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Wow...
Welcome everyone. It's great to be here.
Now, there's one thing that we know for sure
that nature is good for us.
We've known this for millennia.
2000 years ago Daoist monks wrote about
the healing powers of working in greenhouses
and tending gardens.
And in 1984 E. O. Wilson
wrote about our deep, primal need
to affiliate with nature in the natural world,
and coined the term "Biophilia".
This concept of biophilia is becoming ever more urgent
as we consume the biodiversity around us,
and separate ourselves
more and more from the natural world.
As of 2010,
we have officially become an urban species.
More of us live in cities than don't.
And that is a trend that is continuing and accelerating.
It has progressively drawn us inside,
away from the natural world.
And now the average North American and European
spends 90 percent of their time indoors.
That remaining 10 percent, well...
five of that is spent in a car
( audience laughter )
if not more.
I hear some commuters laughing in the audience.
This is... this is an environment
very different from our ancestral origins.
And it's a relatively modern thing.
So, how has this radical shift
in lifestyle affected our minds and body?
Well, there are a slew of studies
chronicling the modern ailments
that go along with the separation
from the natural world.
And there are... physical as well as mental
and some of these include
spreading epidemic of myopia.
If you don't get enough sunlight on your eyeballs
they grow longer and we get myopia.
We have rising levels of obesity and diabetes,
cardiovascular diseases correlated with
a lack of nature exposure,
and all sorts of behavioral disorders.
Depression is rampant.
So, what is going on and how can nature help?
Well, nature is...
nature is a complicated therapy.
It's not only rich in visuals,
it's multi-sensorial.
You have incredible sounds and tastes
and textures, interrelationships and processes...
It's... it's a complex therapy.
How do you figure out what's doing what?
Well, you can start to look at it
by breaking it into its component parts.
And, let's say visuals.
Now, I'm a marine biologist and
I've spent many, many hours studying this crazy fish,
the Giant Ocean Sunfish and other large animals.
And I love being immersed in nature.
I find it completely exhilarating and rejuvenating.
But what I find particularly interesting,
as well, is that just looking at nature imagery
does something powerful to our brains and bodies.
There's something going on there, we're not in nature
we're looking at it. So, what's that mechanism?
Well, Roger... Robert Ulrich
was the first to really formally
write about this and publish a scientific study
in 1984 in
And he found that recovering patients from
gall-bladder surgery who had windows
that looked out on trees
had a faster recovery rate, upwards of a day faster.
And requested fewer strong pain medication
than those patients whose windows
look out on a brick wall.
And since those studies many have followed suit
and found similar things.
There's a number of theories that have been put forth to
describe and explain what's going on
and one of the prevailing theories is put forth by
Rachel and Stephen Kaplan, of the University of Michigan,
that's called "Attention Restoration Theory".
You have your directed attention,
your voluntary attention and your involuntary attention.
And nature, it has our involuntary attention.
It draws us in with this kind of,
what psychologists call a "soft fascination",
that doesn't take much effort.
You look at the clouds overhead,
you look at the wind rustling the leaves
and your attention is drawn but it's not taxing you.
As opposed to directed attention where you're...
if you're driving, you have to,
you know, stay focused on these things.
And nature is restorative in this way.
So, that's one of the prevailing theories,
and there's lots of different ones as well.
And there's ways of testing this.
You can take...
take bits of saliva and look for cortisol,
which is a measure of stress levels,
you can put on galvanic skin sensors,
you can put on heart rate monitors.
But what if you could crawl right inside the mind.
Now wouldn't that be cool?
So, that's what we're looking at now
and I'm coining-- I'm calling this neuro-biophilia.
The science of how nature engages the brain.
And this is a sub-discipline
It joins other sub-disciplines that are looking at the brain
and how the brain responds to our environments.
And they include things such as neuro-cinematics,
the brain on movies.
There's also neuro-aesthetics,
the brain on beauty and art.
And what I find really exciting
about these sub-disciplines is that
they're highly interdisciplinary.
They're drawing from all sorts of different venues,
all sorts of different disciplines,
from social science to evolutionary psychology to...
to computer science,
artificial intelligence, landscape architecture,
color theory and they're pulling it all together
to make sense of what's going on in the brain.
We have our toes on the shores of this vast cerebral sea
and it's such an exciting time
to have these tools available for these explorations.
And to continue our adventure into the brain,
I'm going to hand off to Tan.
