Thinking with Natural Spaces

This post is based on a new book by Annie Murphy Paul with some new ideas and data. The subtitle is The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain.

Ms. Paul writes, “Over hundreds of thousands of years of dwelling outside, the human organism became precisely calibrated to the characteristics of its verdant environment, so that even today, our senses and our cognition are able to easily and efficiently process the particular features present in natural settings. Our minds are tuned to the frequencies of the organic world. No such evolutionary adjustment has prepared us for the much more recent emergence of the world in which we now spend almost our time: the built environment, with its sharp lines and unforgiving textures and relentless motion. We’ve set up camp amid the high-rises and highways of our modern milieu, but our minds are not at ease in this habitat. The mismatch between the stimuli we evolved to process and the sights and sounds that regularly confront our senses has the effect of depleting our limited mental resources. We are left frazzled, fatigued and prone to distraction, simply as a function of the hours we spend in a setting for which we are biologically ill-equipped.

Just how much of our lives unfolds inside buildings and vehicles is revealed by scientists time use studies: only about 7% of our time is spent outdoors. That’s much, much less than for our nature-dwelling ancestors, of course, but it’s meager even when compared to that of Americans twenty years ago. More than 60% of American adults report spending five hours or less outside in nature each week. Children, too, engage in outdoor recreation far less frequently than earlier generations; only 26% of mothers report that their kids play outside every day. Such trends are likely to continue: more than half of Earth’s humans now live in cities, and by 2050 that figure is predicted to reach almost 70%.

Yet despite these massive shifts in culture, our biology remains identical to that of our progenitors. Even now, our brains and bodies respond to nature in ways that reveal the deep imprint of our evolution in the outdoors. In fact we can draw a direct line from the kind of landscapes we enjoy today to the settings in which our species evolved. One place to begin drawing that line is with the crowds of people who throng to a half-mile-wide strip of land in the middle of Manhattan Island. Forty-two million people visit New York’s Central Park each year—ambling across its wide Sheep Meadow, browsing its fragrant gardens, circling its shimmering reservoir. ‘Natural scenery,’ wrote the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead, ‘employs the mind without fatigue and yet enlivens it; and thus, through the influence of the mind over the body, gives the effect of refreshing rest and reinvigoration to the whole system.’”

There are at least two messages here. One is to spend time in nature to replenish our limited resources. The other is to preserve and enjoy the limited natural environments that remain.