“Well, it’s jagged and it’s white and the trees look dead, because
it’s winter.”
“But it’s beautiful,” I said. “When I’m skiing in places like this,
I’m definitely in my happy place.”
“The app isn’t taking into account your activity or endorphins or
oxygen to your brain. I’m just analyzing the face value of the
environment. According to Wilson’s biophilia hypothesis, people
would react strongly to dead trees.”
“But these aren’t dead. It’s just winter. It’s pretty.”
“There’s a difference between pretty and psychologically
valuable.” He adjusted my hands in front of the image. “If you point
the camera a bit upwards to get more of the blue sky, it will rate
better.” He shrugged. “I’m not saying it’s perfect.”
TAYLOR, VALTCHANOV AND OTHERS have shown that nature images—
even on a screen—can elicit fast, positive responses in our brains. But
if nature, real nature, is what the visual system was actually built to
look at, maybe we should let those looks linger. Because when we’re
stuck indoors looking at screens, our eyes aren’t happy. Mine get dry
and start to hurt. I went to my eye doctor for eye pain, and she was
like, welcome to the club. “You’re a starer.” She told me. “A starer?”
I suddenly felt like a creepy ogler. “You don’t blink!” she said. I
blinked. I blinked again. It felt weird. “When we stare at screens all
day, we blink less,” she said. “We all do it.” She sent me off with
some eye drops and told me to make myself blink twenty times in a
row as often as I can remember.
Aside from dryness, weird things start happening to our eyes in
the absence of outdoor space and light. One clue was a study from
China that found twice the rates of myopia (nearsightedness) in
wealthier, urban parts of the country than in rural areas. In Shanghai,
a stupendous 86 percent of high school students need eyeglasses. As
recent studies in Ohio, Singapore and Australia found, the real