How Nature & Other Physical Environments Impact Your Focus, Cognition & Health | Dr. Marc Berman

Andrew Huberman:
Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Mark Berman. Dr. Mark Berman is a professor of psychology at the University of Chicago, where he directs the Environmental Neuroscience Laboratory. His research focuses on how our physical environments, particularly natural environments, impact our brain function, mental health, and cognitive performance. During today's episode, we discuss the fascinating and actionable science of how your physical surroundings indoors, and in particular, your relationship and interactions with nature, can shape your biology and your cognitive abilities. Dr. Berman explains how exposure to very common features in nature, such as fractal patterns, increase your ability to focus, reduce your stress, and improve your mental and physical health metrics. And not just while you're in nature, but after you return indoors for many hours and even days afterwards. During today's episode, you'll learn about something called attention restoration theory, which turns out to be very important for understanding how different types of indoor and outdoor environments either deplete or restore your cognitive resources. We also discuss practical science-based strategies that anyone can implement, regardless of where you live. So if you're in an apartment or a house, if you have ready access to nature or if you don't, today's episode explains how to design your indoor space, the optimal duration and timing of nature exposure, and the specific visual and auditory elements that will provide you with the greatest cognitive and health benefits. So whether you're a student or a professional looking to enhance your learning capacity, focus, and reduce your burnout, or you're simply interested in optimizing your mental and physical health through exposure to different elements of nature, today's episode provides clear, actionable protocols based on rigorous scientific research. By the end of today's episode, you'll have a toolkit of evidence-based strategies that will transform your relationship with your indoor environment and outdoor environments, and you'll learn to harness those to improve your brain and body. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, today's episode does include sponsors. And now for my discussion with Dr. Mark Berman. Dr. Mark Berman, welcome.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Great to be here, Andrew.

Andrew Huberman:
I love being out in nature, so I'm excited about today's conversation, which is taking place indoors. But we're going to talk about the relationship between the mind, the brain, nature, stress, rumination, and this incredible power that interactions with the natural world can have on our brain. As we wade into this, I'd like to start with this issue of recapturing our attentional abilities, because I think nowadays, everybody, whether they're clinically diagnosed with ADHD or they are just a human being on the planet, feels as if their attention is being pulled in different directions, sometimes without our awareness, sometimes with our awareness. What is this notion of recapturing attention?

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah, I think it's a really fundamental concept, and we think that attention, maybe on the surface of it, people just think about, oh, it's kids trying to pay attention in school, or, oh, it's trying to pay attention at work, but it's actually deeper than that. We think that elements of attention are sort of involved in controlling all of our behaviors. And when our attention is depleted, we don't have as much impulse control. We might behave more aggressively. We may not be able to achieve our goals. And with a lot of things in the modern world, our attention is just being fatigued and we're depleted, and it's really hard to recharge the battery or know what to do to recharge the battery. And I think that's kind of the entry point why I sort of got interested in this and one of my mentors, Steve Kaplan, would talk about this directed attention fatigue problem that a lot of us are facing. Our ancestors thousands of thousands of years ago were not bombarded with so much information like we are now. Now, the modern human has to sort of pick and choose what to pay attention to, and it's kind of overwhelming. And Steve Kaplan had this idea that humans have two different kinds of attention. So one kind of attention is called directed attention, and that's kind of the attention that I've been talking about just recently here, and that's the kind of attention where you, as the individual person, are deciding what to pay attention to. So presumably, Andrew, you're deciding to pay attention to what I'm saying even though there's many other things you could find that might be more inherently interesting than what I'm saying. And this is a very unique human capability. There might be other species that can decide what to pay attention to, but we're really good at it. Humans are really, really good at being able to focus on this lecture or focus on reading this paper or focus on trying to finish this math problem, but we can't do it forever. And I think everybody has had that sensation where at the end of a long workday, maybe 3 or 4 o'clock, you might be just staring at the computer screen and you can't focus anymore. And we call that a directed attention fatigue state, where you can't really control your attentional focus anymore. And I see this all the time when I'm lecturing at the University of Chicago, and I think I'm a decent lecturer. First five minutes of class, all the students' eyes are on me. They're engaged. I see they're nodding along with me. And 45 minutes into my lecture, I kind of see people nodding back like this. They're getting tired. It's just hard for people to direct their attention for long periods of time. So that's the special attention, directed attention. We think there's this other kind of attention that we call involuntary attention, and that's the kind of attention that's automatically captured by interesting stimulation in the environment. So bright lights, loud noises, those things automatically capture our attention, and we don't really have much control over it. And we think that kind of attention, this involuntary attention, is less susceptible to fatigue or depletion. So you don't often hear people say, "Oh, I can't look at that beautiful waterfall anymore, it's just too interesting. I've got to step away." Or, "Oh, I have to stop watching this movie. It's just too interesting. I'm too tired out." So that's a different kind of attention, and we think what's happening in modern times is that our directed attention is being fatigued, but maybe we can restore directed attention by going into environments that can softly capture our involuntary attention.

Andrew Huberman:
Do we know the basis of attentional fatigue? I could imagine it's something in the noradrenergic dopamine, catecholamine world. Listeners of this podcast will recognize those terms, at least crudely. I could also imagine that it's literally a fatigue of the visual system and/or the auditory system. It's hard to maintain fixation, as we say-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yes

Andrew Huberman:
... as visual neuroscientists. To focus on a target-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yes

Andrew Huberman:
... is challenging. If we allow our eyes to rest, it actually gets easier to look back at it and fixate on a target. So what is the basis of the attentional fatigue for this focused attention, or what you call directed attention?

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah, it's a really great question. I'm not sure I have a great answer yet. Maybe you'd have some ideas, Andrew. One thing that sort of to me puzzles me a little bit about the brain is that from my understanding, it's like brain metabolism is 20% of overall metabolism no matter what people are doing, except for really extreme exercise, where brain metabolism goes down a little bit. But if you're asleep or if you're doing a hard calculus problem, I think the brain is still using 20% of metabolism. So it's sort of this puzzle, why do we get this mental fatigue state? It's got to have some kind of neurological component. At this point, I can't point to it, so I'm going to talk about it more at the psychological level. It's a sensation that we have that we can't focus anymore. If I was to talk about brain areas, I would say probably this ability to direct attention is most likely in frontal cortex, whereas this involuntary attention, sometimes we call it more bottom-up attention or exogenous attention, where it's activated by external stimulation, I would say that's probably more activated by things in the parietal cortex or even occipital cortex or auditory cortex, depending on what that external stimulation is.

Andrew Huberman:
I'm not going to lean everything on the visual system, but I've been listening to this book that unfortunately is only available as an audiobook called "Daily Rituals," which it's got two-minute chapters, and it describes the daily rituals of writers and artists and creatives. And it's very interesting that across many of those chapters, you find the same thing, which is that almost all of these people had a ritual of taking some stimulant, typically caffeine, sometimes more aggressive stimulants, but caffeine, and then something to restrict their visual world, make it more tunnel vision. In fact, there are certain painters, I forget the particular painter that they described, who literally built cardboard blinders onto his glasses when things weren't going so well. Now, the reason I bring this up is not as a suggestion, although I suppose it could. I actually used to read papers. Maybe I need to go back to this. I'd put a baseball cap on, put a hoodie on, and you-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... restrict your visual world.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And it makes perfect sense if, in fact, involuntary attention, which presumably comes from the periphery-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right

Andrew Huberman:
... is inexhaustible.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
So I think what's interesting about the digital interface-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... that we exist in now is that the whole world is brought right in front of us.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
So presumably, we evolved to move through space and direct our attention to particular locations and let the rest of the world fall away.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
And then involuntary attention could grab us to-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yes

Andrew Huberman:
... alert us to people showing up-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yes

Andrew Huberman:
... or danger or the smell of something-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yes

Andrew Huberman:
... wafting by, calling us for dinner. But now it's all placed right in our central visual field.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
So it makes sense that we would all be very challenged with maintaining directed attention-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yes

Andrew Huberman:
... within that small tunnel vision.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yes. And I would say something else too. I guess if you felt like you had to create an isolation chamber sort of thing to focus your directed attention, that's where we would say it's probably time to take a break, that that's when we might recommend that you go for a walk in nature to recharge this precious directed attention resource. So that might be a signal. If you're just having a really hard time focusing, yeah, you can try to power through, but I think that might not be the most productive. That might be a signal to you to say, "Hey, maybe I got to go take a break." And the break better not be scrolling on social media. We're saying a really good break is actually a walk in nature or some kind of interaction with nature.

Andrew Huberman:
I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, Helix Sleep. Helix Sleep makes mattresses and pillows that are customized to your unique sleep needs. Now, I've spoken many times before on this and other podcasts about the fact that getting a great night's sleep is the foundation of mental health, physical health, and performance. Now, the mattress you sleep on makes a huge difference in the quality of sleep that you get each night. How soft it is or how firm it is all play into your comfort and need to be tailored to your unique sleep needs. If you go to the Helix website, you can take a brief two-minute quiz, and it will ask you questions such as, "Do you sleep on your back, your side, or your stomach?" "Do you tend to run hot or cold during the night?" Things of that sort. Maybe you know the answers to those questions, maybe you don't. Either way, Helix will match you to the ideal mattress for you. For me, that turned out to be the Dusk mattress. I started sleeping on a Dusk mattress about three and a half years ago, and it's been far and away the best sleep that I've ever had. If you'd like to try Helix Sleep, you can go to helixsleep.com/huberman, take that two-minute sleep quiz, and Helix will match you to a mattress that's customized to you. Right now, Helix is giving up to 27% off all mattress orders. Again, that's helixsleep.com/huberman to get up to 27% off. Today's episode is also brought to us by BetterHelp. BetterHelp offers professional therapy with a licensed therapist carried out entirely online. I've been doing weekly therapy for over 30 years. Initially, I didn't have a choice. It was a condition of being allowed to stay in school. But pretty soon I realized that therapy is an extremely important component to overall health. In fact, I consider doing regular weekly therapy just as important as getting regular exercise, which of course, I also do every week. There are essentially three things that great therapy provides. First of all, great therapy provides a great rapport with somebody that you can trust and talk to about any and all issues with. Second of all, great therapy provides support in the form of emotional support or directed guidance. And third, expert therapy can provide useful insights. Those insights can allow you to make changes to improve your life in immeasurable ways, not just your emotional life and your relationship life, but also your professional life. With BetterHelp, they make it very easy to find an expert therapist you resonate with and that can provide you these benefits that come through effective therapy. Also, because BetterHelp allows for therapy to be done entirely online, it's extremely time efficient and easy to fit into a busy schedule. If you'd like to try BetterHelp, go to betterhelp.com/huberman to get 10% off your first month. Again, that's betterhelp.com/huberman. I want to talk about interaction with nature. I just want to-- It's not a pushback on what you just said, but maybe just to probe a little bit deeper. I think a lot of people struggle with getting into a focused state at the outset.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And I myself am familiar with the sitting down to do some work and it taking some time to kind of warm up and that-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... agitation. I always think about it as literally climbing over or through-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yes

Andrew Huberman:
... barbed wire. Sometimes it actually feels like that, right?

