welcome everyone it’s great to be here
now there’s one thing that we know for
sure that nature is good for us we’ve
known this for millennia 2,000 years ago
Taoist monks wrote about the healing
powers of working in greenhouses and
tending gardens and in 1984 iya Wilson
wrote about our deep primal need to
affiliate with nature in the natural
world and coined the term Biophilia this
concept of Biophilia is becoming ever
more urgent as we consume the
biodiversity around us and separate
ourselves more and more from the natural
world as of 2010 we have officially
become an urban species more of us live
in cities than don’t and that is a trend
that’s continuing and accelerating it
has progressively drawn us inside away
from the natural world and now the
average North American and European
spends 90% of their time indoors that
remaining 10% well five of that is spent
in a car
if not more I hear some commuters
laughing in the audience this is a this
is an environment very different from
our ancestral origins and it’s a
relatively modern thing so how has this
radical shift in lifestyle affected our
minds and body well there are a slew of
studies chronicling the modern ailments
that go along with this separation from
the natural world and they’re a physical
physical as well as mental and some of
these include spreading epidemic of
myopia if you don’t get enough sunlight
on your eyeballs they grow longer and we
get myopia we have rising levels of
obesity and diabetes cardiovascular
disease is correlated with a lack of
nature exposure and all sorts of
behavioral disorders depression is
rampant so what is going on and how can
nature help well nature is a nature’s a
complicated therapy it’s not only rich
in visuals its multi-sensorial you have
incredible sounds
textures interrelationships processes
it’s a
it’s like it’s a complex therapy how do
you figure out what’s doing what well
you can start to look at it by breaking
it into its component parts and let’s
say visuals now I’m a marine biologist
and I’ve spent many many hours studying
this crazy fish the giant ocean sunfish
and
other large animals and I love being
immersed in nature I find it completely
exhilarating and rejuvenating but what I
find particularly interesting as well is
that just looking at nature imagery does
something powerful to our brains and
bodies there’s something going on there
we’re not in nature we’re looking at it
so what’s that mechanism well Roger
Robert Ulrich was the first to really
formally write about this and publish a
scientific study in 1984 in science the
journal Science and he found that
recovering patients from gallbladder
surgery who had windows that looked out
on trees had a faster recovery rate
upwards of a day faster and requested
fewer strong pain medication than those
patients whose windows look out on a
brick wall and since those studies many
have followed suit and found similar
things there’s a number of theories that
have been put forth to them describe and
explain what’s going on and one of the
prevailing theories is put forth by
Rachel and Steven Kaplan out at the
University of Michigan and it’s called
attention restoration theory you have
your directed attention your voluntary
attention and your involuntary attention
and nature it has our involuntary
attention it draws us in with this kind
of what psychologists call a soft
fascination that doesn’t take much
effort you look at the clouds overhead
you look at the wind wrestling the
leaves and your attention is drawn but
it’s not taxing you as opposed to
directed attention where you’re if
you’re driving you have to you know stay
focused on these things
and nature is restorative in this way so
that’s one of the prevailing theories
and there’s lots of different ones as
well and there’s ways of testing this
you can take take bits of saliva and
look for cortisol which is a measure of
stress levels you can put on galvanic
skin sensors you can put on heartrate
monitors but what if you could crawl
right inside the mind now wouldn’t that
be cool so that’s what we’re looking at
now and I’m coining I’m calling this
neuro Biophilia the science of how
nature engages the brain and this is a
sub-discipline it joins other sub
disciplines that are looking at the
brain and how the brain responds to our
environments and they include things
such as neuro cinematix the brain on
movies there’s also neuro aesthetics the
brain on beauty and art and what I find
really exciting about these sub
disciplines is that they’re highly
interdisciplinary they’re drawing from
all sorts of different venues all sorts
of different disciplines from social
science to evolutionary psychology to to
computer science artificial intelligence
landscape architecture color theory and
they’re pulling it all together to make
sense of what’s going on in the brain we
have our toes on the shores of this vast
cerebral sea and it’s such an exciting
time to have these tools available for
these explorations and to continue our
adventure into the brain I’m going to
hand off to tan so thanks
Thank You tini and good evening everyone
you know I spend most of my day in front
of a computer screen I basically do a
lot of reading I look at a lot of
numbers measurements and I coordinate
people because I’ve spent the last 10
