Chapter 1: What are the psychological benefits of spending time in nature?
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To get your tickets to our 2026 shows, go to hiddenbrain.org slash tour and use the promo code BRAIN. No promo code is needed after November 5th. I hope to see you there. And here's today's show. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedant. When we are facing struggles with our thoughts or our emotions, many of us turn first to medication or therapy as solutions.
The share of American adults reporting they took prescription drugs for mental health conditions stood at 19% in 2022. That's according to an analysis of government data by the Kaiser Family Foundation. That's millions of people taking drugs for anxiety, for depression, for attention deficit disorder. Millions more are in therapy, working through their challenges with a counselor.
For many people, such measures are enormously helpful, even essential. At the same time, it may be the case that we are overlooking a potential source of relief that is literally right outside our door. This remedy costs nothing, has no known side effects, and is often delightfully pleasant. We are talking about spending time in nature.
The capacity of the natural world to soothe and refresh our sensibilities has been known for centuries. But it's only recently that scientists have begun to identify exactly what it is about the outdoors that has such a powerful effect on our moods and our minds.
Nature is filled with curved edges. And one thing that we found in our research is that people really like images that have more curved edges, even built images. So images of architectural scenes that don't have any nature in them. If the architecture has more curved edges, people tend to like that architecture more.
If you struggle with the ability to think clearly, to focus your attention, to control maladaptive behaviors, this episode and a companion story on Hidden Brain Plus are definitely for you. Why nature is good medicine, this week on Hidden Brain. Many of us enjoy an occasional stroll in the park or a hike in the woods.
It feels good to see beautiful trees, to hear birds sing, and to breathe fresh air. But might nature offer more than a fleeting respite from our time-pressured, harried lives? At the University of Chicago, psychologist Mark Berman studies how spending time in nature can help our minds. Mark Berman, welcome to Hidden Brain. Thank you for having me on the show.
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Chapter 2: How does nature serve as a remedy for mental health issues?
Now, I understand that he continued to have trouble the rest of his life. So it's not like being out in nature was a panacea. It's not like he basically turned over a completely new leaf. But it did sound as if he got his life together, partly as a result by being out in nature.
That's right. And, you know, we would never argue that depression or alcoholism are easy problems to solve. But it does seem to be the case that people's interactions with nature can be very beneficial for people who are suffering from depression and anxiety or ADHD, even things like PTSD.
So while, yes, I wouldn't say that being in nature can solve all of these problems, it does seem to be the case that being and interacting with nature can help with many of these problems.
In more recent years, Mark, the Naval Health Research Center in San Diego, California, has run a program to treat members of the U.S. military. What kinds of problems are these veterans struggling with?
Often they have problems that involve maybe developing depression or post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD. Some of them have traumatic brain injury or TBI. There's a lot of physical and mental health conditions that unfortunately a lot of these service members develop from their time in the military.
So the psychologists who work with this population take an unusual approach to treatment. What do they do?
Yeah, so they actually had about 20 or so of these military veterans engage in a six-week surf therapy therapeutic session where for three or four hours in a group setting in a Southern California beach, they taught these veterans how to surf, thinking that this kind of program could actually be beneficial to them from a mental and physical health perspective.
I'm curious, why surfing?
That's a good question. I think in part because they had some feeling that being in nature might be beneficial. So being out in the ocean, seeing the ocean waves, being on the beach, having the sights, smells, and even the textures of the ocean could be beneficial. It was also somewhat of a social activity because they were taking these veterans out in groups of about 20 people.
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Chapter 3: What evidence supports the healing effects of nature?
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.
As you began to conduct your own research in this field, Mark, you were working with a mentor named Stephen Kaplan. Steve believed that the benefits of exposure to nature had much to do with attention, and he would often talk about how humans have two distinct types of attention. What are these two forms of attention?
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.
And that's the kind of attention where you as the individual person are deciding what to pay attention to. So presumably... anybody listening to this show is deciding to pay attention to what we're talking about. And this directed attention is the kind of attention that we use a lot in schools and at work.
It's thought to be fatigable or depletable, that you can only sort of direct your attention for so long before you become mentally fatigued and you can't really focus anymore. And we've all had that sensation kind of at the end of a long workday where you might be just staring at the computer screen and nothing's really happening and you just can't focus or concentrate to get your work done.
We would call that a directed attention fatigue state, and that's a good time to take a break.
So Steve argued that there was a second form of attention as well. What is the second form?
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Chapter 4: How can nature help alleviate symptoms of PTSD and depression?
They could give them these little boosts of directed attention.
Very often when we're trying to get somewhere, we focus on getting from point A to point B as quickly and efficiently as possible. Mark, you say that we should be asking how green our route can be. And in fact, you're exploring the development of an app to help people identify the most nature-filled way to walk somewhere.
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.
Marc, you found yourself inspired by certain buildings that incorporate elements of nature. Talk about this, how architecture in some ways can itself be a way of bringing nature indoors.
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. They have a lot of the curved edge structure that real nature has. And it just feels like it's possible that it might be having some cognitive benefits to us. And
I had an architecture student, Alex Coburn, contact me where he was interested in seeing if buildings, building facades or building interiors, if they mimic patterns in nature, did they also yield some benefits? So he and I and a few other people designed some studies where we had people look at different architectural facades.
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