So, thanks for listening.
( applause )
Thank you, Tierney. And, good evening everyone.
You know I spend most of my day
in front of a computer screen.
I basically do a lot of reading,
I look at a lot of numbers,
measurements and I coordinate people
because I've spent the last ten years of my life
working to develop new technologies
that allow us to study brains.
You know, this amazing and yet enigmatic space
inside our head.
And as we go through life,
our brain actually undergoes extraordinary development.
It's the most adaptive organ in our body.
And it can change both positively and negatively,
by our thoughts, actions and experiences.
And we know, as neuroscientists that
nature has a restorative effect on the brain.
And the way in which most of these experiments
are conducted is based on
giving people a sustained attention task
that drains and fatigues your attentional networks.
And then you're asked to spend about 30 minutes or--
in nature or in an urban setting
and then you're brought back into the same place
and asked to do the same test again.
And you're measured to see your performance,
which one did you do better in.
And whilst that's a really good way to
observe the effects of the beneficial effects
of nature on the brain,
it's not quite the same as being able to
measure and quantify exactly
what is going on in the brain itself.
And that's the question
that the three of us wanted to answer.
We wanted to actually measure and quantify exactly
what is going on in my brain
when I experience those amazing imagery of nature.
And, so one of the things that really excites me the most
about brain research in the last decade
is that we have moved beyond psychology,
psychiatry and neurology
and we've merged with other disciplines.
Statistical analysis, artificial intelligence,
machine learning, even, you know,
material sciences, information technology
with advances in technology
contributing to ever better,
faster and smarter devices and techniques.
One of the things that we're trying to do
is to really push the boundaries of
the latest in science and technology
to enable these portable electroencephalogram systems
to open a new window on the
complex functioning of our brain.
And, I wanted to take a few moments
to share with you and really show you
an insight into what my brain
actually looks like in real-time.
So, if we switch over,
there you are. So, this is,
this device is picking up my brain activity right now
and transmitting it to a computer.
And, so what you're able to see is
a data visualization tool
that localizes the activity
in different functional brain areas.
So, when you see the frontal part of my brain light up,
the frontal lobes are responsible
for executive function,
conscious thoughts, movements, attention,
planning, language, logic.
The side of my brains,
the temporal lobes are responsible for
processing auditory responses, memory.
And the back of my brain,
when you see that part light up
the parietal and occipital lobes,
that's actually responsible for sensory integration
and visual processing.
And so through tools like this
we can actually have a window
into what's going on in real-time,
and that allows us to
really start to piece together the beneficial effects
of nature on the brain,
in a way that we haven't really been able to...
to see in the past.
And, so with that I am going to pass on to
Nalini to end our...
( applause )
Well, that's great.
I can't believe I just saw my colleague's brain going on
but that was fantastic.
And really that's the wonderful thing
about a collaboration like ours.
There's so much sharing and learning that goes on,
I've learned, for example,
that the different parts of a neuron,
a single neuron, one of billions
that occur in our brain,
they function in a way to connect
the thoughts and the actions
and the knowledge that we have
within our bodies and outside, outside our worlds.
And I'd like to share with my colleagues
anything I can tell them about trees
because that's what I study.
And I have been studying forest trees for many years.
I study in the forest canopy.
I started 35 years ago
and that was a time when we were pioneers
in the forest canopy,
where very few people had ascended.
Well, the beautiful tapestry of the intact forest canopy
is being destroyed by many human activities.
And I became very concerned about this.
The disturbances of deforestation,
of forest fragmentation,
of conversion of primary forest to agricultural land.
Another environmental problem that I became very interested
in is the harvesting of canopy dwelling mosses
for the horticulture trade.
This is a 300-million dollar business.
And it wouldn't sound so bad unless you realize that
it takes 30 years, 20 to 30 years
for these mosses to grow back
after they've been stripped off
of old growth forest trees.
And as a scientist,
I felt that maybe I could do something about this
environmental problem and I realized
I couldn't stop the collecting of mosses,
but perhaps I could learn how to farm these mosses,
in order to bring down the harvesting pressure
in these beautiful old growth systems.
And it also seemed to me that I needed help to do this
And it also seemed to me that perhaps
people who didn't have access,
people who don't have access to nature
or to these beautiful mosses
and this incredible temperate rainforest
might be the best possible partners.
And so I started a program in 2005
to enlist the help of prisoners,
of incarcerated men and women
to help me learn how to grow mosses
for the horticulture trade.
