two sides. It felt treacherous, in a good way. Below us we could see a
reclining Adam Gazzaley, who is an avid photographer when he’s not
authoring lead neuroscience articles for the journal Nature. We posed
for some snapshots and got out of there.
“I just had this amazing thing happen,” said Gazzaley when we
reached him. “I was lying there, trying to get a shot of my feet and the
rock and the sky, and all of a sudden I figured out something I never
figured out before. I could take a vertical panorama! From bottom to
top!” Gazzaley was now giggling. He showed us the tiny vertical
panorama on his phone, but between the glare and the size it was not
much to see.
“Half a day in nature and you’re already more creative!” I said.
“I know, right?”THIS WAS DAVE Strayer’s third neuroscientists-in-the-desert confab.
The first took place in 2010, a thirty-two-mile backpacking trip in
Grand Gulch. After that came a five-day river trip with a slightly
larger group. A canoe tipped over, two esteemed neuroscientists fell
out, and a photographer from the New York Times caught it on
camera. It was all a little embarrassing. The point of that river trip
was for Strayer to infect his colleagues with his somewhat eccentric
ideas having to do with the creativity and peace that are unleashed
when you take off your watch, turn off your devices, and head into the
wild. Of this group, Strayer is the one who buys most into the Power
of Nature. But he knew he needed the street cred and technical lab
expertise of the others.
The plan worked well enough. After five days, the scientists were
uncannily relaxed, some more so than they had been in years, and
they agreed to test Strayer’s ideas. They came up with a pilot study to
measure the creativity of fifty-six Outward Bound participants. Half
took a test called the Remote Associates Test before the trip; half did
so after three days of hiking. A fun and challenging measure of