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

which is we think it's important, the kind of stimulation that activates this involuntary attention.

So when I look at a beautiful waterfall, it captures my attention, but I can still kind of mind wander and think about other things looking at that beautiful waterfall.

It doesn't capture all of my attentional resources.

When I'm in Times Square in Manhattan, wow, also super interesting.

Lots of stimulation to capture my attention, but it sort of does so in an all-consuming and sort of harsh way.

I can't really mind wander or think about other things in Times Square.

So we think the kind of stimulation that captures your involuntary attention should be softly fascinating and not harshly fascinating.

And we think that's the kind of environment that's going to be able to restore our directed attention abilities.

That's right.

So I do kind of think of directed attention as a bucket or a bank account that you can kind of cash out or empty, but that this is not a passive process.

So it's like engaging another kind of attention that's like...

you know, it's like a Goldilocks rule.

It's sort of interesting enough that it captures my attention, but not so interesting that it's all consuming.

It kind of sits at this nexus that that, yes, that we think that can actually restore your directed attention.

I mean, presumably sleep

would do something similar.

But I think often when we're mentally fatigued, we're actually not physically fatigued.

It's almost like our bodies are telling us, go do pay attention to something else or you have to switch tasks.

So that's the kind of fatigue that we're sort of talking about.

And as you were saying too, this is sort of like an active process that can kind of restore our attention.

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