switching, which is something we do an awful lot of these days, burns
up precious oxygenated glucose from the prefrontal cortex and other
areas of the brain, and this is energy we need for both cognitive and
physical performance. It’s no wonder it feels pretty good to space out
and watch a butterfly. Of course, that requires brain real estate too,
but it’s different real estate, and that’s a key point.
As we neared the trailhead, the brilliant sky contrasted
dramatically with the red cliffs through the front window. A corridor
of green creek bed emerged from a seam in the landscape. “From my
perspective,” Atchley continued, sweeping his hand across the view,
“what this environment is doing to us right now is giving us fewer
choices. And by having fewer choices, your attentional system
functions better for higher-order things. In the office environment,
you’ve got emails, alerts, sounds. That’s a lot of filtering and so it’s
harder to think deeply. Here the filtering requirements are not
demanding so you have the capacity to focus on deeper thought.”
COMING INTO THIS project, I believed that being in spectacular or even
just pleasant natural environments helps me destress, think more
clearly and feel grounded in a way that made me a better person. But I
found myself resisting the idea that our Pleistocene ancestors had it
so much better. Here in Moab were a bunch of middle-aged scientists
who disliked their cell phones and saw the effect phones were having
on their undergraduates, many of whom were distractible, listless and
anxious. But it seemed too convenient and ahistorical to think that our
modern stressed-out lives are somehow worse than the stressed-out
lives of our forebears. I worried that the nature justifiers might be
overly romanticizing cavemen (especially the men) who presumably
got to skip across the veldt stalking game, building up their deltoids
and engaging in bro rituals by the light of a crackling fire. But, hello.
Hunter-gatherer child mortality rates alone would have sent most
families into extreme grief, not to mention the dire uncertainties of