Can you talk about this a little bit in relation to some of those things?

Yes.

And I'm really glad you asked me about this, Paul, because I always think about Jens' work a lot.

And and how some of this work might relate to crime.

So the trees have this significant impact on health.

Other people have actually found trees have this really amazing impact on aggression and crime.

So Ming Kuo and Bill Sullivan did amazing studies in Chicago public housing projects, like the Robert Taylor homes, which are no longer around.

What is it about being in nature of all the options that could be out there that helps us gather our thoughts in a soft attention kind of way better than other

So why don't you just tell us, uh, sort of the high-level message here? And you have a book out that came out last year, so, um, remind us the, the title of the book and what it's all about.

Uh, yeah, so the title of the book is called Nature and the Mind: The Science of How Nature Improves Cognitive, Physical, and Social Well-Being, and the book, uh, talks a lot about this field called environmental neuroscience that I kind of helped to develop, which is very interested in the bi-directional relationships between the physical environment and our brains.

So again, as I kinda mentioned before, uh, our brains have adapted to the physical environment.

Uh, we as humans have a lot of control over the physical environment, so we're manipulating the physical environment, and then this environment that we've created is also impacting our brains in this kind of cyclical, um, relationship.

So in the book, we ...

You know, I focus a lot in my lab on natural environments, so contrasting people interacting with more natural environments, like you can think about your local park, uh, or, you know, the trees on your tree-lined street.

Um, maybe you go on vacation to a lake.

[laughs]

So with all the writing about concerns about our declining capacity for attention these days, are you saying that what we're worried about is the declining capacity for directed attention or too much distractibility, too many things pulling on the other kind of attention that's easily captured?

I think it's sort of two sides of the same coin.

So definitely I feel like humans now are under more of a directed attention fatigue state because there are just so many kinds of stimulation that are vying for our attention.

And a lot of the activities, you know, like social media or surfing the web, or streaming something on your favorite streaming service, streaming your favorite show, a lot of those activities feel restful, but they're actually potentially depleting, depleting more of directed attention.

So that's one kind of problem.

The other kind of problem, I haven't explained this yet, but we think the kind of stimulation... that activates involuntary attention in order for the environment to be restorative needs to be what we call softly fascinating.

So what do I mean by softly fascinating? So for example, when you look at the beautiful waterfall, it captures your involuntary attention.

Which field, I'm curious to know, has been the most resistance to the idea that nature matters?

Can you talk about the walk in the park experiment?

Yeah, that was, um, one of the first studies that we did in this area.

And it was an important study because there, there had been work done examining, you know, how interacting with nature can make people feel like they're more mentally recharged or that they have more attention.

But very few studies had actually tried to measure or quantify did it actually [laughs] cause people to have better attention.

So we, we designed a study where we brought people into the lab and we gave them a very difficult directed attention task called the backward digit span task.

So what, what happened in that task was participants would hear digits out loud like five, seven, three.

And they would need to repeat them back in backwards order, so three, seven, five.

... a really good example of the spaces that we're in when we're indoors, and can we design them to make us feel a little bit better?

Uh, what was this decision, and how did nature end up playing a role in helping you make this decision, Mark?

I had a job offer in New Jersey of a, a professorship.

You know, they're very hard to come by.

I, I really wanted to take the job.

But my, you know, wife Katie and I, uh, we were pregnant at the time too, and Katie just felt uncomfortable kinda going to a new place where we didn't have family to have our, our child there.

So, she wanted, um, to go back and, and be near family in Toronto, and it was a very difficult decision.

We were arguing a lot about it.

Talk about this, how architecture in some ways can itself be a way of bringing nature indoors.