They have time, many of them have space,
you don't need sharp tools to grow mosses.
And so in fact this turned out to be a fabulous project.
The incarcerated men and women
enjoyed this project and got something out of it
because they found that they were contributing
to something larger than themselves,
something larger than the prison
in which they were incarcerated.
Something as large as planet Earth,
because they were helping to reduce...
collecting pressure of these old growth ecosystems.
And the supervisors and superintendent
loved this project because the men were occupied.
They were having better social interactions.
Violent infractions started going down.
And so they asked me to organize more projects.
I started a science lecture series
in this prison that spread to others.
And from those lecture series
became the inspiration for starting some
conservation projects.
These involved growing endangered species,
prairie plants, the Oregon spotted frog,
the Taylor checkerspot butterfly
by the inmates behind bars.
When these animals and plants were produced,
they were taken by our
collaborating conservation groups
and used for restoration projects in Washington state.
This was really a win-win situation
for the men and women that we were able to bring
these projects to but I very soon realized
that I was missing people in the prison,
in terms of people who could be
involved with these projects.
That is, I was missing the men and women
who were incarcerated far deep
in the bowels of the prison system of the United States,
those that live in solitary confinement.
Over 30,000,
some estimate it up as high as 80,000 men and women
are incarcerated in solitary confinement
in the United States.
This is a cell, 9 by 12.
All you can see is very bare of really anything.
They're incarcerated in this cell for 23 hours a day.
Their meals are brought to them.
And one hour a day, they are brought out by two guards
to their exercise rooms or their recreational space,
which again is a very bare room
with very little in terms of stimulation,
and absolutely no exposure to nature at all.
And it seemed to me that maybe,
although we couldn't bring in frogs and butterflies
and soil and plants,
that we might be able to bring nature imagery
to these exercise cells.
So that for at least one hour a day
they would be exposed to some element
of nature and nature imagery.
We started this out at the invitation of a wonderful,
oh, well, I don't know if I can say wonderful prison,
but in any case, a prison where wonderful people work,
the Snake River Correctional Institution
in Ontario, Oregon.
They installed a projector in one of the
exercise rooms in one of the cellblocks there.
They were able to gather natural history films
from the web and various other places.
And so, right now
the men who are in solitary confinement
can ask to see one of the films
when they go into their exercise room.
And there they can choose one of the 30 films
that has been made available to them.
And then they're able to watch that film
and for that one hour a day
they're being exposed to nature imagery.
We have some anecdotal information
that this has been very positive,
in terms of bringing down stress and anxiety
but we have to do more work
in terms of understanding
how this might become an intervention.
We need to understand the real impacts of this
on the attitudes and the behavior
of the inmates that are exposed to it.
We also recognize that it's not just
the incarcerated men and women who are exposed
to this nature deficit situation.
It's also the staff,
the officers and the people who work in this environment
that undergo what they call decomposition
of physical, emotional and psychological behavior,
as they're removed from nature and nature imagery.
This is true not only in solitary confinement prisons
but increasingly as Tierney pointed out,
in our own society.
People who work in windowless offices
in cubicles like this,
people who have jobs in tollbooths,
people who work in military barracks.
My own mom who's 91 years old
and is in a senior assisted living center
in Rockville, Maryland here
has very little in the way of interaction
with nature or nature imagery.
So, I think there's tremendous potential
to think about the things that
Tierney and Tan have talked about
and the kind of things that we'd like to do,
to eventually apply what we know
to the kinds of populations that we will be
a part of increasingly as time goes forward.
I think that our collaboration
has allowed us to just sort of,
as Tierney said,
"put our toes into the first little waves
of understanding humans and the brain."
But I'd like to just share with you
three of the beginning conclusions
that we have come up with so far.
First of all,
we've come to understand that
if we want to understand nature and the brain
we must use both the cognitive sides
of our ability to understand
as well as the emotional side.
Both of those are intertwined,
if we're to understand nature and the brain.
Secondly, we need to collaborate.
It's great to have this threesome of colleagues,
but there are other fields that must be drawn into this.
Neuroscience, ecopsychology,
sociology, all of these fields
must come together and touch in points
where we can make contact and help each other understand
this complexity of nature and the brain.
And the third concluding idea
that we've come up with as a result of our collaboration...
is that nature is necessary
for human social resilience,
that is, nature is needed by everyone.
Thank you.
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