works from her plant-filled university office in Ann Arbor. She and
her husband are still revered within the world of environmental
psychology, and together their mentorship has spawned dozens of
leading researchers around the world whose work crops up across
these pages. What leads to brain-resting? I had asked her. “Soft
fascination,” she’d said. That’s what happens when you watch a
sunset, or the rain. The most restorative landscapes, she said, are the
ones that hit the sweet spot of being interesting but not too
interesting. They should entice our attention but not demand it. The
landscapes should also be compatible with our sense of aesthetics and
offer up a little bit of mystery. You can find these conditions indoors
if you’re lucky, but they spring easily from natural environments.
The Kaplans called their hypothesis the Attention Restoration
Theory, or ART. They tested it qualitatively at first, finding that their
subjects expressed clearer thinking and less anxiety after viewing
nature photographs or spending time outdoors. In 2008, Stephen
Kaplan teamed up with one of his graduate students, Marc Berman,
for more empirical testing. They found that short sessions of nature-
image viewing (compared to pictures of urban setting) allowed
subjects’ brains to behave as if at least partly “recovered,”
specifically in measures of cognitive performance and executive
attention. Rachel Kaplan thinks these effects will only get bigger as
time in nature increases.
One of the Kaplans’ early students was Roger Ulrich, the EEG
researcher we met briefly in the last chapter. While the Kaplans
promulgated the idea of attention restoration, Ulrich instead argued
on behalf of the Stress-Reduction Theory, or SRT. It’s worth pointing
out the main difference between ART and SRT, and it’s mostly a
question of timing. Both propose that nature makes us happier and
smarter. In the Kaplans’ ART theory, the first stop is the brain’s
attention network. Nature scenes, like my walk up Hunter Creek, lulls
us with soft fascination, helping to rest our top-down, direct-attention