years of my life working to develop new
technologies that allow us to study
brains you know this amazing and yet in
mathematics space inside our head and as
we go through life our brain actually
undergoes extraordinary development it’s
the most adaptive organ in our body and
it can change both positively and
negatively by our thoughts actions and
experiences and we know as
neuroscientists that nature has a
restorative effect on the brain now the
way in which most of these experiments
are conducted is based on giving people
and a sustained attention task that
drains and fatigues your attentional
networks and then you’re asked to spend
about 30 minutes or in nature or in an
urban setting and then you’re brought
back into the same place and asked to do
the same test again and you’re measured
to see your performance which one did
you do better in and whilst that’s a
really good way to observe the effects
of the beneficial effects of nature on
the brain it’s not quite the same as
being able to measure and quantify
exactly what is going on in the brain
itself and that’s the question that the
three of us wanted to answer we wanted
to actually measure and quantify exactly
what is going on in my brain when I
experience those amazing imagery of
nature and so one of the things that
really excites me the most about brain
research in the last decade is that we
have moved beyond psychology psychiatry
and neurology and we’ve merged with
other disciplines statistical analysis
artificial intelligence machine learning
even you know material sciences
information technology with advances in
technology contributing to ever better
faster and smarter devices and
techniques now one of the things that
we’re trying to do is to really push the
boundaries of the latest in science and
technology to enable these portable
electroencephalogram systems to open a
new window on the complex functioning of
our brain and I wanted to take a few
moments to share with you and really
show you an insight into what my brain
actually looks like in real time so if
we switch over who you are so this is
what this device is picking up my brain
activity right now and transmitting it
to a computer
and so what you’re able to see is a data
visualization tool that localizes the
activity in different functional brain
areas so when you see the frontal part
of my brain light up the frontal lobes
are responsible for executive function
conscious thoughts movements attention
planning language logic the side of my
brains the temporal lobes are
responsible for processing auditory
responses memory in the back of my brain
when you see that part light up the
parietal and occipital lobes that’s
actually responsible for sensory
integration and visual processing and so
through tools like this we can actually
have a window into what’s going on in
real time and that allows us to really
start to piece together the beneficial
effects of nature on the brain in a way
that we haven’t really been able to to
see in the past and so with that I’m
going to pass on to Malini to end
hmm that’s great I can’t believe I just
saw my colleagues brain going on but I
was fantastic and really that’s the
wonderful thing about a collaboration
like ours there’s so much sharing and
learning that goes on I’ve learned for
example that the different parts of a
neuron a single neuron one of the
billions that occur in our brain they
function in a way to connect the
thoughts and the actions and the
knowledge that we have within our bodies
and outside outside our worlds and I’d
like to share with my colleagues
anything I can tell them about trees
because that’s what I study and I have
been studying forest trees for many
years I study in the forest canopy I
started 35 years ago and that was a time
when we were pioneers in the forest
canopy where very few people had
ascended well that beautiful tapestry of
the intact forest canopy is being
destroyed by many human activities and I
became very concerned about this the
disturbances of deforestation of forest
fragmentation of conversion of primary
forests to agricultural land another
environmental problem that I became very
interested in is the harvesting of
canopy dwelling mosses for the
horticultural trade this is a 300
million dollar business and it wouldn’t
sound so bad unless you realize that it
takes 30 years 20 to 30 years for these
mosses to grow back after they’ve been
stripped off of old-growth forest trees
and as a scientist I felt that maybe I
could do something about this
environmental problem and I realized I
couldn’t stop the collecting of mosses
but perhaps I could learn how to farm
these mosses in order to bring down the
harvesting pressure and these beautiful
old-growth systems and it also seemed to
me that I needed help to do this and it
also seemed to me that perhaps people
who didn’t have access people who don’t
have access to nature or to these
beautiful mosses in this incredible
temperate rainforest might be the best
possible partners and so I started a
program in 2005 to enlist the help of
prisoners of incarcerated men and women
to help me learn how to grow moss is for
the horticultural trade they have time
many of them have space you don’t need
sharp tools to grow mosses and so in
fact this turned out to be a fabulous
project the
