Mark Berman

It's very boxy with just straight lines.

And it turns out in architecture, if the building has more curved edges to it, people actually rate those buildings as being more natural and they like those buildings more and they rate them as more comforting.

So this suggests that

There's something about mimicking the patterns of nature, the curved edges, the fractalness, maybe some of the colors, that if we mimic that in our built environment, that might also confer psychological benefits.

Another great question.

And I would say it can have benefits.

So I would say that the best thing you can do is go out in real nature.

But if you don't have access to go out in real nature...

can you look at real nature out of a window?

And if you can't look at real nature out of the window, can you bring some real nature into the home?

And if you can't bring real nature into the home because maybe you don't have good enough lighting, you can have fake plants in the home or office.

And even if you can't, if you don't want to have fake plants in the home or office, we find that even just mimicking some of the patterns of nature, like the curved edges and some of the fractalness and in some kind of, you know, abstract artwork or mimicking these patterns and in other textures, like in carpeting or in tables might also confer some psychological benefits.

So that's another thing that I write about in the book, Nature and the Mind, is that

we can try to naturize all of our spaces and that means naturizing our indoor spaces.

So in my home office where I don't have good natural light, I do have fake or artificial plants in my office.

In other areas of our home where we do have good natural light, we do tend to place a lot of plants there and even rather large plants that are beautiful for us to look at.

But again, because a lot of us don't have easy access to nature, it's really comforting to know that we can get some of these benefits from pictures of nature, plants, fake nature plants, or even just mimicking some of these natural patterns.

So when we did our initial studies, having people walk in nature, we took participants' cell phones from them when they went on the walk.

And the reasons why we did that is because we didn't want people chit-chatting on the phone or texting on the phone

when they were out in the natural environment because that would distract them from the softly fascinating stimulation in nature.