Wells, it was that the prettier courtyards drew residents outside,
where they got to know each other and could keep an eye out. The
researchers had also tested how often residents used the courtyards
and asked them what they thought of their neighbors. The greener-
courtyard residents reported their neighbors were more concerned
with helping and supporting one another, had stronger feelings of
belonging, engaged in more social activities and had more visitors.
The Kuo findings were backed up by a Dutch study of over 10,000
households that found people of similar incomes living near more
vegetation experienced less loneliness, and by an office study
showing that subjects in rooms with potted plants were more generous
to others when asked to distribute five dollars than those in a room
without plants. (Potted plants! Someone really ought to deck out the
halls of Congress with ficuses.) For some reason, social psychologists
like to study road rage, and even here, the evidence for tree views
making us nicer appears strong. In these studies and in others, the
greenery appeared to be leading to prosocial behaviors and a stronger
sense of community. Frederick Law Olmsted suspected as much.
“I am not historically a nature lover,” Kuo told me. “I had no
personal intuition when I started that these findings would come out
the way they have. But twenty years later, I have convinced myself.”
ALTHOUGH THESE STUDIES point to real health and behavioral effects
from nearby nature, they don’t explain how merely looking at some
shrubbery—as opposed to a full sensory immersion in nature—makes
us healthier and nicer. For that, the visuals need to be broken down.
Enter nanoparticle physicist Richard Taylor. Like Ulrich’s, his quest
starts with a meaningful childhood experience. When Taylor was ten
years old and growing up in England, he chanced upon a catalogue of
Jackson Pollock paintings. He was mesmerized, or perhaps a better
word is Pollockized. Franz Mesmer, the crackpot eighteenth-century
physician, posited the existence of animal magnetism between