Afterward, some students were assigned to watch a ten-minute video
of nature scenes and some to watch videos of urban scenes, from a
pedestrian mall to cars on a road. The results were dramatic: within
five minutes, the brains-on-nature returned to baseline. The brains-
on-built-environment recovered only partway—as indicated by those
nervous system measures— even more than ten minutes later.
Despite early promise, the study of brains-on-nature went fairly
dark for a couple of decades. It was considered soft science, much of
it based on qualitative measures in a medical world dazzled by
genetics and modern chemistry and funded by pharmaceutical
companies that didn’t stand to make a profit from houseplants or
garden views. The renewed interest of late represents a convergence
of ideas and events: the relentless march of obesity, depression and
anxiety (even in affluent communities and despite more medication),
the growing recognition of the role of the environment on genes, and
the growing academic and cultural unease with our widening breach
from the outdoors.
NOT SURPRISINGLY, MY urban peregrination wasn’t quite as pleasant as
the soft green trail of Juniko. Downtown Hirosaki is far less green
than D.C. There are transit stations, shops selling basic goods, and
people on the go. In the height of summer, the asphalt was baking.
Shoppers rushed in and out of a department store whose busy
windows advertised “spaghetti with tomato cream.” I passed four
parking lots, two taxi stands, a bus station, and two loudly idling
buses belching fumes. My nervous system responded. My systolic
blood pressure had dropped six points after walking in the forest. It
went up six points after walking in the city. Which of course begs the
question: How long do the feel-good effects of nature last? Do they
just get wiped out by the first traffic jam or cell phone tone?
Miyazaki’s sometime collaborator, an immunologist in the
department of environmental medicine at Nippon Medical School in