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
And then at either side of the barbed wire is a steep slope. On one side is distraction that can come from-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yes

Andrew Huberman:
... surfing the web or social media.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
And then on the other side is any sort of drama.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
And then, of course, our mind starts creating all these things that we think we need to do, and the idea is to get through the barbed wire.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
And then on the other side of it is that focused state.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
For most people, I think what I described is not terribly different from that.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I'm making a lot of assumptions here, but I don't know many people that can just sit down to work-

Dr. Marc Berman:
No, and just-

Andrew Huberman:
... and just drop in-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right

Andrew Huberman:
... like a-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yes

Andrew Huberman:
... like a trench.

Dr. Marc Berman:
That's right.

Andrew Huberman:
Can you do that?

Dr. Marc Berman:
No, but I can do it better after a walk in nature. So I think almost like the walk in nature is sort of like a preparatory kind of process. Just like thinking about like lifting weights or something like that. You wouldn't start off a workout and say, "Oh, let's put 250 on the bench and start going."

Andrew Huberman:
Correct.

Dr. Marc Berman:
You warm up. You got to wake up your nervous system a little bit, and I think that's kind of a little bit what we think interacting with nature is kind of doing. It's not a passive process. We're not saying, "Go and sit in a dark room for 30 minutes and then start to go to work." No. We're saying, we want you to be interacting with nature. We want you to notice nature. We want your involuntary attention to be automatically captured by the stimulation of nature. And then after you've kind of been sufficiently recharged, then we think you're going to be able to go back to your desk and be able to direct attention and be able to focus.

Andrew Huberman:
So let's talk about some of the data around what walks in nature and interactions with other components of nature can do for our cognition and our level of focus. I think intuitively people will appreciate, okay, a nice walk in nature, not looking at one's phone. It's very pleasant, it's relaxing, and then you get back to your desk, and you can really focus. What about the laboratory data that support this, or out-of-laboratory data that support this?

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Maybe you could describe a few of the incredible studies that you've done, because they are really incredible, and they're very pioneering in the way that you've brought real laboratory technology into nature as well. So pick your favorite study about this, and then I'll ask you about a few others as well.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Sure, thanks. Well, I think the seminal experiment that we did was back in 2008. And at that time, when people did these sort of nature walk studies, they would ask people, "How do you feel after the walk?" And it was very subjective, and I'm not against subjective accounts. And people reported, "Yeah, I feel much more refreshed after the walk in nature." But I always felt a little bit dissatisfied by that. I wanted to see, well, does objective performance change? Just like we would probably be dissatisfied if I gave you a pill and I said, "This pill is going to get you stronger. You're going to be able to lift more weight." And if we just had people say, "Yeah, I feel like I can lift more weight," I don't think that'd be satisfying. We'd actually want to see, can people actually lift more weight? And so what we did is we designed a study that was experimentally controlled that would have objective measures. How did people perform cognitively before and after going on a walk in nature? So what we did is we brought people into the laboratory, and then we gave them some challenging working memory and attention tasks. So one of the tasks was called the backwards digit span task, where you would hear digits out loud at a pace of about one digit per second, and then the participant would need to repeat them back in backwards order. So if I said, "Five, six, seven," the participant would have to repeat back, "Seven, six, five." Pretty easy task at three digits, but we keep increasing the number of digits all the way till about nine digits. At about five digits, you're ready to pull your hair out. It's a challenging task. So we gave participants this backwards digit span task, and then we gave them a map of a walk. The first studies were through the Ann Arbor Arboretum, which was a nature walk by the psychology building at the University of Michigan, or participants went for a walk on busy Washtenaw ... street in downtown Ann Arbor. The walks were both about 2.6 miles, so it took people about 50 minutes to do the walk. We also took participants' cell phones because we didn't want them texting or chit-chatting on the walk. We wanted their attention to be fully focused on the environment. And we also did one other thing. We also gave them a GPS watch. Why did we give them a GPS watch? Well, we did it for two reasons. One, we wanted to make sure they went on the walk, they didn't just go to Starbucks. And two, we wanted to see, do people get lost? Because if people got lost on the walk, maybe that wouldn't be restorative. Okay, so people do the backwards digit span task. We send them on a walk in nature, or we send them on a walk through an urban environment. They go on this 50-minute walk. They come back to the lab. We give them that same backwards digit span task again to see if there's any performance change or not, measure that. Then we have people repeat the whole procedure again. They come back to the lab a week later. So if they walked in nature the first week, they walked in the urban environment the second week, or vice versa. So it's all within subject, very tight experimental control. And what we found was pretty incredible, that people's working memory capacity and their ability to direct attention improved by about 20% after the walk in nature versus the walk in the urban environment. And people might be thinking, well, maybe it's just because the nature walk was just more pleasant. They just like the nature walk more. And people did tend to like the nature walk more. And we did measure improvement in mood. How much did mood improve on the walk? We didn't find very strong correlation between improvements in mood and improvements in the working memory and directed attention performance, suggesting that people weren't just getting better because they were getting into good moods. But the even stronger demonstration that this wasn't mood driven is that we had people walk at different times of the year. So some of our participants walked in June when it was 80 degrees Fahrenheit. People said, "Marc, I can't believe you're paying me to go for a walk in nature." Really healthy mood benefits, really healthy working memory and attention benefits. We also had participants walk in January, 25 degrees Fahrenheit. People said, "Marc, I was freezing my butt off out there. I did not enjoy that walk." But incredibly, the people that walked in January when it was freezing cold and they didn't enjoy the walk, obtained the same working memory and attention benefits as the people that walked in June. So you didn't even have to like the nature interaction to get this directed attention benefit. So that I thought was pretty interesting and counterintuitive, that this isn't just about liking or pleasantness. There's something deep about processing auditory, visual, maybe even tactile stimulation of nature that somehow is good for our brains and restores our ability to direct attention.

Andrew Huberman:
Super interesting findings, and it leads me back to this finite resource of directed attention, whatever the underlying networks and chemicals-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right

Andrew Huberman:
... happen to be. Could we speculate what might be occurring in the nature walks that is enhancing or allowing restoration of directed attention? And I guess the neurobiologist in me wants to say, okay, I'm walking in nature. That probably means some greenery, some dirt, maybe some water. And I could imagine one hypothesis that it's the kind of irregularity of nature environments, right? Maybe trees are spaced out-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yep

Andrew Huberman:
... in perfect spacing, like on Palm Drive at Stanford.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yep.

Andrew Huberman:
It looks like it speaks to the engineering department that they're set at such even intervals.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
Right? But typically, when you're in the forest or nature, there's also things to break up that regularity.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yep.

Andrew Huberman:
Whereas indoor environments and city environments tend to have a lot of right angles. Buildings can be different sizes, but city blocks are pretty fixed for a given neighborhood in terms of their size.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yep.

Andrew Huberman:
So that's just one hypothesis.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Sure.

Andrew Huberman:
I'm coming up with this off the top of my head. Do we have any data, or do you have any preferential speculation as to what it is about nature in terms of its physical structure?

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yep.

Andrew Huberman:
And as a corollary to that, is it that nature is relaxing people and therefore they're not having to use their directed attention, and therefore directed attention capability comes back or is set at a higher level? I realize this is two questions kind of braided together, but that's what I'm curious about.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah, and I think both elements are at play. So maybe I'll start first with kind of the resting directed attention element. So let's pretend we're on these walks in nature or the walk on the urban environment. And I'll start with the walk on the urban environment. The walk in the urban environment required people to cross a lot of streets, so you had to be vigilant, so you still had to use directed attention. It also had a lot of car traffic, so you're hearing the noise of cars whizzing by at probably 40, 45 miles per hour. There's also advertising. You're going by shops and billboards. That kind of requires some directed attention. So you can't really just mind wander and let your mind kind of go in those environments. You still have to be vigilant. You still have to use directed attention. The walk through the Ann Arbor Arboretum, you didn't have a lot of those distractions. So I think you only had to cross one or two streets, and then you're kind of getting towards the arboretum. You don't have to cross any more streets. There's no advertising there. And then, and this is a thing I want to talk about, too, this idea of soft fascination. There's all the colors, fractalness, curved edges of nature that we think sort of captures our involuntary attention in what we say is softly fascinating ways. And we think that In combination with not placing a lot of demands on directed attention is why nature is able to restore directed attention. So what do I mean by softly fascinating stimulation? So let's pretend we're looking at a waterfall, and the waterfall is really beautiful. You can hear the rush of the water going down. You can see all the bubbles and maybe some of the froth of the water going down. It captures our attention, but we can still kind of mind wander and think about other things at the same time. So it doesn't really harshly capture all of our attentional resources. If we're in Times Square, also super interesting. Lots of interesting stimulation to look at, but it kind of captures all of our attentional resources in an all-consuming way that doesn't allow for any reflection or mind wandering or anything like that. So while Times Square does capture our involuntary attention, we say it does so in a very harshly fascinating way, whereas the waterfall captures our involuntary attention in a softly fascinating way. And we think that's the way that's going to be restful eventually of directed attention. So we think two elements created why the nature walk was restorative. One, it didn't place as many demands on directed attention, and two, it had this softly fascinating stimulation that activated this involuntary attention, but not in an all-consuming way. So we think those two things are critical. The other point that you bring up about, okay, well, what causes soft fascination to be captured or why does something capture involuntary attention in a softly fascinating way? And that gets really interesting where we think it could be elements of the structure of nature. So it's interesting, Andrew, that we can get these effects of nature improving cognitive performance, people just looking at pictures of nature versus looking at pictures of urban scenes, listening to nature sounds versus listening to urban sounds, watching nature videos versus watching urban videos. So there you don't have to worry about getting hit by a car. There's something about the visual aesthetic of nature that we think is producing some of those benefits, that somehow our brain maybe processes that fractal stimulation in more efficient or easier ways than what you were talking about, the 90-degree angled built environment that we've constructed.

