sensory and less analytical, or what neuroscientists call bottom-up
instead of top-down. The older parts of my brain were reasserting
themselves over the chatty neocortex. It simply doesn’t usually
require intense concentration to walk across a landscape, one foot in
front of the other, at the speed of human locomotion. This is a speed
our brains naturally understand.
During lunch atop warm boulders near the creek, I pulled out my
flower guide. We lumbered down to gather around a white blossom on
a stalk. Turns out there were quite a few of these on the laminated
card, and this one didn’t quite fit. “I think it’s a buckwheat,” said
someone. “No, look at the leaves. They’re pointy.”
“That’s gotta be this one, a milkvetch,” said Atchley, pointing to
the card.
“Actually, it’s a stinking milkvetch.”
It was natural history by committee: educated guesses, disputes
and confident pronouncements that turned out to be wrong. It was
probably a lot like doing brain science.
THE IDEA OF nature as a kind of orchestral conductor of attentional
resources isn’t all that new. Remarkably, Frederick Law Olmsted
wrote of exactly this phenomenon in 1865, arguing that viewing
nature “employs the mind without fatigue and yet exercises it;
tranquilizes it and yet enlivens it; and thus, through the influence of
the mind over the body, gives the effect of refreshing rest and
reinvigoration to the whole system.” Slowly, slowly, academia started
to catch up. Beginning in the early 1980s, Stephen and Rachel Kaplan
at the University of Michigan noticed that psychological distress was
often related to mental fatigue. They speculated that our constant
daily treadmill of tasks was wearing out our frontal lobes. This part of
the brain got exercised in premodern life too, but the difference is it
also got more rest, said the Kaplans.
Before coming to Moab, I had spoken with Rachel Kaplan, who