The Nature Fix

“quiet zone,” like the Amtrak quiet car: no phones, soft voices. It reduced the background noise there by t ...

like a stereo to street traffic. I scored a 5.2. Adults average a 4, and college students average a ...

motorized sounds, or just sitting in a quiet room with no video. My video started playing, a simple s ...

ducks. As Smyth put it: “Your recovery was clearly disrupted by the experience of noise. It set back your ...

in This is Your Brain on Music). Darwin devoted ten pages to birdsong and six to human music in The Desce ...

protomammals split from a common ancestor, our brains are surprisingly similar to the parts of birds’ brai ...

tattoo of parrots on her left arm. She admitted she was more of a city person than a nature person, but ...

Myung-Bak. To flesh it out, water is pumped in seven miles from another river and recirculated. Planted tre ...

“It’s this gift we are born with, to reach out and hear all these incredible subtle sounds,” he’d sa ...

5 Box of Rain [When] the myopia had become stationary, change of air—a sea voyage if possible—should be prescribed. — ...

One of the serious risks of city living are other drivers. Although our brains have long been hardwired ...

In the intensive care unit at Bethesda Suburban, the nurses were shaking their heads. This was the third ...

adolescence. But reading them now, I find they are full of insight into our divorced family and the rol ...

writers live such exciting lives). After many weeks in the hospital he finally went outside, where h ...

were described in nurses’ notes as having better attitudes. Published in Science in 1984, the study made a ...

trees. Residents were randomly assigned to apartments and shared equally dismal levels of poverty, drug u ...

Wells, it was that the prettier courtyards drew residents outside, where they got to know each other ...

inanimate and animate objects. Pollock’s abstractions also seemed to elicit a certain mental state in the v ...

series of Pollocks and found that the paintings were indeed fractal. It was a little like discovering y ...

manufactured too recently to be used by the artist, much to Taylor’s relief. Fractals had interrupted one of ...