Post by malati on Jun 26, 2023 3:56:55 GMT -6
Every time I am with nature I tend to feel spiritual and makes me feel refreshed. My experience with devotees made me conclude that many devotees love being with nature, in the great outdoors.
Science in some ways has determined why we get that feel good feeling.
An article from Outside magazine, " Why Being in Nature Makes You Smarter, According to Neuroscientists".
Why being in nature makes you smarter
(It's behind a paywall, so I don't think the link will work unless you're a subscriber and for copyright reason, I only pasted some passages from the article).
The scientific evidence is overwhelmingly clear: spending time outdoors boosts your brain function. So what are you waiting for?
...... Interacting with nature improves our ability to pay attention and complete difficult mental tasks. Urban environments have the opposite effect. The nature effect is largely true across multiple studies—even with short exposures to nature or when subjects just looked at photos of wild places. Green spaces around homes and schools correlate to better cognitive development in kids and better mental function in adults. Researchers have even documented physical changes to the brain with MRI scans: One study found kids with more access to green spaces had more gray matter, which is linked to higher-level thinking and processing. Another reported that simply showing people photos of nature improved connectivity between different parts of the brain.
.... The evidence that nature boosts brain power is “extremely strong,” says Marc Berman, director of the Environmental Neuroscience Laboratory at the University of Chicago. “Our interaction with nature improves working memory performance and executive attention performance—those are the ones that keep replicating,” he says.
....... As anyone who’s spent too long staring at math problems or balance sheets knows: concentrating on something gets exhausting. Not only that, but daily life for most of us is also full of distractions—everything from an officemate’s cell phone pinging to a flashing banner ad online to email alerts piling up to a screeching garbage truck out on the street—that grab our attention, often inadvertently. Switching attention from one thing to another is also cognitively taxing, says Jason Duvall, concentration advisor and lecturer at the University of Michigan’s Program in the Environment. “We don’t really do multitasking, we do task switching,” he says. “In order to do that, we have to keep each of those things active in the brain, so it can be recalled and we can return. For every task that we add, we get worse at any other subsequent task.”
...... There’s also a concept called perceptual fluency. “The idea is that elements of the natural environment tend to be easy for our visual system to process,” Duvall explains. “One explanation is that natural features have fractal patterns, or repeating patterns at different scales,” like snowflakes or tree branches. “From an information-processing perspective, the brain has an easier time making sense of what’s going on. That may explain why people feel more refreshed after those experiences—the cognitive load is lessened in natural environments.”
The why is important, but perhaps less critical than the simple fact that it just works: If a mountain of neuroscientific evidence tells us that regular nature exposure optimizes brain function, well, we should listen. Whether that means an hour of forest time at school, a daily bike ride, or a lunchtime walk around the park, getting outside is a lot more than just fun or relaxing. It’s essential.
Science in some ways has determined why we get that feel good feeling.
An article from Outside magazine, " Why Being in Nature Makes You Smarter, According to Neuroscientists".
Why being in nature makes you smarter
(It's behind a paywall, so I don't think the link will work unless you're a subscriber and for copyright reason, I only pasted some passages from the article).
The scientific evidence is overwhelmingly clear: spending time outdoors boosts your brain function. So what are you waiting for?
...... Interacting with nature improves our ability to pay attention and complete difficult mental tasks. Urban environments have the opposite effect. The nature effect is largely true across multiple studies—even with short exposures to nature or when subjects just looked at photos of wild places. Green spaces around homes and schools correlate to better cognitive development in kids and better mental function in adults. Researchers have even documented physical changes to the brain with MRI scans: One study found kids with more access to green spaces had more gray matter, which is linked to higher-level thinking and processing. Another reported that simply showing people photos of nature improved connectivity between different parts of the brain.
.... The evidence that nature boosts brain power is “extremely strong,” says Marc Berman, director of the Environmental Neuroscience Laboratory at the University of Chicago. “Our interaction with nature improves working memory performance and executive attention performance—those are the ones that keep replicating,” he says.
....... As anyone who’s spent too long staring at math problems or balance sheets knows: concentrating on something gets exhausting. Not only that, but daily life for most of us is also full of distractions—everything from an officemate’s cell phone pinging to a flashing banner ad online to email alerts piling up to a screeching garbage truck out on the street—that grab our attention, often inadvertently. Switching attention from one thing to another is also cognitively taxing, says Jason Duvall, concentration advisor and lecturer at the University of Michigan’s Program in the Environment. “We don’t really do multitasking, we do task switching,” he says. “In order to do that, we have to keep each of those things active in the brain, so it can be recalled and we can return. For every task that we add, we get worse at any other subsequent task.”
...... There’s also a concept called perceptual fluency. “The idea is that elements of the natural environment tend to be easy for our visual system to process,” Duvall explains. “One explanation is that natural features have fractal patterns, or repeating patterns at different scales,” like snowflakes or tree branches. “From an information-processing perspective, the brain has an easier time making sense of what’s going on. That may explain why people feel more refreshed after those experiences—the cognitive load is lessened in natural environments.”
The why is important, but perhaps less critical than the simple fact that it just works: If a mountain of neuroscientific evidence tells us that regular nature exposure optimizes brain function, well, we should listen. Whether that means an hour of forest time at school, a daily bike ride, or a lunchtime walk around the park, getting outside is a lot more than just fun or relaxing. It’s essential.