Mark Berman

In addition, the patients that had the rooms with the nature view, they used less pain medication than the patients that had the views of the brick wall.

Wow.

And, you know, people might be thinking, well, maybe patients who were healthier or younger or wealthier, maybe they got the views of nature and...

The other patients didn't, but that wasn't the case.

These patients were basically randomly assigned to these different hospital rooms.

They were just, whatever room was available, that's the room that they got, which is kind of like doing an experiment.

And it's just amazing that being randomly assigned to the room that had the modest nature view could speed recovery and also cause people to use less pain medication.

Roger was really interested also in stress and stress responses.

So he believed that interactions with nature could remediate stress responses.

And he thought that was the mechanism behind why interacting with nature was having different beneficial effects.

So the biophilia hypothesis in a nutshell is this idea that humans have an inherent love of nature and the natural world and other living organisms.

And these tend to be places that we would say would be very good habitats for humans to live in.

And there was actually a researcher

Jay Appleton, who proposed this other theory called prospect-refuge theory, that environments that had high prospect, meaning places where you could draw food and water, but also that had high refuge, places where you could kind of hide and be safe, would be the most kind of preferred environments.

And that also kind of matches this idea of humans kind of liking natural environments that have

Well, a lot of plants and trees, but also water.

Yeah, so Steve coined or developed this hypothesis called the attention restoration theory.

And he did this in partnership with his wife, Rachel Kaplan.

And one of the main tenants of attention restoration theory is that humans have two main kinds of attention.

And one kind of attention is called directed attention.