faculties. With that restoration, we become more relaxed, and then
can perform thinking tasks better. SRT and Wilson’s biophilia, on the
other hand, posit that nature exposure can immediately lower our
anxiety and stress levels, and then we can think more clearly and
cheer up. Ulrich explained the intellectual split with the Kaplans to
me: “After getting my Ph.D. our paths diverged with respect to
conceptual thinking and research methods. Their work continued to
evolve around cognition. Mine turned in the directions of emotional,
physiological, and health-related effects of nature.” Ulrich influenced
the Japanese with their blood-pressure cuffs and mood scales, while
the Kaplans’ attention framework has generally held more sway with
the Americans.
“How could we have possibly imagined where all this would go?”
asked Kaplan, marveling at the long tail on the creature she and
Stephen birthed. Both ART and SRT still leave plenty of room for
investigation: What constitutes soft fascination? Through which
sensory systems do we register the scenes that change our moods?
How do you define nature and how quickly do these responses occur?
Here’s Team Moab’s overarching hypothesis: After days of
wandering in a place like this, resting the executive branch and
watching the clouds drift across an endless sky, good shit happens to
your brain.
“After three days, there’s just this feeling, ooh, something
changes,” said Paul Atchley.
Added Strayer: “We’d be foolish to ignore it. By the fourth day,
you’re more relaxed, you notice details. In the wilderness, there’s a
novelty effect for the first few days, you’ve got a new backpack on,
there’s all this equipment. But then the novelty wears off and that
novelty was attracting your attention, so now your attention is not
grabbed. There’s a capacity to use other parts of your brain. It’s like
when Michael Jordan had the flu when the Bulls played the Utah Jazz.
You can’t write him off because he plays well like that. He scored