incarcerated men and women enjoyed this
project and got something out of it
because they found that they were
contributing to something larger than
themselves
something larger than the prison in
which they were incarcerated something
as large as planet Earth because they
were helping to reduce a collecting
pressure of these old-growth ecosystems
and the supervisors and superintendent
loved this project because the men were
occupied they were having better social
interactions violent infractions started
going down and so they asked me to
organize more projects I started a
science lecture series in this prison
that spread to others and from those
lecture series became the inspiration
for starting some conservation projects
these involve growing endangered species
prairie plants the Oregon spotted frog
the Taylor Checkerspot butterfly by the
inmates behind bars when these animals
and plants were produced they were taken
by our collaborating conservation groups
and used for restoration projects in
Washington State this was really a
win-win situation for the men and women
that we were able to bring these
projects to but I very soon realized
that I was missing people in the prison
in terms of people who could be involved
with these projects that is I was
missing the men and women who were
incarcerated far deep in the bowels of
the prison system of the United States
those that live in solitary confinement
over 30,000 some estimate up as high as
80,000 men and women are incarcerated in
solitary confinement in the United
States this is a cell nine by 12 while
you can see it’s very bare about really
anything they’re incarcerated in this
cell for 23 hours a day their meals are
brought to them and one hour a day they
are brought out by two guards to their
exercise rooms or their recreational
space which again is a very bare room
with very little in terms of stimulation
and absolutely no exposure to nature at
all and it seemed to me that maybe
although we couldn’t bring in frogs and
butterflies in soil and plants that we
might be able to bring nature imagery to
these exercise cells so at that at least
for one hour a day they would be exposed
to some element of nature and nature
imagery we started this out at the
invitation of a wonderful well I don’t
know if I can say a wonderful prison but
in any case a prison where wonderful
people work the Snake River Correctional
tuition in Ontario Oregon they installed
a projector in one of the exercise rooms
of one of the cell blocks there they
were able to gather Natural History
films from the web and various other
places and so right now the men who are
in solitary confinement can ask to see
one of the films when they go into their
exercise room and there they can choose
one of the 30 films that has been made
available to them and then they’re able
to watch that film and for that one hour
a day they’re being exposed to nature
imagery we have some anecdotal
information that this has been very
positive in terms of bringing down
stress and anxiety but we have to do
more work in terms of understanding how
this might become an intervention we
need to understand the real impacts of
this on the attitudes and the behavior
of the inmates that are exposed to it we
also recognize that it’s not just the
incarcerated men and women who are
exposed to this nature deficit situation
it’s also the staff the officers and the
people who work in this environment that
undergo what they call decomposition a
physical emotional and psychological
behavior as they’re removed from nature
and nature imagery this is true not only
in solitary confinement prisons but
increasingly as Tierney pointed out in
our own society people who work in
windowless offices in cubicles like this
people who have jobs in toll booths
people who work in military barracks my
own mom who’s 91 years old and isn’t a
senior assisted living center in
rockville maryland here has very little
in the way of interaction with nature or
nature imagery so I think there’s
tremendous potential to think about the
things that tyranny and Tom have talked
about and the kinds of things that we’d
like to do to eventually apply what we
know to the kinds of populations that we
will be a part of increasingly as time
goes forward I think that our
collaboration has allowed us to just
sort of as Tierney said put our toes
into the very first little waves of
understanding humans and and the brain
but I’d like to just share with you
three of the beginning conclusions that
we have come up with so far first of all
we’ve come to understand that if we want
to understand nature in the brain we
must use both the cognitive sides of our
ability
understand as well as the emotional side
both of those are intertwined if we’re
to understand nature in the brain
secondly we need to collaborate it’s
great to have this threesome of
colleagues but there are other fields
that must be drawn into this
neuroscience eco psychology sociology
all of these fields must come together
and touch in points where we can make
contact and help each other understand
this complexity of nature and the brain
and the third concluding idea that we’ve
come up with as a result of our
collaboration is that nature is
necessary for human social resists
resilience that is nature is needed by
everyone thank you
