writers live such exciting lives). After many weeks in the hospital he
finally went outside, where he would “fondle the living plants. Some
essential connection and communion with nature was re-established
after the horrible isolation and alienation I had known. Some part of
me came alive.” Even if my father couldn’t name the objects he could
see, the sunlight and the trees and the birdsong might somehow reach
him.
We’ve looked at smell and sound. Now it’s time to tackle our
strongest sensory system for processing the world around us: the
visual. Its impact on our emotional and physiological states can also
be immediate and powerful. One of the first people to study the health
consequences of a room with a view was psychologist and architect
Roger Ulrich, the researcher who wondered in the mid-1980s why
people went out of their way to drive on tree-lined roads and who
measured alpha brain waves in subjects looking at nature slides. After
those initial, promising results, he was curious about effects in the
real world, so he turned to a suburban hospital in Pennsylvania. Like
Sacks, he knew from personal experience that nature could play a role
in healing. As a child, he suffered recurring bouts of painful kidney
disease. During long periods at home in bed, he drew great,
inexplicable comfort from a pine tree outside his window. Later, as a
young scientist, he wanted to test his hypothesis that nature views
could reduce patient stress and lead to better clinical outcomes. He
was aware of a study from 1981 showing that prisoners in Michigan
whose cells faced rolling farmland and trees (instead of a barren
courtyard on the other side of the facility) had fewer sick-call visits
overall.
Ulrich examined the records of gallbladder-surgery patients over
half a dozen years, some of whom had been assigned to rooms with a
window view of trees and some who looked out onto a brick wall. He
found that the patients with the green views needed fewer
postoperative days in the hospital, requested less pain medication and