Andrew Huberman:
I have to ask, if you are exposing people to nature images versus urban environment images in the laboratory and seeing some of these same effects, are you presenting that on a typical small screen right in front of somebody, or is it in panorama? I'm headed in a particular direction-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Okay

Andrew Huberman:
... with this question because I have a pet hypothesis as to what nature could be doing to not deplete directed attention. But before I ask you about that, I'm just curious what the experimental setup is.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I'm also asking because I'm a little concerned that people are going to hear, "Oh, great. I can just look at a picture of a forest." "I don't have to get outside." And as you mentioned, there are so many things in an actual nature environment that provide a rich experience of soundscape, et cetera.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
But what's the format?

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah. So it's basically the same format as the walk, the walking study that I described. So people come into the lab. We give them the backwards digit span task, but then we take them into a room in the lab where they just have a computer screen that's flipping through nature scenes or urban scenes. They look at the scene for a couple seconds. We also have them rate the scene on a scale of one to three for how much they like it, just to make sure that they're awake and they're engaged with the environment. That whole procedure takes about 10 minutes. They come out of the laboratory room that had the pictures, and then they take the backwards digit span task again to see if there are changes in performance. And then we'd have them come back to the lab a week later, repeat the whole procedure again. If they saw the nature pictures the first week, they see the urban pictures the second week, or vice versa. And there, even just seeing the pictures of nature, we see improvements in working memory and directed attention. However, I would caution that the effects are not as large as they are for the actual walk. So it's harder, or I would say, I guess, the intervention is not as strong as actually walking in nature, right? Just seeing 10 minutes of nature pictures, it's incredible that it works. You can get some of these benefits, but the benefits are not as strong as they are for the real thing. And the same procedure happens when we test sounds of nature versus urban sounds. We test people with the backwards digit span task. Then we put headphones on them, play a series of nature sounds, or play a series of urban sounds. Then they do the backwards digit span task again. And we find that when people listen to nature sounds, they also show improvements on working memory performance and directed attention. We don't do anything special in terms of having it being a panoramic view. It's basically just looking at a slideshow of nature pictures or urban pictures on a computer screen.

Andrew Huberman:
As I'm hearing this, I'm starting to wonder whether we have brain areas and/or circuits that are devoted to nature. Which on first pass seems like kind of a crazy idea because visual perceptions and auditory perceptions are built up from their sort of elementary units, which is just nerd speak for your eye and low-level visual system cares about circles and angles.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And then your higher-level cortex-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... puts it into-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... the recognition of a person or a building, et cetera, is literally built up from elementary units. In the sound domain, it's built up from different frequencies, et cetera.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
But there's something about This problem. Here's what's on my mind here. If I walk through a neighborhood, an urban neighborhood-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yep

Andrew Huberman:
... where it's a bunch of warehouses-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yep

Andrew Huberman:
... with some cyclone fence-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yep

Andrew Huberman:
... and some signs, and it's a weekend, maybe it's a Sunday-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yep

Andrew Huberman:
... and they're all closed. There aren't trucks coming in and out-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... and not a whole lot's happening.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yep.

Andrew Huberman:
This reminds me of West Oakland near the shipyard on a Sunday.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yep.

Andrew Huberman:
Right? Not a place I recommend people go, unless you really like kind of bland urban environments on a Sunday.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yep.

Andrew Huberman:
Because not much is happening. It's a shipyard. Sunday, it's closed. Versus a trail in Yosemite. I used to work up in Yosemite in the summers, but it's not one of the most magnificent trails, meaning it's not Yosemite Falls, Half Dome, or Clouds Rest-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yep

Andrew Huberman:
... my favorite trail. It's a kind of barren environment. But there might be a meadow, and there might be a mountain. You would never say, "You know, this trail up in Tuolumne that I'm on right now is, it's kind of boring."

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yep.

Andrew Huberman:
"It's not as interesting as the peak of Clouds Rest." And arguably, it's not.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
When you get to the top of Clouds Rest, it's like, whoa.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yep.

Andrew Huberman:
It's a spiritual experience.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yep.

Andrew Huberman:
Okay. But when we are in nature, we don't tend to think, oh, this is boring. There's nothing here.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yep.

Andrew Huberman:
Even if it's fairly sparse, visually.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
So as we dissect this, it can't just be density of visual stuff.

Dr. Marc Berman:
No.

Andrew Huberman:
There must be something additional.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
And we could say, well, maybe it's the greenery. But, I was out in the Utah desert not that long ago, and it wasn't arches or the beautiful landscapes that definitely exist out there.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yep.

Andrew Huberman:
And it was just kind of like horizon, sky-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yep

Andrew Huberman:
... some sand.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yep.

Andrew Huberman:
Maybe a cactus or two-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yep

Andrew Huberman:
... some rocks. But it's beautiful.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah, right.

Andrew Huberman:
And you would never say, "Oh, this is boring," because it doesn't have arches.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
When you get to arches, you're like, it's that much better.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
You get the point here.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
So it can't be density of visual objects.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
And it's pretty quiet out there in the desert.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
Except at night, when it's really quite noisy in the desert, actually, with animals-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right

Andrew Huberman:
... and stuff, if you're lucky. So what's the deal?

Dr. Marc Berman:
Part of it could be evolution, to some extent. Our brains evolved in nature. So is it possible that our neural machinery is just more tuned to that kind of stimulation? There's no natural right angles in nature. We created right angles. That's pretty speculative. And I'd want to dig in a little more about that, but I can't ignore it, that there's just something maybe fundamental with how our brains evolved, and we evolved in nature, that there's just something maybe about we just maybe more fluently process natural stimulation, and maybe we like that. But we're starting to have some ideas. Soft fascination, I love it as a concept, but it still is a little bit squishy. I kind of wanted to get some kind of quantitative parameters around it. So one idea that we were thinking about was that maybe nature scenes are actually more compressible than urban scenes. Now, what do I mean by that? So what I mean by that is that maybe because there's repeated patterns in nature, I don't need to store all of the information. I can kind of smoosh it down into fewer bits.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Marc Berman:
And that might be easier for my brain to process, whereas in a lot of urban scenes, it's not very fractal, and maybe I have to store all of that information. So we actually, this is one of my students, Ngoc Nguyen, we ran a JPEG compression algorithm on thousands of nature and urban scenes, and it turns out nature scenes get compressed down into fewer bits.

Andrew Huberman:
So we should, no pun intended, unpack a little bit of what you just said, because I think for people that are not familiar with thinking about neural processing-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yes

Andrew Huberman:
... and JPEGs versus TIFF files.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
If I may, I'm just going to give my-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yes

Andrew Huberman:
... crude rendition of this-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Sure

Andrew Huberman:
... because I was very interested in this and did some work related to this years ago. But just to keep it brief, people are probably familiar with the idea that some electronic files are larger than others.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yep.

Andrew Huberman:
So if you have a picture that you take on a camera or your phone and you want to email it to somebody, nowadays, you would just text it, but-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right

Andrew Huberman:
... you might want to email it to somebody. You can send them the TIFF version or the Photoshop version, and it's going to be a very big image-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right

Andrew Huberman:
... or a big movie, for that matter.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
There's another way to send it, which is at a lower file resolution-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right

Andrew Huberman:
... but therefore takes up less memory.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
It doesn't come through as this massive file-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right

Andrew Huberman:
... that you need to go to a second-party site to download or something, and that's a JPEG.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
The whole basis of JPEG is to take the average of pixels near one another and compress them, kind of take a best guess as to what-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yes

Andrew Huberman:
... a black pixel is probably next to another black pixel, or probably a gray pixel, but probably not a white pixel. It could.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
But what it does is it takes a local averaging-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yes

Andrew Huberman:
... and then it compresses it into a JPEG, and then you send it to the other side.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yep.

Andrew Huberman:
But on the other side, you can also unpack that image to its original high-resolution value. The brain does a similar thing, and the best example that I have from the brain is the olfactory system. Where in the olfactory system, you're breathing in tons of volatile chemicals, meaning volatile makes it sound like they're about to throw a tantrum, but they're moving through the air, you inhale them, and they're activating millions, probably, of different odorant receptors. But your brain compresses those down into coffee. This is coffee, and then you unpack it as coffee. Now, if you're a coffee connoisseur, or in the case of wine or a food connoisseur, you can get into the subtle nuance-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yes

Andrew Huberman:
... and say, oh, there's a little bit more of this and a little bit more of that. But you're not thinking about the individual chemical molecules. You'd say, oh, it's a little bit of a cherry flavor, or this chocolate has a little bit of a citrus, this is the-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yep

Andrew Huberman:
... sorts of thing. So that's essentially what the brain does with visual images as well.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
Okay. So that's my very crude and Certainly not complete description of how bits of information are compressed as they go into the brain and then unpacked-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yes

Andrew Huberman:
... into what you call a perception-

Dr. Marc Berman:
That's right

Andrew Huberman:
... or an experience. And the same thing is true of a TIFF or Photoshop file compressed to a JPEG.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
And then you can literally uncompress that file-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yes

Andrew Huberman:
... if you have the computational capability.