you
now there’s one thing that we know for
sure that nature is good for us we’ve
known this for millennia 2,000 years ago
Taoist monks wrote about the healing
powers of working in greenhouses and
tending gardens and in 1984 iya Wilson
wrote about our deep primal need to
affiliate with nature in the natural
world and coined the term Biophilia this
concept of Biophilia is becoming ever
more urgent as we consume the
biodiversity around us and separate
ourselves more and more from the natural
world as of 2010 we have officially
become an urban species more of us live
in cities than don’t and that is a trend
that’s continuing and accelerating it
has progressively drawn us inside away
from the natural world and now the
average North American and European
spends 90% of their time indoors that
remaining 10% well five of that is spent
in a car
if not more I hear some commuters
laughing in the audience this is a this
is an environment very different from
our ancestral origins and it’s a
relatively modern thing so how has this
radical shift in lifestyle affected our
minds and body well there are a slew of
studies chronicling the modern ailments
that go along with this separation from
the natural world and they’re a physical
physical as well as mental and some of
these include spreading epidemic of
myopia if you don’t get enough sunlight
on your eyeballs they grow longer and we
get myopia we have rising levels of
obesity and diabetes cardiovascular
disease is correlated with a lack of
nature exposure and all sorts of
behavioral disorders depression is
rampant so what is going on and how can
nature help well nature is a nature’s a
complicated therapy it’s not only rich
in visuals its multi-sensorial you have
incredible sounds
textures interrelationships processes
it’s a
it’s like it’s a complex therapy how do
you figure out what’s doing what well
you can start to look at it by breaking
it into its component parts and let’s
say visuals now I’m a marine biologist
and I’ve spent many many hours studying
this crazy fish the giant ocean sunfish
and
other large animals and I love being
immersed in nature I find it completely
exhilarating and rejuvenating but what I
find particularly interesting as well is
that just looking at nature imagery does
something powerful to our brains and
bodies there’s something going on there
we’re not in nature we’re looking at it
so what’s that mechanism well Roger
Robert Ulrich was the first to really
formally write about this and publish a
scientific study in 1984 in science the
journal Science and he found that
recovering patients from gallbladder
surgery who had windows that looked out
on trees had a faster recovery rate
upwards of a day faster and requested
fewer strong pain medication than those
patients whose windows look out on a
brick wall and since those studies many
have followed suit and found similar
things there’s a number of theories that
have been put forth to them describe and
explain what’s going on and one of the
prevailing theories is put forth by
Rachel and Steven Kaplan out at the
University of Michigan and it’s called
attention restoration theory you have
your directed attention your voluntary
attention and your involuntary attention
and nature it has our involuntary
attention it draws us in with this kind
of what psychologists call a soft
fascination that doesn’t take much
effort you look at the clouds overhead
you look at the wind wrestling the
leaves and your attention is drawn but
it’s not taxing you as opposed to
directed attention where you’re if
you’re driving you have to you know stay
focused on these things
and nature is restorative in this way so
that’s one of the prevailing theories
and there’s lots of different ones as
well and there’s ways of testing this
you can take take bits of saliva and
look for cortisol which is a measure of
stress levels you can put on galvanic
skin sensors you can put on heartrate
monitors but what if you could crawl
right inside the mind now wouldn’t that
be cool so that’s what we’re looking at
now and I’m coining I’m calling this
neuro Biophilia the science of how
nature engages the brain and this is a
sub-discipline it joins other sub
disciplines that are looking at the
brain and how the brain responds to our
environments and they include things
such as neuro cinematix the brain on
movies there’s also neuro aesthetics the
brain on beauty and art and what I find
really exciting about these sub
disciplines is that they’re highly
interdisciplinary they’re drawing from
all sorts of different venues all sorts
of different disciplines from social
science to evolutionary psychology to to
computer science artificial intelligence
landscape architecture color theory and
they’re pulling it all together to make
sense of what’s going on in the brain we
have our toes on the shores of this vast
cerebral sea and it’s such an exciting
time to have these tools available for
these explorations and to continue our
adventure into the brain I’m going to
hand off to tan so thanks
Thank You tini and good evening everyone
you know I spend most of my day in front
of a computer screen I basically do a
lot of reading I look at a lot of
numbers measurements and I coordinate
people because I’ve spent the last 10
years of my life working to develop new
