Marc Berman
speaker
637 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 6 Jul
Marc Berman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And I think in my lab, what we think a lot about is,
you know, I don't want to poo poo a lot of architecture or design, but I would say that a lot of modern architecture and design or how we how we build things that we live in, they haven't been designed to say, OK, let's make people more cooperative or let's, you know, let's build this environment so people have better working memory capacity or better attention.
It's kind of just built, you know, to house people efficiently, move goods efficiently.
So, yeah, I think in my lab, we're started thinking more about this and just taking a pause and say, OK,
You know, we think that this kind of, I would say, quote unquote, artificial environments that we kind of live in now is kind of changing our behavior, maybe changing our brains.
And we need to think seriously about what that means and maybe what we can do about it or how we might want to change the environment.
And I think part of that, too, might be that I would say for a lot of years, maybe this would sort of be thought of as being sort of fringy kind of science, that this isn't, you know, the most hardcore, rigorous science, in part because it's really hard to do carefully controlled experiments.
You know, in an ideal world, I would love to be able to move people to different environments, you know, manipulate different things.
element in some people's environments, but you can't do that easily.
So it takes a lot of hard thinking and you have to sort of triangulate research from a lot of different areas to be able to draw strong conclusions.
Yeah, so the title of the book is called Nature in the Mind, the Science of How Nature Improves Cognitive, Physical, and Social Well-Being.
And the book talks a lot about this field called environmental neuroscience that I kind of helped to develop.
which is very interested in the bi-directional relationships between the physical environment and our brains.
So again, as I kind of mentioned before, our brains have adapted to the physical environment.
We as humans have a lot of control over the physical environment, so we're manipulating the physical environment.
And then this environment that we've created is also impacting our brains in this kind of cyclical relationship.
in the book we you know i focus a lot in my lab on natural environments so contrasting people interacting with more natural environments like you can think about your local park uh or you know the trees on your tree-lined street maybe you go on vacation to a lake so interacting with those kinds of environments that are um sort of been less manipulated by humans compared to
interacting with more human-made environments, cities, towns, office spaces, schools.
And we find in my work that when we interact with these more natural spaces, that can actually cause changes
in our attention and our working memory that people actually show improvements in their attention and working memory after spending short amounts of times in these more natural environments versus the more urban or built environments.
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