become more so as the weeks and months tick by.
But now inmates can lift weights and do chin-ups several times a
week in the so-called Blue Room while watching forty-minute videos
of ocean life, rainforests and desert sunsets. Since the Blue Room
went in two years ago, inmates often request to go in there when they
want to calm down. Said Renee Smith, Snake River’s behavioral
health services manager, “We’re getting plenty of stories from
officers saying they feel like it is relieving stress and mental health
and behavioral issues. We’re feeling that they’re not getting into
trouble as much. We feel like there are less cell extractions, less
hollering and screaming.”
But how close is virtual nature to the real thing? Wondering if the
screens could in fact have the same stress-lowering effects, a
psychologist named Peter Kahn at the University of Washington ran a
couple of experiments at his university. In the first, he placed nature-
playing video screens in windowless offices and found that they did
improve workers’ cognition and mood. In the second, he divided
ninety subjects into three groups: one with a real-live window view of
nature, one in front of a plasma-screen TV showing nature, and one
near a blank wall. He first distressed the volunteers with public-
speech tasks and then measured how quickly each group recovered.
Taken together, the studies showed that the real-nature views helped
the most, with the video views helping a bit (although hardly at all in
the second experiment) and the blank wall helping the least. Kahn
concluded that humans can “adapt to the loss of actual nature,” but
“we will suffer physical and psychological costs.”
While some researchers like Kahn lament this speedy and
inexorable replacement of real nature by screens, others, especially
the younger ones, seem more pragmatic. They also, notably, grew up
with less exposure to nature to begin with. “We are moving toward
more of a virtual life with every year, with video games, 3D TVs,
larger, more immersive screens and more virtual content,” said