Dr. Marc Berman:
So one thing that I just want to add to it, the kind of compression that we were doing with the JPEG compression was lossy, meaning that the information was thrown away, you couldn't recover it.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Marc Berman:
But that didn't really matter. So if you showed people the image at its high resolution versus the image at its compressed or lower resolution, the human eye can't really tell the difference. And I think, but for the urban images, you couldn't get away with that trick. You needed to keep all of the original pixel values. So that's what computers and our iPhones are actually doing.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Marc Berman:
And the reason why we think they can get away with that is because nature has a lot of this repeated structure, like you were talking about before, about predicting the pixel's value, and you can use that, you can capitalize that. That means there's a lot of redundancy, so you don't need all of that information. Natural images also tend to have, maybe this is going to get a little bit technical too, a lot of high-frequency spatial content. So a lot of little changes or little contrast changes that we don't really need. Whereas in the urban environment, there's more of these big contrast changes that we do need. So we think maybe the brain is, like you're saying, there's all this evidence that the brain is basically doing that. And in nature, because you're walking through the nature, you can kind of throw away a lot of the information. And so we think that actually might be why it's more softly fascinating and easier to process versus the urban environment. There's another element here, too, which we haven't got it completely yet, but which I'm very interested in. So that's looking at sort of complexity of the images at the very, very low level. But you could also think about semantics, like the language that we use to describe a scene. And when I see a nature scene, I don't have a huge language repertoire. I can say lake, tree, river, shrub, sand, desert. But when I'm in the urban environment, I can say Volkswagen Beetle, BMW M3, Gothic architecture. My vocabulary is so much more complex for an urban scene. So one thing that we're also thinking about is maybe nature might also be more semantically simple, from a linguistic level, that I can just label it really easily, and then it allows my brain to just not have to store as much information. Whereas in the urban environment, maybe I'm forced to label all of these objects, and it just takes up more room in our brain. So we also do these studies where we show people a bunch of nature scenes and urban scenes and then test their memory for the scenes. And it turns out that people's memory for the nature scenes is worse than the urban scenes. So people remember-

Andrew Huberman:
Perfect.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Exactly.

Andrew Huberman:
It fits.

Dr. Marc Berman:
It fits. And you might think, oh, well, you want to remember stuff, but actually, in some sense, it's measuring how just difficult it is to process. And if it's so easy to process nature, you're just not going to remember it. And that, in this case, is a good thing. So we think that's also part of it, that that's also saying to us that, yeah, it's just easier to process this natural stimulation versus this urban stimulation, where you just have to attend to more stuff. It's more sticky.

Andrew Huberman:
Do you have any data as to whether or not people track time better or worse when they are in natural versus urban environments?

Dr. Marc Berman:
So I don't have direct evidence to this, but I have a few other little pieces of evidence that I think will get us there. So we've done some studies where we send people, this one was actually sending people to a nature arboretum, an indoor nature arboretum, the Garfield Conservatory, a really beautiful conservatory in Chicago, versus the Chicago Water Tower Mall, a very fancy indoor mall in Chicago. And we actually gave participants here cell phones that we had in the lab that would ping them, and ask them questions while they were going on the walk in the conservatory, the walk in the mall. And we asked them, "What are you thinking about?" And it turns out when people are walking in nature, they actually think more about the past than walking in the mall. So that was kind of interesting.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Marc Berman:
This is also kind of interesting. People also said that they felt more impulsive in the mall than in the conservatory, which makes sense. Mall designers want people to be buying things. But this idea about thinking about the past, to me, suggested a little bit that time might be going a bit slower. Other people have found in cities that the larger the city is, people walk faster. The pace of everything is a little bit faster. So my hunch is that based on those two findings, that I think time does probably slow down in nature, but I don't have direct evidence for that. I think that's something that'd be really super interesting to study. But that would be my hypothesis, that in nature, time does slow down a bit.

Andrew Huberman:
If you had to wager a guess, would you assume that going into an art gallery is more similar to taking a walk in nature or an urban environment? It's so rich with information.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
You have options.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
You have to decline certain things-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... certain rooms, certain paintings, certain sculptures. There's a lot of decision-making.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And yet most people find galleries-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... big galleries to be extremely calming.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Maybe it's also because everyone's quite quiet in them.

Dr. Marc Berman:
I would say the gallery would have a similar effect to nature, would be my guess. Because Kaplan's Attention Restoration Theory Really is not specific to nature. It basically just says you got to find an environment that doesn't place a lot of demands on directed attention while simultaneously having softly fascinating stimulation. And an art gallery might meet those two criteria. If you don't have to be tested on the artwork and you can just kind of go there and you don't have an agenda, I think there's going to be a lot of very softly fascinating stimulation in an art gallery. So my hunch would be that, yeah, walking through an art gallery might have a similar kind of effect. This is going to be a little bit of a jump. There are some studies that we did where we were looking at the relationship between park visits and crime and going to a museum versus crime. There's been a lot of actually interesting studies suggesting that interacting with nature can make people less aggressive, and we think it has to do with attention. So we had this incredible data set, this cell phone trace data set where from 100,000 people in Chicago, we knew where they lived, and we knew where they went for an entire month. So what we did is we quantified how many times did people leave their neighborhood and go and visit a park versus leaving their neighborhood and going to a museum or something like that. And we wanted to correlate that with crime. And sure enough, we found that neighborhoods where people leave their neighborhood and go and visit a park, actually that predicted less crime in those neighborhoods, but the museum visits didn't predict that.

Andrew Huberman:
And this was controlled for socioeconomic background and this kind of thing?

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah. Again, it's a correlational study, so I can't claim causality, but we also controlled for age, education, income, all those demographics. So there it seemed like there was something special about the park visit versus the museum visit on at least aggression. But I do believe that going through a museum might have a similar effect to nature. I'm not sure it'll be as strong, but I think the museum maybe has a lot of the same elements that a nature walk might have.

Andrew Huberman:
I think I'm just obsessively starting to drop into the trench of what sorts of things are attention depleting and what sorts of things are attentionally restorative. Because I personally believe that our ability to attend is like the hallmark of building a great life.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
So much so that on hikes and walks, I will listen to audiobooks and podcasts.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
But there are times when, for instance, I will exercise with silence.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yep.

Andrew Huberman:
And then I'll use music as something to push me through some particularly-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... hard moments in the exercise, but then I'll turn it off-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... and bring it back out. I don't just head out the whole time-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... blasting music.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
Sometimes I'll do that.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
But I'm starting to become kind of an experimentalist with this idea of attention as this resource that we deplete each day. Sleep, it's restored, mostly. You go back again. Looming in the backdrop of this conversation is a conversation about social media.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
But before we go there, if you were at this point to give a best recommendation in terms of how to reset one's attentional abilities, what are the basic requirements?

Dr. Marc Berman:
So I think there's a lot there, too. I think you have to be really mindful about directed attention fatigue. So if you're trying to study or you're at work and you're having a really hard time concentrating, I would recommend not just trying to power through. If you have the ability and the time to take a break, I recommend that you stop and you take a break. And what kind of break do I recommend you do? I recommend that you go and try to find some nature and walk in nature. And-

Andrew Huberman:
What if you're having a hard time getting into a focused state at all?

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
It's not that you've fatigued it-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Okay

Andrew Huberman:
... that day.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
So many people that I hear from-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... who listen to the podcast and elsewhere will say, they get up, they-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... did their best to get their sleep, they get their morning sunlight, they hydrate, they drink their caffeine, they sit down to their computer, and they just can't focus.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
And then they start thinking, do they have brain fog?

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Do they need a nootropic? All these questions start to arise. What are your thoughts?

Dr. Marc Berman:
I think in some sense, even though you might be very well slept and very well fed, you could still be in a directed attention fatigue state. So I think, yeah, if you can't concentrate right in the beginning of the morning, then you should go for a walk. That should be the first thing you should do. Or if you don't have access to nature, maybe listen to some nature sounds or watch a nature video or something like that. We find that all those things can be beneficial. Even looking out the window to nature can be beneficial. Looking at a picture, you've got a picture of nature here. Looking at a picture of nature can be beneficial. So I would say any time you're having trouble concentrating, it doesn't matter if it's at the beginning of the day or the end of the day or the middle of the day, I would recommend that you take some kind of break with nature. And it could be simulated nature, like listening to nature sounds, watching a nature video, looking at nature pictures, or even better is if you can actually get out and interact with nature. Because Steve Kaplan used to also talk about these other elements that might be important for a restorative environment. One was that the environment had to have extent, meaning that it had to have enough interesting things to look at. Now, it doesn't mean that it has to be Yosemite Valley, which has incredible spatial extent. It's huge, it's enormous. But near my office, At the University of Chicago, we have this Japanese garden, the Garden of the Phoenix. It might be only 100 square meters. It's pretty small, but man, it's still got a lot of extent. It's got a walking path. It's got a little waterfall. You can see Lake Michigan. So that's one element. Another thing about the nature is that you want it to be compatible with your goals. So what do I mean by that? If you've got a big exam and you haven't studied, I'm not sure going for the walk in nature's going to work. Mm-hmm. You better use that time to study. But if you can't concentrate, trying to power through it, I don't think is going to be compatible to your goals. I think going in for the nature walk is compatible with your goals. So that's another thing that's going to be really important. And the other concept that Steve used to talk about being important is that the environment needs to give you the sense of being away, that you're kind of removed from your current environment, almost like a change of mindset. And again, that doesn't mean you have to go really, really far away, but you might want to go to a location that's not at your desk. So maybe don't sit at your desk and look at the nature pictures. Maybe you want to go somewhere else and look at the nature pictures. And this kind of distance, I think, could be helpful. I don't know if Cal Newport talks about this in his "Deep Work," but I've heard people talking about in an office, you might want to have a separate area of your office for deep work. And I think this kind of sense of being away is related to that. You kind of want to get out of your current state and go into this other environment that might be able to replenish those resources. So I'm hearing that there are two sides of the coin. One is to designate an area for work that's truly for deep work. Yes. I followed Cal's recommendation, and now I have an area in my basement, believe it or not, and there has never been a phone in that basement. There are no phones allowed in that basement. Right. That's not a rule. Yeah. It's not a protocol, it's a policy. Right. And I remember he talked about in his-- He has this library office that he goes to, and I very much agree with that. Yeah. Now I do get Internet access down there a little bit if I need to look for papers. Yeah. But I've been turning off Wi-Fi on my computer when I go down there to work. Yeah. And I get more done in three hours down there than I would in three weeks above ground. Yeah. I swear. It's a huge effect. Yeah. The other side of the coin is this business of getting out into a different environment, and it sounds like these walks or these ventures into nature don't take terribly long. How long does one need to do this in order to get the enhancement in focus and working memory? What do the data say? Yeah. Our walking study was 50 minutes, but I've seen other studies with as little as 20 minutes you can get the effect. For cognitive enhancement. For cognitive enhancement. Mm-hmm. And there's actually been some interesting studies with kids with ADHD, and they find attention benefits for these kids with ADHD after just a 20-minute walk in nature that actually was similar to a dose of Ritalin. So that was pretty incredible. So it doesn't have to be super long. And when we were doing the slideshow of nature pictures, that was only for about 10 minutes, so it doesn't have to be a really, really long immersion. There have been other studies that have suggested overall, you might want to get about two hours a week in nature. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, AG1. AG1 is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that also includes prebiotics and adaptogens. As somebody who's been involved in research science for almost three decades and in health and fitness for equally as long, I'm constantly looking for the best tools to improve my mental health, physical health, and performance. I discovered AG1 back in 2012, long before I ever had a podcast, and I've been taking it every day since. I find it improves all aspects of my health, my energy, my focus, and I simply feel much better when I take it. 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Andrew Huberman:
I've been long obsessed with this difference between what happens in our brain stem, the areas involved, as you know, with levels of arousal and stress versus calm, when we look at a fixation point versus a horizon or when we go into panoramic vision.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
And there are now ample data to support the idea that when we fixate on a small box-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... like a phone or a computer, or we're fixated on something we're reading or paying attention to it, that our level of autonomic arousal creeps up. Doesn't creep up indefinitely, but this makes sense, right?