technologies that allow us to study
brains you know this amazing and yet in
mathematics space inside our head and as
we go through life our brain actually
undergoes extraordinary development it’s
the most adaptive organ in our body and
it can change both positively and
negatively by our thoughts actions and
experiences and we know as
neuroscientists that nature has a
restorative effect on the brain now the
way in which most of these experiments
are conducted is based on giving people
and a sustained attention task that
drains and fatigues your attentional
networks and then you’re asked to spend
about 30 minutes or in nature or in an
urban setting and then you’re brought
back into the same place and asked to do
the same test again and you’re measured
to see your performance which one did
you do better in and whilst that’s a
really good way to observe the effects
of the beneficial effects of nature on
the brain it’s not quite the same as
being able to measure and quantify
exactly what is going on in the brain
itself and that’s the question that the
three of us wanted to answer we wanted
to actually measure and quantify exactly
what is going on in my brain when I
experience those amazing imagery of
nature and so one of the things that
really excites me the most about brain
research in the last decade is that we
have moved beyond psychology psychiatry
and neurology and we’ve merged with
other disciplines statistical analysis
artificial intelligence machine learning
even you know material sciences
information technology with advances in
technology contributing to ever better
faster and smarter devices and
techniques now one of the things that
we’re trying to do is to really push the
boundaries of the latest in science and
technology to enable these portable
electroencephalogram systems to open a
new window on the complex functioning of
our brain and I wanted to take a few
moments to share with you and really
show you an insight into what my brain
actually looks like in real time so if
we switch over who you are so this is
what this device is picking up my brain
activity right now and transmitting it
to a computer
and so what you’re able to see is a data
visualization tool that localizes the
activity in different functional brain
areas so when you see the frontal part
of my brain light up the frontal lobes
are responsible for executive function
conscious thoughts movements attention
planning language logic the side of my
brains the temporal lobes are
responsible for processing auditory
responses memory in the back of my brain
when you see that part light up the
parietal and occipital lobes that’s
actually responsible for sensory
integration and visual processing and so
through tools like this we can actually
have a window into what’s going on in
real time and that allows us to really
start to piece together the beneficial
effects of nature on the brain in a way
that we haven’t really been able to to
see in the past and so with that I’m
going to pass on to Malini to end
hmm that’s great I can’t believe I just
saw my colleagues brain going on but I
was fantastic and really that’s the
wonderful thing about a collaboration
like ours there’s so much sharing and
learning that goes on I’ve learned for
example that the different parts of a
neuron a single neuron one of the
billions that occur in our brain they
function in a way to connect the
thoughts and the actions and the
knowledge that we have within our bodies
and outside outside our worlds and I’d
like to share with my colleagues
anything I can tell them about trees
because that’s what I study and I have
been studying forest trees for many
years I study in the forest canopy I
started 35 years ago and that was a time
when we were pioneers in the forest
canopy where very few people had
ascended well that beautiful tapestry of
the intact forest canopy is being
destroyed by many human activities and I
became very concerned about this the
disturbances of deforestation of forest
fragmentation of conversion of primary
forests to agricultural land another
environmental problem that I became very
interested in is the harvesting of
canopy dwelling mosses for the
horticultural trade this is a 300
million dollar business and it wouldn’t
sound so bad unless you realize that it
takes 30 years 20 to 30 years for these
mosses to grow back after they’ve been
stripped off of old-growth forest trees
and as a scientist I felt that maybe I
could do something about this
environmental problem and I realized I
couldn’t stop the collecting of mosses
but perhaps I could learn how to farm
these mosses in order to bring down the
harvesting pressure and these beautiful
old-growth systems and it also seemed to
me that I needed help to do this and it
also seemed to me that perhaps people
who didn’t have access people who don’t
have access to nature or to these
beautiful mosses in this incredible
temperate rainforest might be the best
possible partners and so I started a
program in 2005 to enlist the help of
prisoners of incarcerated men and women
to help me learn how to grow moss is for
the horticultural trade they have time
many of them have space you don’t need
sharp tools to grow mosses and so in
fact this turned out to be a fabulous
project the
incarcerated men and women enjoyed this
