working memory improves,” he said. And, he explained, it is also
consistent with the Kaplans’ Attention Restoration Theory. The quiet
hikers were able to access the Kaplans’ magic recipe of feeling
“away,” of being open to soft fascination in their environment, of
having a sense of compatibility with the landscape and feeling as if
they are in a vast, restful space. The phone talkers, by contrast, may
have been relaxed by being outside in the fresh air, but they were not
as liberated from daily cares. They weren’t truly resting their top-
down attentional networks. They were multitasking, walking, looking,
listening and most importantly, speaking, which uses up a lot of
attentional bandwidth. Note to self: leave the cell phone at home, or at
least deep in your pocket, when in need of a cognitive reboot.
About the same time Strayer was running his experiment, yet
another Stanford team designed a walking-in-nature study (it’s
interesting to note that the campus most known for changing our
relationship to technology—by incubating it—is now becoming
known for helping us ditch it). As sometimes happens, neither team
was familiar with the other’s work, but there was some nice
complementarity. Working with ecosystem services expert Gretchen
Daily and emotional-regulation-psych guru James Gross, doctoral
student Greg Bratman randomly sent sixty volunteers on either a
fifty-minute walk through a busy street in Palo Alto or on trails
around the iconic local green space known as the Stanford Dish.
Before and after, he measured their moods, anxiety and rumination,
and also gave them a series of punishing cognitive tests. Results? The
subjects performed significantly better on a test measuring memory
and attention—and they also reported feeling happier—after walking
in nature.
Bratman and his colleagues had a theory about why, and they
wanted to test it. His coinvestigator, Gross, is an expert on
rumination. This is something cows do literally, but our minds do it
too: chew on an unpleasant memory to create, as the study authors put