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Visual attention-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yes

Andrew Huberman:
... matches the cognitive attention.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
You need arousal-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... aka alertness, you get cognitive attention.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
But that when we go into panoramic vision, which is for the aficionados, you can look up magnocellular vision, what you're essentially doing-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... is you're taking bigger pixels of the visual environment.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
And when we look at a horizon-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yep

Andrew Huberman:
... we naturally go into panoramic vision, unless we're looking at our phone and taking a picture of the horizon.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
So, take note. It's interesting to me to think about visual environments such as nature that have us taking larger bins, pixels, if we're talking about visual space, but that we're also perhaps, this is a question I'm obsessed with, perhaps taking larger time bins.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Mm.

Andrew Huberman:
What do you think about a general idea that what we need to do in order to be focused-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... is to allow our mind to go into these time drift states?

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah. And I think you're talking about it from a visual perspective, but I think it's also from a cognitive, mental perspective. So, I think also too, being in nature kind of widens your cognitive landscape. And that's why I think people sometimes, you hear all these anecdotes where people are struggling to solve a problem, they can't figure it out. They go for a walk in nature, and then boom, they solve the problem. Because the brain is still churning on that, right? But maybe being out in nature sort of inspires this widening of attentional space internally.

Andrew Huberman:
We had a guest on this podcast, Michael Platt, from the University of Pennsylvania.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
He's a neuroscientist, and he told us about this experiment. It's pretty wild. This still blows me away. You're probably familiar with it, but I wasn't, which is that if you have human subjects in a lab do a connect-the-dots task where the dots are placed very close together-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... versus a connect-the-dots task where the dots are placed much further apart, and then you give them a creativity task, the people who do the task, and it's well-controlled for, folks-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yep

Andrew Huberman:
... connecting dots that are further apart in physical space show significantly elevated levels of-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Creativity

Andrew Huberman:
... creative insight to solving problems. And so there's something about visual space-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yes

Andrew Huberman:
... and time-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yes

Andrew Huberman:
... and our ability to link things in cognitive space-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yes

Andrew Huberman:
... and time. This is why when you said earlier that when you're out in nature, there aren't as many words to describe things.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right. Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
What that means to me, if I think about the results that Platt was talking about, is that perhaps it isn't just that there's a dearth of language, but perhaps then your brain starts to drop into other modes of cognition. I don't want to sound too nerdy-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yes

Andrew Huberman:
... just to sound nerdy here, but-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah. Yes

Andrew Huberman:
... there are all sorts of things in your brain that can't have words assigned to them.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Like for instance, your childhood. You could give the whole story, but it still wouldn't capture it, right?

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
But there was your trauma, there was your wins, there were your falling in love. We have these words, but they don't capture the experience. They don't capture the-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... visceral experience, the smells, the tastes.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yep.

Andrew Huberman:
And so, I love the idea that in nature, things are sparse enough, yet rich enough-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yes

Andrew Huberman:
... that maybe these networks get triggered.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right. And I think this is kind of another, if we want to get into the neuroscience a little bit, we have some of these ideas for what a brain looks like when it's at rest.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm.

Dr. Marc Berman:
And, when we talk about fractalness, most of us think about a spatial fractal. So, if there's a snowflake, it's got a characteristic shape. If you put that snowflake under a microscope and zoom in, it still has that same shape. If you zoom in some more, it's still got that same shape. So, it doesn't matter at what scale you look at the snowflake, it's got the same shape. So that's called, as a snowflake, a sort of scale-free spatially, or another way to say it is that it's fractal. It's got this repeated patterning at these different spatial scales. And nature is filled with fractals.

Andrew Huberman:
Could you tell us more about some of those? I recall hearing about fractals of Mandelbrot.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah, Mandelbrot. Right. Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
That came up with fractals.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
But despite the fact that I remember Mandelbrot's name, all that tells you is that my brain is filled with meaningless information- ... because what I want to know is not who came up with it, right? This is the problem with the hippocampus, right? You can encode perfectly useless information. No discredit to Mandelbrot. But where in nature, aside from snowflakes, do fractals show up? Are they in tree bark?

Dr. Marc Berman:
Everywhere. I mean, a tree is also quite fractal, right? So you have the trunk of the tree, and then it breaks off into branches, which breaks off into smaller branches, which breaks off into leaves, and the leaves have the veins that also branch off. So, it's very fractal. It's got this same branching structure at all these different scales.

Andrew Huberman:
Really?

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
So, when I look at sand in the desert-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... you're telling me that this regularity exists at every scale.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah, pretty much. I think a desert would also be fractal in terms of how the wind, because the wind is also a fractal sort of process. So, the sand will be somewhat fractal. A mountain scape will also be quite fractal. A coastline will be fractal.

Andrew Huberman:
Well, tell me for a mountain. So, where am I going to look at a smaller scale? I can see, I can imagine a mountain.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Mountain.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Now, if you zoomed in on a different portion of the mountain, it would have some of the same structural properties as the zoomed-out version.

Andrew Huberman:
Really?

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Wild.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah. So, and again, to return back to compression Again, if you have this repeated patterning, that might be easier for our brain to process, because really, you just have to only kind of encode one structure, because that structure's repeated at all these different scales.

Andrew Huberman:
Whereas human beings and advertisements and all that. There's this thing in science, as you know, people are either lumpers or splitters.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
Right? And many a career has been made by splitting-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yep

Andrew Huberman:
... when lumping would have been sufficient.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
Human behavior, human advertising, music, I'm sure there's immense regularity.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
But when we're bombarded with that, now I'm sort of making the segue to something like social media-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... where you're just bombarded with sensory information.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
One movement of my thumb takes me from one cognitive landscape to a completely different cognitive landscape.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
If it were my preference, my entire feed would be dogs.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yep.

Andrew Huberman:
But I'm going from dogs to politics to fitness, and then stuff that the algorithm is testing on me, and it's amazing that we can do this.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yep.

Andrew Huberman:
And yet, the more we talk about nature and how restorative it is

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... or reading a book and following a common narrative-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... kind of drilling down into that, or watching a movie-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... which hopefully has some continuity to the plot, the more I realize that social media is, for lack of a better word, is kind of chaos. It's like cognitive chaos.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Or it's definitely not fractal. It's definitely not fractal.

Andrew Huberman:
Well put. Yeah. It's not fractal.

Dr. Marc Berman:
And if we return to fractalness, too, so we talked about fractalness in terms of space, like there's that this shape and you zoom in, same shape, zoom in some more, same shape. You could also talk about fractalness in time. So you can have a signal oscillating in time, fluctuating in time. And you could also quantify how fractal that signal is in time.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Marc Berman:
So it's like if you look at the signal at one millisecond, 10 milliseconds, 50 milliseconds, 10 seconds, 30 seconds, an hour, does that signal look the same or does it look different? If the signal looks the same at all those different temporal windows, we say the signal is fractal in time.

Andrew Huberman:
Can you give me an example from a nature environment and one by comparison from an urban environment? I'm thinking a car alarm in an urban environment-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... is like the most alerting. It grabs our involuntary attention.

Dr. Marc Berman:
And it's not fractal, it's periodic. It's just wah, wah, wah, wah, over and over again. Like a fractal signal will have low frequency stuff, will have a lot of power, but it also has all of the different frequencies are represented, but their amplitude is, this is going to get a little nerdy, is proportional to their frequency. So low frequency stuff will have higher amplitude or higher power, and high frequency stuff will have lower amplitude or lower power. And a lot of natural sounds and stuff are also more fractal, but what's interesting is that you can also look at brain signals. Like I can put a person in an MRI machine and look at how are the brain areas fluctuating, or I can have an EEG cap on them and look at how their electrical activity is fluctuating. And it turns out when brains are more fractal in time, brains are exerting less effort, less cognitive effort. So it's kind of depressing, but as we age, our brains get less fractal. If you're learning a new task for a first time when it's harder, the brain is less fractal than when you're well-practiced at the task.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Marc Berman:
If you're doing an easy task, the brain is more fractal than when you're doing a harder task. And so we think that maybe nature is pushing the brain into this higher fractal state that might be this sort of critical rested state that's going to allow you to actually have a lot of directed attention.

Andrew Huberman:
When you need it.

Dr. Marc Berman:
When you need it. Versus the social media stuff is just pull and grabbing, it's not letting you get into this fractal rested state. It's driving fractalness down.

Andrew Huberman:
Right. Well, the social media platforms, not to paint them as evil, because I teach on social media, learn on social media-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... enjoy social media, but it's a business.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
They're not doing it for free.

Dr. Marc Berman:
No.

Andrew Huberman:
They're not doing it out of the goodness of their hearts.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
And I basically think of social media as the reality TV show that we've all either chosen to be a part of.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
We've cast ourselves in it.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yep.

Andrew Huberman:
The idea here is that it is not designed to be relaxing.