project and got something out of it
because they found that they were
contributing to something larger than
themselves
something larger than the prison in
which they were incarcerated something
as large as planet Earth because they
were helping to reduce a collecting
pressure of these old-growth ecosystems
and the supervisors and superintendent
loved this project because the men were
occupied they were having better social
interactions violent infractions started
going down and so they asked me to
organize more projects I started a
science lecture series in this prison
that spread to others and from those
lecture series became the inspiration
for starting some conservation projects
these involve growing endangered species
prairie plants the Oregon spotted frog
the Taylor Checkerspot butterfly by the
inmates behind bars when these animals
and plants were produced they were taken
by our collaborating conservation groups
and used for restoration projects in
Washington State this was really a
win-win situation for the men and women
that we were able to bring these
projects to but I very soon realized
that I was missing people in the prison
in terms of people who could be involved
with these projects that is I was
missing the men and women who were
incarcerated far deep in the bowels of
the prison system of the United States
those that live in solitary confinement
over 30,000 some estimate up as high as
80,000 men and women are incarcerated in
solitary confinement in the United
States this is a cell nine by 12 while
you can see it’s very bare about really
anything they’re incarcerated in this
cell for 23 hours a day their meals are
brought to them and one hour a day they
are brought out by two guards to their
exercise rooms or their recreational
space which again is a very bare room
with very little in terms of stimulation
and absolutely no exposure to nature at
all and it seemed to me that maybe
although we couldn’t bring in frogs and
butterflies in soil and plants that we
might be able to bring nature imagery to
these exercise cells so at that at least
for one hour a day they would be exposed
to some element of nature and nature
imagery we started this out at the
invitation of a wonderful well I don’t
know if I can say a wonderful prison but
in any case a prison where wonderful
people work the Snake River Correctional
tuition in Ontario Oregon they installed
a projector in one of the exercise rooms
of one of the cell blocks there they
were able to gather Natural History
films from the web and various other
places and so right now the men who are
in solitary confinement can ask to see
one of the films when they go into their
exercise room and there they can choose
one of the 30 films that has been made
available to them and then they’re able
to watch that film and for that one hour
a day they’re being exposed to nature
imagery we have some anecdotal
information that this has been very
positive in terms of bringing down
stress and anxiety but we have to do
more work in terms of understanding how
this might become an intervention we
need to understand the real impacts of
this on the attitudes and the behavior
of the inmates that are exposed to it we
also recognize that it’s not just the
incarcerated men and women who are
exposed to this nature deficit situation
it’s also the staff the officers and the
people who work in this environment that
undergo what they call decomposition a
physical emotional and psychological
behavior as they’re removed from nature
and nature imagery this is true not only
in solitary confinement prisons but
increasingly as Tierney pointed out in
our own society people who work in
windowless offices in cubicles like this
people who have jobs in toll booths
people who work in military barracks my
own mom who’s 91 years old and isn’t a
senior assisted living center in
rockville maryland here has very little
in the way of interaction with nature or
nature imagery so I think there’s
tremendous potential to think about the
things that tyranny and Tom have talked
about and the kinds of things that we’d
like to do to eventually apply what we
know to the kinds of populations that we
will be a part of increasingly as time
goes forward I think that our
collaboration has allowed us to just
sort of as Tierney said put our toes
into the very first little waves of
understanding humans and and the brain
but I’d like to just share with you
three of the beginning conclusions that
we have come up with so far first of all
we’ve come to understand that if we want
to understand nature in the brain we
must use both the cognitive sides of our
ability
understand as well as the emotional side
both of those are intertwined if we’re
to understand nature in the brain
secondly we need to collaborate it’s
great to have this threesome of
colleagues but there are other fields
that must be drawn into this
neuroscience eco psychology sociology
all of these fields must come together
and touch in points where we can make
contact and help each other understand
this complexity of nature and the brain
and the third concluding idea that we’ve
come up with as a result of our
collaboration is that nature is
necessary for human social resists
resilience that is nature is needed by
everyone thank you
you
Please follow and like us: