4Runner, my phone and its riveting Mappiness app in my pocket.
“Don’t talk to Siri!” He implored me and the others in the SUV.
Apple is very miffed at Strayer. So are GM and Ford.
For all his expertise with automobiles, Strayer has taken on their
opposite in his latest line of inquiry: nature. As a longtime river
rafter, backpacker and hiker, he knows he gets his best ideas in the
wilderness. Now he wants to know why.
Buddha, Jesus, and Reese Witherspoon all went to the desert to
seek wisdom. David Strayer was following the pattern, and bringing a
half-dozen neuroscientists with him. Their plan: to figure out how to
study the effect of something as beautiful and complex as nature on
something as beautiful and complex as the human brain. While the
Japanese begin with the premise of biophilia—our innate emotional
connection to living things—and Mappiness assesses feelings, this
group was all about cognition. Strayer’s team was less interested in
amorphous concepts of well-being and more interested in watching
and measuring how nature helps us think, solve problems and work
together. Results should be controlled, imaged, measured, charted,
recrunched, replicated, regressed into chi squares and attacked in
multiple studies from unexpected angles. On this retreat, they would
need to come up with questions and experimental designs that could
pass muster with their peers, and with themselves.
But for now, it was time to engineer some decent hiking. Strayer
had invited the group to Moab, a scruffy town of mountain bikers and
river runners in southern Utah named after an ancient kingdom. With
its proximity to outrageous scenery—as well as to purveyors of
decent 3.2 ale—it seemed a fitting place to discuss and plan
experiments for assessing nature’s impact on the brain. Strayer was
the George Clooney to this Ocean’s Eleven of nerds trying to crack a
scientific problem. He had the maps, the supplies and the funding
from the National Academies of Science. For my part, I wanted to
understand where the neuroscientists were coming from theoretically