Wallace J. Nichols
speaker
40 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Wallace J. Nichols’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Water helps us to relax. It helps us to be more creative. It helps to connect us to each other. It connects us to ourselves. And it is the basis of all life. We've all experienced it, but it's nice to tag it.
So yes, it is a thing. It's deeply, innately part of being a human being on a water planet. We respond to water in all of its forms immediately and instinctively. So we've exploited that in all kinds of ways in terms of modern society. But it really goes back to
Slam dunk, right? It's over. It was maybe a tweet, and that's about it. The reality is it is maybe the most important conversation we could be having right now. Water helps us to relax. It helps us to be more creative. It helps to connect us to each other. It connects us to ourselves. And it is the basis of all life. So it is a big, wide-reaching conversation.
Yeah. Well, lots of people have had that experience of getting unstuck while sitting in a bathtub, that eureka moment, or standing in the shower and you say, oh, that's it. That's the solution. That's the line. That's the lyric. That's the line of code.
And what happens when we're by the water, it quiets down a lot of the background noise that can be distracting and take us off of the task at hand. sitting by the water or floating on the water, literally standing, soaking in the water, switched switches us into this mode that I call blue mind, that allows our brain to do things that we we don't do as well when we're distracted, when we're
taking care of the busyness around us when there are external screens or voices or leaf blowers or blenders or whatever's going on. When we get to the water, the water helps with that. It simplifies things and allows us to focus. So that's where the poetry occurs or the song lyrics or the insights. And we've all experienced it in different ways throughout our lives.
But it's nice to tag it and say, this actually does work. Are there not people who this does not apply? I have not met anyone yet. So if you can think of someone, feel free to offer. But I like to ask people, what's your water? And then listen to their story. And I haven't met anybody that hasn't had a fascinating personal answer to that simple question. I'm looking. I'm open to it.
But certainly there are people who are scared of being in the water or underwater or who don't like to swim and don't like boats. But they do enjoy water in the way that they enjoy water, whatever that may be. Drinking it, sitting by it, listening to it, just looking out over it, taking a bath, taking a shower. We're not trying to make everybody a surfer or a scuba diver or an Olympic swimmer.
It's meeting people where they live in terms of their water relationship.
It sometimes gets poetic, and people will say, my water is a someone. They think of the person who took them to the water. I think of my father, and he taught us to swim when we were kids. So I can say, my water is my father. He was my guide. He was the bridge. Sometimes people refer to food. Food is mostly water. They'll say, well, my water is my garden.
So it isn't always a majestic body of water or an immersive experience. It can be something much more subtle.
Yeah. Well, some people say, I'm more of a mountain person. And I say, that's great. And when you go to the mountains, is there snow? Are there lakes? Maybe rivers or creeks? Do you gravitate to those places? And they say, well, as a matter of fact, I do. And it's just a short step from there to, well, that's water, that's snow, that ice, that lake, that river.
It's not a competition between the mountains and the ocean.
We did this big experiment recently called the pandemic. And people went into various kinds of lockdowns. And what we found is that people missed the water dearly. The people who had access to it fared better. The people who could go out their backyard and run to the beach or go to the lake or the river could walk to it.
Those who had a hot tub, a spa, or a pool that they could access when we were in this lockdown mode. And then people freaked out when they shut down the beaches. And they said, no, you're not even allowed to go to the beach. You can't even swim. You have to stay away. And they started arresting people with their surfboards. That was a really interesting experiment. And people really got it.
They said, wow, when you take that away from me, that made people really uncomfortable. We are water beings on a water planet. And when you cut us off from it, it feels bad.
Yeah, when we take it apart, we pull this concept apart into its components, like we like, we like to do that as scientists, and look at it through each of the senses. There's a special thing that water does related to each of our senses. Now, the way we experience it, in fact, is all together. So you pull it apart to study it. But then the the actual experience of blue mind is
all of it together at the same time so you you taste it and you smell it and you hear it and you feel it so if you jump into a body of water you're getting the the multi-sensory experience if you're looking merely looking at a nice video of some waves on your laptop it may be purely visual if you turn up the volume you might get the wave sound that's nice but it really goes to the next level when you
use all of your senses you know the somatic experience of water of the water really surrounding you and touching all of your your skin cells at the same time um the pressure of it the buoyancy of it the temperature of it so it's all of that at the same time and so as we pull it apart we we can kind of look at what makes it special in each of its components
But the experience of Blue Mind is a simultaneous sensory experience. And there's really nothing quite like it. I mean, really, the best comparison in our lives is to music, the way music can bring you up and take you down and move you and boost your creativity.
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