“Yes!” said Jason Watson, a young researcher and associate,
another attention scientist who’d become captivated by the nature
effect and whose shyness dissipated under the night’s half-moon. “It’s
what Kaplan calls mystery.” Watson told us about a recent study he’d
done that largely confirmed Kaplan’s mystery element. He and his
colleagues showed a couple hundred subjects images of nature scenes,
some with flat, predictable trails and some with winding or partly
obscured scenery, the kind of images that compelled the viewers to
want to peek around the corner. Even though the subjects saw the
images very briefly, just a matter of seconds, they remembered the
mysterious scenes better. In other words, there was something about
mystery that improved cognitive recall.
Ruth Ann Atchley saw a good transition point. “Okay, I have one
question: what kind of studies should we do now?”
“What I’d like to know more about is creativity. We can do
cognitive tests, but we also need biomarkers,” said Strayer.
Art Kramer had helped find a beautiful biomarker, the neural
growth factor BDNF, which spritzes the brain like Miracle-Gro during
exercise. Could nature exposure unleash some similar, visible
molecule? Until recently, it’s been hard to see inside the brain in real-
world settings or under more sophisticated lab conditions. Some
studies show a drop in hemoglobin levels (a proxy for blood and
oxygen) in the prefrontal cortex during time in nature. It’s still
debatable where the blood is going instead. At least one MRI study
(using photographs of nature) shows it’s going to parts of the brain
like the insula and the anterior cingulate that are associated with
pleasure, empathy, and unconstrained thinking. By contrast, when
those same subjects viewed urban pictures, more blood traveled to the
amygdala, which registers fear and anxiety.
Strayer would like to know what a brain looks like as it’s getting
restored. Can you see it? Does it look different in the real world
compared to in a lab that uses photographs? After some discussion,