Dr. Marc Berman:
No.

Andrew Huberman:
It's designed to capture your directed attention.

Dr. Marc Berman:
That's right.

Andrew Huberman:
If it just grabbed your involuntary attention, it wouldn't work. Now, that might seem a little bit counterintuitive because I and everybody else has the experience of picking up your phone, you're like, "Okay, I'm only going to spend a minute. I'm going to just check what's on Instagram."

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
And all of a sudden, you're taken down this-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right

Andrew Huberman:
... rabbit hole of one thing, and then it's 30 minutes later and you're like, "Goodness-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right

Andrew Huberman:
... I got to get ready for work," or something like this.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
But the involuntary attention that you were talking about before is the kind of thing that cues you to something, and then you go down that direction.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right. Or I would say that the social media, it's not softly fascinating, it's harshly fascinating.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm.

Dr. Marc Berman:
It's grabbing you and not letting you mind wander or think about anything else. It's grabbing all of your attentional resources.

Andrew Huberman:
And I would say it does that not by taking us typically down rabbit holes, but it's not like you spend a lot of time on one post.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
You might go into the comments section if you're interested in that.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah. Right.

Andrew Huberman:
But it's the fact that you have a, I'm imagining now that there's some resource in the brain that's a combination of catecholamines, dopamine, norepinephrine-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... certainly.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Plus a bunch of neural network metabolism stuff.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
It will never be one thing, right?

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
It's not going to be like a molecule.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
Depending on how well-rested we are, we go into the day with a certain amount of directed attention units that we can spend.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yep.

Andrew Huberman:
And everything you're telling us today is that going into a fractal, AKA nature environment, allows us to come off the sort of spending-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... of our directed attention.

Dr. Marc Berman:
That's right.

Andrew Huberman:
And it also seems to reset the directed attention account.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
Are there any data that speak to whether or not it just allows us to not spend, or whether or not it actually replenishes this directed attention capability?

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah, it's a good question. Or does it even extend capabilities? Does it take you above your baseline?

Andrew Huberman:
Right. Is it an investment?

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
Lately, I think not so much about dopamine per se.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I think about are you spending your dopamine down-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... or are you investing your dopamine?

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right. And I would say, unfortunately, I don't have a good answer for it. I'm not sure. It's possible that it might expand your store. You might be getting interest.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Marc Berman:
So one of the things too that we kind of struggle with a little bit is, is nature boosting us a lot, or is urban fatiguing us?

Andrew Huberman:
Right.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Either depleting us, and I think both things are kind of at play there.

Andrew Huberman:
I have a whole set of questions popping to mind about sleep states and deep sleep being more like fractal environments, and rapid eye movement sleep being more like reality and therefore more challenging. But I'm going to just shelve those-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Okay

Andrew Huberman:
... and maybe we'll get back to them, maybe we won't. I want to make sure that I understand correctly what the protocol, for lack of a better word, would be. Get out into nature, ideally move-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yes

Andrew Huberman:
... for about 20 minutes minimum.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yep.

Andrew Huberman:
And ideally, you remove yourself from phone. What if you have to make a phone call while you're doing it? Is that-

Dr. Marc Berman:
I mean, that's just you don't want to do it. And I'd even say, too, I know you were saying you like to put the earbuds in sometimes. I would say you don't want the earbuds in. You want all of your attentional capacity or involuntary attention to be captured by that environment.

Andrew Huberman:
Okay. Great.

Dr. Marc Berman:
I kind of joke with my students about this a little bit, where I would say, "How many of you study with listening to music?" And a lot of students raise their hand, "Yeah, I study with listening to music." I say, "Okay. How many of you want to take the exam listening to music?" Nobody raises their hand. I say, "Well, that's not consistent."

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Marc Berman:
And it's not because the students are not smart, it's that studying sucks.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Marc Berman:
And listening to music just makes it more pleasurable. But you're taking away attentional resources that could be used for the studying by listening to music. And I think, on the flip side, I want you to be fully engaged with nature. I want your involuntary attention to be just automatically captured by this nature stimulation. I don't want anything else interfering with that. I think that's how you're going to get the most bang for your buck. And in fact, we did these studies where I wasn't sure how it was going to work, so we did some studies where we took participants who were diagnosed with clinical depression, and this is kind of mean but I think important, we had them walk in nature, too. But before these participants went for a walk in nature, we had them think about a negative thought or memory that's been bothering them to try to induce rumination, to get them ruminating. And we thought, maybe if you go for a walk alone in nature and you're restoring your attention, maybe they're going to ruminate even more. That it's going to be not good. Maybe it's going to hurt performance. And we found just the opposite, that actually, these participants with clinical depression who we had induced to ruminate got even stronger benefits walking in nature than our non-clinical sample.

Andrew Huberman:
On working memory.

Dr. Marc Berman:
On working memory.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Marc Berman:
And you can imagine participants that are struggling with depression and rumination, their working memory is not as good because you've got cognitive resources devoted to these negative thoughts that are just repeating over and over again. You don't have your full bank account of attention because you're spending it on the rumination. And we found that for these participants, the effects were stronger in improving their attention and working memory, and I think part of that might be that it's actually giving them some of the attentional resources necessary to deal with the rumination.

Andrew Huberman:
Super interesting. I know rumination is something that many people, depressed or not, struggle with. And I've long thought, and I'm certainly coming to this conclusion with each successive year of my life, that distraction is the enemy.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Like the ability to drop into work, creative work, or for me, prepping a podcast or reading papers, or taking a walk with somebody, having a conversation with somebody, because relationships are important too, of course, and just being able to be fully present to that-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right

Andrew Huberman:
... is really the basis of a great life.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
Even if you're dealing with challenge.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
It's that when we spread ourselves out across all these different modalities, that no good comes of it.

Dr. Marc Berman:
That's right.

Andrew Huberman:
And like any destructive force that's really bad, it's the fact that we don't notice that we were absent for large swaths of it-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right

Andrew Huberman:
... and that it becomes so pervasive in society that it's not also frowned on.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yep.

Andrew Huberman:
I actually put social media on an old phone. So I have social media accounts, but on an old phone-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yep

Andrew Huberman:
... and that's the only way I can access social media.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yep.

Andrew Huberman:
Somebody sends me something by way of social media, I don't do it because, I don't know what the best analogy is. It's like someone who's trying to eat clean, and you're constantly handing them junk food.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
And I enjoy social media, but I like to make it a designated-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right

Andrew Huberman:
... time. So getting out for a walk of 20 minutes-

Dr. Marc Berman:
And I would say put the phone in a box

Andrew Huberman:
... put the phone away. The whole basis here seems to be allowing your brain to go into, if I take it to its logical conclusion, to its necessary state to reset.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Maybe. This state of getting into nature, and let's call it high fractal environments-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yep

Andrew Huberman:
... is similar or should be similar to the way that we've started to talk about sleep.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Mm.

Andrew Huberman:
Prior to 2015, maybe it was 2018, the notion was sleep when you're dead. Matt Walker, UC Berkeley-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yep

Andrew Huberman:
... with the book "Why We Sleep," transformed what we now understand, and I and others have been arguing that people need sleep. Now-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... I think everyone understands if you don't sleep, your mental health, your physical health-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yep

Andrew Huberman:
... your performance-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yep

Andrew Huberman:
... drops dramatically.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yep.

Andrew Huberman:
You need sleep. And Matt has educated us that you need slow-wave sleep, you need rapid eye movement sleep. Maybe we also need these high fractal environments. And the fact that they come in their best form through walks in nature when we're not doing anything else, just like you wouldn't want to, I don't know, you don't want to bring the phone into the bedroom kind of thing-

Dr. Marc Berman:
No

Andrew Huberman:
... late at night because you're not going to get your deep sleep because you're going to go to sleep too late, and then you miss out on the opportunity for deep sleep.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
I love the idea that these waking states become better understood as, and perhaps even requirements. I feel like we understand so much about sleep, slow-wave sleep-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... growth hormone, REM sleep-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yep

Andrew Huberman:
... emotional repair. And everyone now is like, "Cool, we need sleep."

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
"Here are the different stages of sleep."

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
We actually know very little, it seems, about waking states.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
And the requirement for different waking states.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
Because if you stay up all night-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yep

Andrew Huberman:
... you entirely expect to not be at your best the next day.

Dr. Marc Berman:
That's right.

Andrew Huberman:
But I have a feeling that based on your work, that we're doing all sorts of things-

Dr. Marc Berman:
That's right

Andrew Huberman:
... that are making us far less than our natural best.

Dr. Marc Berman:
That's right.

Andrew Huberman:
And that some of us who are clinically diagnosed with things-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yep

Andrew Huberman:
... I haven't been clinically diagnosed with ADHD. If anything, I'd probably veer more towards the OCD side-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... of things when it comes to work.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yep.

Andrew Huberman:
But my guess is that if we understand and engage in the proper waking states, that our lives are going to improve markedly, irrespective of whether or not we need medication. That can only be determined, it seems, when we're doing the right behavioral things.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
So what are your thoughts, this is a big question-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... but what are your thoughts on really starting to understand what the different waking states are?

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And our requirements for waking states. Because I feel like that's pretty much what your work's about.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah. That's right. And I think the social media and things on the phone are kind of like the junk food. They're just ruining our waking states to a large extent. And I think what we're talking a lot about with this attention restoration theory and walking in nature is that we need breaks. You need breaks during your waking time. Or if, like you were talking about before, that if we want to get into a state where we are going to be able to concentrate well, maybe you have to take the nature walk first to kind of recharge the battery, even right at the beginning of the day. So I think there's two elements there. One is that there's a lot of stuff that we're doing during our waking hours that's depleting directed attention, and we want to mitigate a lot of that stuff. The other thing is that you can't work 10 hours straight. Maybe some people say they can, but I just don't think people really can direct their attention for 10 hours straight. I think-

Andrew Huberman:
Not continuously

Dr. Marc Berman:
... not continuously.

Andrew Huberman:
In talking to a lot of writers, because when you're working on this book-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... most writers who are career writers will say that the most number of hours that they can do really focused writing per day on a regular basis is four.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Mm. Yep.

Andrew Huberman:
And some even say three.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Mm.

