Picture yourself at work or doing a hobby that requires a lot of concentration, like playing an instrument. Inevitably, someone or something will interrupt your focus – a cell phone buzzing, a person coming in to chat, the lure of the beautiful summer weather outside your window. Holding your attention for extended periods of time requires inhibiting such potential distractions, which is mentally intensive and, over time, erodes.
One potential remedy to this erosion of our ability to tune out distractions is experiencing nature. “You’ve probably experienced that feeling where the things going on around you that earlier seemed tuned down and easy to ignore, are now grabbing your attention with ease,” says Cameron Bell of the University of Tasmania and lead author on a new study in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (JoCN) on the role of nature in “attention restoration theory.” The theory, he says, suggests that natural environments offer greater benefits in restoring attention than urban settings.
“Nature is supposed to be particularly effective at getting us to switch off that ‘directed attention’ to let it rest and replenish, by instead eliciting a more organic, involuntary mode of attention referred to as ‘soft fascination,’” he says. And the new study confirms that exposure to nature can turn down the brain’s cognitive controls, giving us a restorative attentional break. This finding was especially true for people who feel a deeper connection to nature.
I spoke with Bell about his own connections to the natural world, the study’s significance, and about some next steps in the work.
CNS: How did you become personally interested in this research area – why is studying exposure to nature in relation to cognition important to you?
Bell: I live in Tasmania, which is an island state of Australia with lots and lots of nature. I grew up in a coastal village, on a street with a single row of homes sandwiched between the ocean and a wildflower reserve. So like a lot of Tasmanians, being outdoors was a big part of life growing up.
As I got older and moved to larger urban centers for university and work, spending time in nature became more of an active hobby, and how it made me feel became a more and more salient reason that I would seek it out. During my undergrad psychology degree I’d done a bit of reading on how nature experiences may be beneficial to us, and I knew of attention restoration theory. It wasn’t until I had completed my honors post-graduate research on attention in a cognitive neuroscience lab that my expertise and personal interest kind of collided, and I realized I could perhaps make a scientific contribution in an area I was passionate about.
CNS: What new insights were you seeking with the JoCN paper?
Bell: Essentially, we wanted to see whether exposure to natural environments improves our capacity to suppress distractions and remain focused, and if so, examine what changes in brain activity might be associated with this improvement. On top of this, I had become fascinated by the idea that the physical natural environment – be it trees, mountains, oceans, etc. – can only do so much, and that the restorative effects nature may elicit will probably depend on what the individual viewing that nature brings to the table. For all of us, a given environment likely triggers different memories, appraisals, and feelings of connection. So, we measured people’s trait “nature relatedness” to see how this might influence nature restoration. Neither of these ideas were particularly novel and our study, like most, built upon previous findings. But these areas were under-researched.
CNS: What did you find most exciting about the results?
Bell: I don’t think excited is the right word, as I try to be as emotionally removed from the outcomes as possible. The most interesting finding I think is that our short nature exposure produced a significant decrease in the brain activity associated with attentional control. There was no prior consensus here as to whether attention restoration ought to increase neural processing (i.e., perhaps resource abundance), or reduce neural processing (i.e., perhaps resource efficiency). In this case, it looked like the latter. This “efficiency” finding was tentative in the article, and has since been more decisively replicated by our lab.
CNS: What do you most want people to understand about this work?
Bell: The environment you choose to spend your downtime in matters. I think a lot of people have felt the effects of nature and intuitively know this, but there can still be a tendency for us to write off these sorts of perceptions as a kind of “woo woo.” It’s not. These aren’t subjective responses on a questionnaire (although we did that too); brain activation is different during and after viewing nature. However, your affiliation to the setting also is important. If you wouldn’t describe yourself as a “nature person,” a nature experience likely won’t have the same restorative benefit that it might for those who do.
CNS: What’s next for this line of work?
Bell: There are clear parallels between the restorative state described as “soft fascination” in attention restoration theory and states of mindfulness. There’s work going on here already, but I’d like to better understand the similarities and differences in these brain states. There are also competing theories to attention restoration theory that warrant investigation with neuroscientific techniques.
-Lisa M.P. Munoz