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 over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas · 360 | Marc Berman on the Science of Touching Grass · 6 Jul 2026 podcast

And it turns out that the apartments that had the views of nature, people had better attention in those apartments.

There was lower reported crime, lower reports of aggression.

Again, suggesting that this nature, even if it's modest, could have some salubrious qualities to people's psychological functioning.

Yeah, so this was a theory that was codified by one of my mentors in grad school, Steve Kaplan, and his wife, Rachel Kaplan, who are environmental psychologists.

And one of the main tenets of this theory was sort of that humans have two kinds of attention.

So one kind of attention he called directed attention.

Sometimes people call this top-down or endogenous attention.

This is the kind of attention where you as an individual person are deciding what to pay attention to.

So presumably, Sean, you're deciding to pay attention to me.

Your listeners are deciding to pay attention to what I'm talking about.

But it's thought that that kind of attention is fatigable or depletable, that you can only sort of control your attentional focus for a limited amount of time before you become mentally fatigued and then you can't focus anymore.

And we've all had that sensation that, you know, after a long workday, you know, three o'clock, four o'clock.

in the afternoon, you might be staring at the computer screen, and it's just hard to focus.

Or I see this when I'm lecturing.

I think I'm a decent lecturer, but the first five minutes of lecture, I see a lot of eyes on me, people nodding along with me.

45 minutes into lecture, I see a lot of students kind of tilting their head back.

They're kind of dozing off.

It's just hard to control your attention.

So this directed attention ability is really important because it shows that humans are not just stimulus driven.

We can decide what we're going to pay attention to, but we can really only do that for a limited amount of time before we become mentally fatigued and we can't really do it.

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