Andrew Huberman:
Some say five, but four seems to be the average.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yep.

Andrew Huberman:
And that's where their entire day and night is dedicated to creating-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... that four hours, typically in the morning-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... although some wrote at night, most wrote early in the morning.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yep.

Andrew Huberman:
And that after four hours, they are saturated.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right. Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
That the brain just can't do it.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Do it, right. So I think there's this element of during our waking hours, protecting directed attention, and then also doing these nature interventions as your breaks.

Andrew Huberman:
I love this.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I'm big on getting sunlight in the morning.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I try to see a horizon when I do it.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
The reason I don't talk about that so broadly is many people don't live in environments where they can catch a horizon.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Sure. Right.

Andrew Huberman:
And I go up on my roof through a trap door-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... and I don't want people falling off of roofs, and you'd be amazed what people do with information.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
At the same time, if I don't do that, I find it very difficult to ratchet into work in the same way.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yep.

Andrew Huberman:
I think, again, to take a step back, what I think is so important about your work is that you've identified at least one, and clearly several ways that we can reset our levels, maybe even improve our abilities at directed attention. And again, I don't want to demonize social media-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... but social media is a commercial product that we're engaging in.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yep.

Andrew Huberman:
And we get returns in likes, follows, and-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right

Andrew Huberman:
... some people get paid on there. But for the most part, it's a business.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
And we're the customer.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
And they're the owner.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right. And I'm just saying it's using directed attention. It's not a restful activity, is basically. So you can choose to spend your directed attention allocation on that, but then you're going to have less for your work or for other things.

Andrew Huberman:
So is it fair to say that Low cognitive demand activities are not always restorative.

Dr. Marc Berman:
That's right.

Andrew Huberman:
I think people need to really understand that-

Dr. Marc Berman:
That's exactly right

Andrew Huberman:
... and hear that. Because when I think about like, okay, yesterday I recorded a solo on the podcast.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And those are extremely... I don't use a teleprompter except for ads, because those have to proper wording for legal reasons. The amount of attentional demand is immense.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
So I didn't do this, but in the past, I would finish up, go home, and I find that scrolling social media, it feels relaxing. You can do it reclined.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
It's passive participation.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
Unless I'm posting or commenting.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
Just like, maybe use my thumb.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
You know?

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
And like some things, but even though it's low cognitive demand, it's draining, is what you're saying.

Dr. Marc Berman:
That's right. Exactly.

Andrew Huberman:
Interesting.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Steve and I wrote this paper back in 2010. Then television was still the low cognitive load activity that we thought was not restful, and there's all these studies on television that people watching television, after they watch for a couple hours, they report being fatigued and being irritable.

Andrew Huberman:
Does cognitive performance decline after watching?

Dr. Marc Berman:
And cognitive performance declines. So even though it's low cognitive load, it's depleting. It's depleting of directed attention.

Andrew Huberman:
Well, I'm really extreme about this stuff, and I'm excited to be able to incorporate more knowledge toward creating better opportunities for directed attention to the right things and not depleting that. I'm so maniacal that before I'll do a solo, I'll tell my assistant when he comes to the house in the morning, "Please don't talk to me today. I'm sorry, I don't want to be rude, but I need to keep rehearsing it in my head."

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I need to keep, not the specific words, but the concepts in my-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right

Andrew Huberman:
... I'm literally thinking about the structure of the vagus nerve-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... constantly for usually about 48 hours before-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... in the same way that you would obsess over something.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
And then once it's done, it's done.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
But anything that's introduced there-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right

Andrew Huberman:
... like having to make a decision about what to eat for breakfast-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... is interference.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
The brain is amazing, but we're not that great at using our brain to its best advantage always, right?

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah, or our bodies.

Andrew Huberman:
Well put.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I want to make sure that we get back into this discussion about rumination. So you discovered that depressed people ruminate about their problem in nature in a way that allows them to dump the problem?

Dr. Marc Berman:
We don't know if people with depression ruminate about their problems. In the experiment, we kind of forced them to ruminate, to see if people are in this ruminative state, would nature still have a benefit? And it turns out that it did. Now, one thing that we were kind of wondering about is maybe they just think less about their problems in nature than the urban environment. And we found that wasn't true. This is actually work that we did with Ethan Kross, and actually my wife, Catherine Kerpen, was also an author on this study. We also thought maybe interacting with nature might put you in this more third-party distance kind of state. So instead of saying, "I'm so unhappy," you'd say, "Mark is unhappy," this distance state. We didn't find evidence of that, too. It wasn't that people thought about their problems from a more distanced perspective in nature either. So what I think is happening is I think we just increased their directed attention, and when you increase directed attention, you're able to do lots of things. And maybe they could just deal with the ruminations better because they had more cognitive resources to deal with those problems.

Andrew Huberman:
I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, LMNT. LMNT is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need and nothing you don't. That means the electrolytes, sodium, magnesium, and potassium in the correct amounts, but no sugar. Proper hydration is critical for optimal brain and body function. Even a slight degree of dehydration can diminish cognitive and physical performance. It's also important that you get adequate electrolytes. The electrolytes, sodium, magnesium, and potassium, are vital for functioning of all the cells in your body, especially your neurons or your nerve cells. Drinking LMNT dissolved in water makes it very easy to ensure that you're getting adequate hydration and adequate electrolytes. To make sure that I'm getting proper amounts of hydration and electrolytes, I dissolve one packet of LMNT in about 16 to 32 ounces of water when I first wake up in the morning, and I drink that basically first thing in the morning. I'll also drink LMNT dissolved in water during any kind of physical exercise that I'm doing, especially on hot days when I'm sweating a lot and losing water and electrolytes. LMNT has a bunch of great-tasting flavors. I love the raspberry. I love the citrus flavor. Right now, LMNT has a limited edition lemonade flavor that is absolutely delicious. I hate to say that I love one more than all the others, but this lemonade flavor is right up there with my favorite other one, which is raspberry or watermelon. Again, I can't pick just one flavor. I love them all. If you'd like to try LMNT, you can go to drinklmnt.com/huberman, spelled drinklmnt.com/huberman, to claim a free LMNT sample pack with a purchase of any LMNT drink mix. Again, that's drinklmnt.com/huberman to claim a free sample pack. You mentioned impulsivity, aggression, and the probability of committing a crime. You have some data that there are these ways of reducing impulsivity more broadly.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Right? I don't think impulsivity is something that most people think they deal with. But I'll tell you, if you've ever found yourself picking up your phone just because everyone else did-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right

Andrew Huberman:
... that's impulsivity.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
And by the way, I think perhaps I've been a little bit unfair to social media, and I've spared the equally or maybe even more pernicious thing of modern life, which is texting.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
It's amazing to me on a plane How hard it is for people to disengage from texting.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
And it's also amazing to me how we can all get into three or four conversations over text, or three or four conversations with one person within a text thread.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
If that were converted into actual dialogue-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... it'd be crazy.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
It'd be like switching back and forth between four different conversations.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
That party is nuts.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
But in the form of texting, it's like we're doing it. Is there any data on what texting is doing to directed attention?

Dr. Marc Berman:
I haven't seen any on it, but again, I would say it's got to be depleting. There was some interesting work, actually, I think by one of your colleagues at Stanford, Anthony Wagner-

Andrew Huberman:
Oh, yeah

Dr. Marc Berman:
... who did work on these multimedia multitaskers. So people that text, and are doing email or social media and something on the computer, like you're using multiple media devices simultaneously, does that train attention or does it deplete attention? And I think those studies, it was quite evident that it depletes attention. It's not training people's attention, it's just depleting their attention. So I would say yeah managing all those conversations is going to be very taxing of directed attention. Again, I'm not somebody who's totally against smartphones. I have a smartphone. I don't do social media, but I do text a lot. I guess I try not to always be so fast. I say sometimes I'm just going to have my time and not always be so fast to respond. But it's hard. It's very difficult. You have to be really mindful and protective of your directed attention.

Andrew Huberman:
And people get angry if they have an expectation of response latency, and then you depart from that.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
Which is just nerd speak for, sometimes I'll text back fast-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right

Andrew Huberman:
... sometimes it will take me several weeks or months.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
I think that's starting to normalize a little bit out there-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... because of the sheer volume of communication-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right

Andrew Huberman:
... that people are getting.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
A few years ago, that was considered rude.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
I've heard more and more discussions that I have no real knowledge of what the discussions were, but there's a very popular podcast, in particular for women, where the host was talking about this the other day. Someone sent it to me. They said, "Oh, the texting three weeks later thing is becoming a norm." I think some people are just bombarded with-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right. Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... text messages. I guess our species is really good at creating technologies and then figuring out like, "Darn. We need to backtrack a little bit."

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
Because all the programs, so the program Freedom, for instance, which shuts down the internet for a certain interval of time on your computer.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
That was great. Hardly anyone uses it.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And hardly any of the people I know who used to use it, use it anymore. Forgive me, Freedom designers. But it's like it starts to just disappear-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... because the culture drifts in a new way.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
And people like Cal Newport, or you who don't have social media, or me who put social media on a separate phone and takes a month to reply to a text-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right

Andrew Huberman:
... unless it's urgent.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
We're considered the weirdos.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah. So it's hard, but again, I've seen people that, like on email, where they'll have an auto-reply that just says, "I'm not going to respond really quickly," or, "I only respond to email this time and this time." And I think that makes sense, again, because we have to protect our directed attention. We're just not going to be good functioning humans if we're just constantly being depleted.

Andrew Huberman:
I read a study from Wendy Suzuki's lab at NYU a few years ago, that people that do 13 minutes a day of mindfulness meditation-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Mm

Andrew Huberman:
... so basically sitting or lying down, closing one's eyes, focusing on their breathing, and constantly refocusing their attention as it drifts back to a location right in the middle of their forehead. They observed improvements in memory tasks. But actually, decrements in sleep were mentioned there.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Huh.

Andrew Huberman:
Especially if they did it too late in the day.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Huh.

