physiological resonance that occurs when the fractal structure of the
eye matches that of the fractal image being viewed.” So perhaps our
comfort in nature is not really about an innate love for living things or
the physical frisson of a good view— it’s simply about fluent visual
processing. It’s about an easy congruence in the way the outside
stimulus (the tree) is processed internally by our neurons. Taylor uses
the word “resonance” instead of congruence, which is interesting,
because it’s the same word Beethoven used to describe how he felt
when he left the confines of Vienna for the country, which I also
quoted in the introduction: “How happy I am to be able to walk
among the shrubs, the trees, the woods, the grass and the rocks! For
the woods, the trees and the rocks give man the resonance he needs.”
Long before fractals, Beethoven intuited a powerful alignment of
senses and surroundings.
According to this processing theory, if the cause of our relaxation
is not rooted in Arcadian romance, the solution surely is. We need
these natural patterns to look at, and we’re not getting enough of
them, said Taylor. As we increasingly surround ourselves with
straight Euclidean built environments, we risk losing our connection
to the natural stress-reducer that is visual fluency. For a lot of
reasons, it would be good to bring greenery back to cities and get
outside. But Taylor has already begun to think about solutions beyond
parks or looking out the window. “You don’t always have a window
with a view. We may be able to manipulate and fool the visual system
and come up with an even better range [of fractal dimension] than
nature, purify it and maximize the response,” he said, beginning to
sound a little scary. As if sensing my response, he added, “I don’t
want some Orwellian future where you project a perfect fractal in a
public space and everyone must stare at it for five minutes. But we
want to give this information to architects and artists so they can
integrate it into a variety of works.”
In sensing the existence of an energy force between objects and