Taylor, he believes there’s a Goldilocks sweet spot of complexity, not
too busy and not too boring. For his Ph.D., Valtchanov used an eye
tracking machine to parse how people looked at scenes. He found that
while the eyes tend to linger lazily over nature scenes, urban scenes
provoke many more rapid “fixations,” and more blinking, indicating
that the eyes—and brain—are working harder to decode them. These
places demand our attention.
From his research, Valtchanov believes easy-to-process scenes
trigger the release of natural opiates in the brain. Other studies have
shown that images we love activate a primitive part of the brain
called the ventral striatum (strongly linked to deep emotions and
rewards that motivate our behavior) as well as the opioid-rich
parahippocampus—the same region Taylor found stimulated in
subjects viewing fractals. When the poet and writer Diane Ackerman
writes of craving the “visual opium” of a sunset, she is not being as
metaphorical as she thinks. According to Valtchanov, nature makes us
happy because of a neural mechanism in our ventral visual pathway
that is tuned to a mid-level frequency range like a clear radio signal.
When it finds it, happy molecules flow.
This is the brain spot Valtchanov wants to target with his app. To
show me how it works, we pulled up a bunch of images on the
Internet. We held up the phone to the photographs and watched as a
small bar on the image moved like a thermometer from green (good)
to white (neutral) to red (stressful). The app will also give the image
an absolute score of restorativeness between 0 and 100 and code them
to these colors. Some of the ratings were predictable. Forest vale:
very green. Lake: ditto. Urban intersections: red. Simple buildings:
neutral. Shanghai skyline under blue sky: neutral. But when I pulled
up a snowy meadow flanked by a snow-covered peak, the kind you
would see on a travel brochure for the Rockies, the app went to
reddish.
“What’s up with that?” I asked.