfortable with. Occasionally, they'd try to convince me that
members of their generation were making an evolutionary leap; because they spent so much
time texting, video-gaming, and so on, they were wired differently. In response I pointed out that
my generation said something like that about recreational drugs. That didn't work out so well.
More optimistic researchers suggest that all this multitasking is creating the smartest generation
yet, freed from limitations of geography, weather, and distance—pesky inconveniences of the
physical world. This vision calls to mind the sci-fi speculation of the 1950s and '60s that people
would someday be freed from physical limitations and that, as they evolved, their brains—in
fact, their heads—would grow larger and larger, until members of our species or what it
becomes (Homo google?) just float around in space. We're not floaters yet. In his 2008 book
The Dumbest Generation, Mark Bauerlein, a professor at Emory University, reels out studies
comparing this generation of students with prior generations, finding that "they don't know any
more history or civics, economics or science, literature or current events"— despite all that
available information.
But here is a third possibility, and the one I prefer: the hybrid mind. The ultimate multitasking is
to live simultaneously in both the digital and physical worlds, using computers to maximize our
powers to process intellectual data and natural environments to ignite our senses and
accelerate our ability to learn and feel—combining the resurfaced "primitive" powers of our
ancestors with the digital speed of our teenagers.
Few today would question the notion that every person, especially every young person, has a
right to access the Internet, whether through a school district, a library, or a city's public Wi-Fi
program. We accept the idea that the divide between the digital haves and have-nots must be
closed.
But recently I've been asking another question of people: Do we have a right to walk in the
woods?