But, apparently, so did other people. Kramer told me later the
study “was a bit of a bust.” There were problems with the lab
technology, specifically the “presentation of scenes across multiple
screens and mismatching auditory and visual scene elements.”
Perhaps it’s time to admit it, people: nature just does the elements
better.
DAVID STRAYER HAD been having better luck with his post-Moab
experiments than Kramer. He conducted his own walking study
outside, per his style. “We know the field is messy,” he told me.
“There’s wind and rain. But being in the lab strips away a lot of the
interesting stuff, so I’ve learned to grin and bear it and accept the
consequences.”
Strayer decided to make use of the Red Butte arboretum near the
University of Utah campus. He wanted to look at the effects of being
in nature on walkers’ memory, and he also—because he is David
Strayer, Distracted Driving Man—wanted to look at how technology
use might mess with memory. For the experiment, Strayer and
doctoral student Rachel Hopman set up three groups of about twenty
people each: one group would hand over their cell phones, walk for
thirty minutes in the arboretum and then take a recognition memory
task. A second group would take the same walk and test, but during
the walk, they were told to make a long phone call. Moms were happy
that day. The third group was the control. They took the memory test
before the walk. The first group, walking with no phone, averaged 80
percent in their postwalk memory test. The group that talked on the
phone scored only 30 percent, and the control group scored about the
same.
Strayer was delighted to see both that nature walking boosted
cognition and that the addition of evil technology totally wiped out
the gains. “What we find is consistent with the other literature that