intuition and “convergent creativity,” the RAT gives you three words
and asks you to come up with a word that links them (like
water/tobacco/stove: answer—pipe. Here’s a harder one:
way/ground/weather: answer is in the footnote.* If you can’t guess it,
go stare at a tree and try again. Hint: it is not “under”). Although it
was a small study, the results (published in PLoS ONE) blew the
researchers away: a 50 percent improvement in creativity after just a
few days in nature.
Fifty percent! Who wouldn’t want to harness that power? But it
needed to be replicated and teased apart. So Strayer chased down a
new grant, enough money to bring everyone together here and
eventually run a couple of larger, more ambitious studies with the
input of the group. On this trip, the scientists were staying in a hotel,
albeit with a fire pit on a roofdeck. It was a compromise between
convenience and cave-dwelling. The plan was to hike and run rivers
during the day, sit around the fire at night and brainstorm
experimental design. Drinks included.
Even though the Outward Bound study was intriguing, there were
a lot of variables going on and plenty of reasons to be wary of the
findings. Was it “nature” that improved performance, or was it
hanging out socially in a stimulating group for several days? Was
there simply a brightening of mood that made people sharper, perhaps
caused by better sleep, or the surprisingly good powdered lentils
(okay, unlikely), or a flirtation with the rock-climbing instructor? The
notion of “nature experience” could be exceedingly difficult to
unpack. “I think there’s a recalibration of your senses, of seeing and
noticing,” said Strayer. “I’d like to have empirical data to assert or
refute that hypothesis.”
THANKS TO THE grant money, the scientists were able to dine a few
steps up from freeze-dried hummus. The first night after Arches, they
headed to Moab’s finest (and only) Thai restaurant. Art Kramer, a