Mark Berman

But people have brought in fake nature into hospitals and they found that it can...

reduce pain for people that are getting painful operations.

It can make people feel like their stay in the hospital is more enjoyable.

And this is even when they know, the patients know, that the plants are fake.

And it can also have benefits to the people working in the hospital, that it can maybe help to give them these, as Rachel Kaplan would say, these micro doses of nature.

They could give them these little boosts of directed attention.

Right.

And this is work that I've done in collaboration with one of my former students, Kate Schertz, where we developed this app called Retune.

So restoring through urban nature experiences.

And, you know, if you go on Google Maps, it's going to route you on the shortest or most efficient path between point A to point B.

But what we try to do with Retune is try to map people on the walking route that will increase their nature exposure.

So that would increase the number of trees that they would be exposed to, reduce the amount of noise that they would be exposed to.

And so what happens with this app is that the path that it might suggest for you might be a little bit longer.

but you would be exposed to more of this softly fascinating natural stimulation that we think would boost cognitive abilities.

Yeah, it's really interesting to think about how some of these nature results also might relate to architecture.

And one thing, I don't know if you've ever been to the campus of the University of Chicago, but it's a very beautiful campus.

in part because the buildings are just beautiful.

There's these beautiful Gothic architecture buildings that actually mimic a lot of the patterns in nature.

There's a lot of intricacy to the buildings.

They have some of the same fractal or scale-free components that real nature has.