Andrew Huberman:
And meditation, to me, always seemed like a focusing exercise.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
And so while it's relaxing because you're not jogging or-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right

Andrew Huberman:
... socially engaging, it's cognitively demanding-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yes

Andrew Huberman:
... because you have to constantly bring your attention back.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
So for many years, we thought of meditation as a reset.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
I think of meditation as focus training.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
Not a reset.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
What you're talking about with nature walks is a reset.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Reset, yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Marc Berman:
And it's interesting because yeah, there was a paper, Tang, I can't remember her first name, and Michael Posner, they did some meditation results, and they found these kind of improvements in attention after meditation. And they were contacting me because I was doing this nature stuff. And they were asking me, "Do you think it's the same mechanism?" And I was saying, "No, I don't think it's the same mechanism." That as you were saying, Andrew, that this meditation is very focused. Lots of directed attention, right? Whereas what I'm talking about in nature is sort of eliminating the need for any directed attention, that it's all just mind wandering and involuntary attention. So I think, even though maybe you can get some of the same results at the end, I think they're very different mechanisms. What I do find fascinating is that I think in a lot of ancient meditation practices, often they try to do it in beautiful nature. And I wonder if they knew something, that actually they could meditate better in this beautiful nature because while they were using directed attention to meditate, being immersed in the beautiful nature was also sort of restoring directed attention at the same time. So I do kind of wonder sometimes if maybe combining them, you could get some really interesting results. But exactly, being in nature, to me, is not a meditative process. It's a much more passive kind of cognitive process.

Andrew Huberman:
So I think we need to distinguish between passive and restorative-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... and passive and depleting.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yep.

Andrew Huberman:
And it should be obvious which things fall into which categories.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
And then there are things that are perhaps passive and restorative, but go beyond restorative. They might even be passive, restorative, and cognitive-enhancing when you get back to work.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
Back to focused attention-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right

Andrew Huberman:
... on the real stuff.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
And then the scary thought, which is probably true, based on just real-world observation, is that passive and depleting activities, when you repeat them over time, aren't just taking away your ability to engage directed attention later that day or the next day, but that over time, the circuitry for directed attention in the brain is probably subject to plasticity in both directions. This is something that I've long been obsessed with.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Every neural circuit that we are aware of is available for plasticity.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
It requires focus, it requires alertness, and it requires sleep.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Those are the requirements, right?

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
But it's also possible that the circuits for focus can strengthen, so you can get better at focusing by focusing.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah. Right.

Andrew Huberman:
I certainly see that. The more I do focused work, the better I get at it-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... and the longer I can do it.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I know there's a threshold there.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
But also, if I take time away from it for a while, yes, I can replenish, but just like exercise, eventually you start to atrophy.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
And it could be that passive and depleting stuff, repeated for enough years, kind of brings you to a state of really true ADHD.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah, maybe.

Andrew Huberman:
Maybe you fall into clinical ADHD that probably existed before-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... but maybe we see it so much more now because people-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... I mean, this is the equivalent of mental obesity.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Basically. Right? Or mental metabolic syndrome.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I don't know. Let's just be direct. Mental obesity, right?

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
If you don't exercise enough for long enough-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... chances are you're going to end up overweight or obese.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Certainly with metabolic syndrome.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah. And unfortunately too, these technology things are addictive, and most addictions just are not healthy, right? So, then it's hard to get out once you start. That is an interesting term, mental obesity. There was this interesting paper that looked at how our collective attention span has sort of changed. They looked at just a short time window, but tweet hashtags, maybe they used to last for 40 hours, be popular. Now it's down to 20 hours. If you look at movie ticket sales, the most popular movies, they were more popular for three months. Now it's one and a half months. Maybe our collective attention span is kind of shrinking a little bit, and we've kind of been wondering, does that mean has our individual directed attention kind of shrunk a little bit-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Dr. Marc Berman:
... or is there just too many other possibilities that we're just too overwhelmed that that's causing that? But it is something that is a bit worrisome. It's not just that we're having a lot of things, and I'm speculating now. It's not just that we have a lot of things vying for our directed attention, but if we're being so bombarded so much, and as you say, we're kind of getting into these bad modes of thinking, could our directed attention span actually shrink?

Andrew Huberman:
I believe it-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... can and it is out there. To borrow from the mighty David Goggins, I don't know if you're familiar with David, but author of "Can't Hurt Me," and he's been on this podcast, and a real proponent of doing hard things every single day, not because he wants to do them, but precisely because he doesn't want to do them. Forcing upon himself-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... real discipline. He's emblematic of that. He's also said, and this should be reassuring to people, that nowadays it's easier than ever to be exceptional, because all you have to do is overcome the urge to be on your phone as much- ... run a bit more. Maybe what we're going to select for are the people who are very organized about their engagement with phones and social media. I will say, coming from the Bay Area, I know a number of people who work for and have founded very large social media platforms.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
They're not on their phones all day.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
They're definitely not, and their kids aren't either.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
Their kids aren't either. So you're a father of four.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yep.

Andrew Huberman:
Are there things that you do with your kids to encourage the buildup and reinforcement of these circuits? Certainly, their brains are still plastic.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And a lot of people listening to this have kids, or are kids, and would like to know what they should do.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Is it exactly what adults should do?

Dr. Marc Berman:
So I try to practice what I preach. It's hard because all of their friends have the technologies, too. My oldest daughter does have a smartphone, but she doesn't have any social media. She uses it mostly to text her friends and play Duolingo or something like that. I try to get them to go out in nature as much as possible. Sometimes they're hesitant, or, "Dad, I don't," they don't want to do it. But we definitely try to get them outside as much as possible. And even when we get to go on vacation once in a while, my wife's family, we're fortunate, they have a little cabin in northern Ontario that we go to, and there's really no internet there or anything, and the kids are just running around with their cousins and playing in the lake and doing just normal kid things. And I think you've had Jonathan Haidt on the podcast, and he kind of talked about this. And he said the kids have to have more free play, and the thing that I would just add to what Jonathan is saying, I would say you want them to have more free play in nature, and we want them getting out in nature more. And I think, back to, Goggins was his name?

Andrew Huberman:
David Goggins.

Dr. Marc Berman:
David Goggins.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Marc Berman:
I do agree, too, that we should do hard things. And I think taking breaks in nature actually allows us to do more hard things.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Just like you can't lift weights continuously all day long, every day. You've got to rest. And you got to take good rest, and I think the nature breaks are the good mental rest, which is going to allow you then to later do the heavy cognitive work better. But many of us are not taking good rest breaks. We're taking bad rest breaks, and I think if we can eliminate those bad rest breaks and substitute in the good nature rest breaks, people are just going to be much healthier cognitively, physically, socially.

Andrew Huberman:
Well, I'm going to offer something controversial, but with a purpose. I did an episode on alcohol about... Basically, the conclusion was zero is better than any.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Okay.

Andrew Huberman:
And two a week is probably fine.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And yes, it's poison.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And remains one of our most popular episodes. But even though I'm not a drinker, you have to kind of wonder whether doing away with happy hour, which by the way, used to be every day at the end of work-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right

Andrew Huberman:
... created this gap for passive depleting stuff to come in, and it kind of raises this question of like, well, was happy hour restorative? And just to give people a clear sense of how pervasive happy hour with alcohol was, when I first was a graduate student at Berkeley and was at Tolman Hall. So first I was at Berkeley, and then I did a second graduate degree elsewhere. But when I was at Tolman Hall, there was this library in the psychology building, and I was told that up until just three years before, so that was in 1998, it was customary for people to gather in the library for drinks every day at the end of the day. And that for many, many decades prior, the founders of this, so Frank Beach and all those guys, used to get together and get really drunk at the end of each day and go home, walk home hopefully, not drive home, and then spend time with their families, and then get up the next morning, drink coffee, and go back to work. And so, alcohol culture, drinking culture-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right

Andrew Huberman:
... was a big part of how people socialized and decompressed at the end of the day. We know it's not good for you. You'll live a shorter life, and it has a bunch of other issues with it, and what happens when people drink together, et cetera, that can often not be good. But the point here is, I think for many people who have families, but especially who don't have families, the number of healthy ways to reset-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... in the evening, to reset on a weekend in non-destructive ways-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right

Andrew Huberman:
... has become more limited.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
In part because what's offered to us as passive restoration, I'm realizing today, is passive depletion.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
So do we bring back happy hour? Maybe with non-alcoholic beverages or something like that.

Dr. Marc Berman:
I think the happy hour is probably good socially, but I'm not sure it was so good for directed attention.

Andrew Huberman:
Do they still do happy hour in your department? You're chair of a department-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... at University of Chicago. They used to do graduate student happy hour every Friday when I was a graduate student.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Wow.

Andrew Huberman:
And a volleyball game, and then people would go out to dinner.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And this was prior to smartphones.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Right as smartphones showed up-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... because 2000 was when I started my PhD. And it was really nice. I didn't always go.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I was often in lab late working.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
But I would go sometimes.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I feel like being on one's phone is not that.

Dr. Marc Berman:
No.

Andrew Huberman:
It's not a volleyball game with friends. It was a friendly-

Dr. Marc Berman:
No

Andrew Huberman:
... volleyball game, meaning if you weren't good at volleyball, people didn't give you a hard time.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
And then people would go out for dinner and drinks.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right. We do do happy hours once in a while. I think it's kind of funny. After COVID, I kind of felt like students didn't always know how to interact with faculty anymore. There was kind of this weird dynamic, so the happy hours have been a good way to kind of reset and show that we're all colleagues and help students interact more with faculty and faculty to interact more with students. I think one thing about the reset is, I didn't say this, but I think the going in nature also has to be solitary to really get the benefit. If you're going with a friend, you're going to be chit-chatting with the friend. That's going to take directed attention. When I take my kids in nature, it's good for my kids, but I don't count that as necessarily a restorative experience for me.

Andrew Huberman:
You're tracking their positions.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
You got four little ones, so that's your evolutionary task. Yeah.

Dr. Marc Berman:
So I have to carve out time where I can go on my own, and I think there's different buckets. I think there's a bucket for getting the good social interaction, so I'm not advocating that people do Thoreau, and you build a cabin in the woods and you're just there solo. I'm more advocating for these kind of micro doses of nature to bump directed attention up.

Andrew Huberman:
Can you bring a dog?

Dr. Marc Berman:
I think a dog would work well. A dog doesn't require a conversation. No words, no language. As long as the dog is pretty well-behaved, I think that would work too. And dogs, in some sense, that's also kind of... We're part of nature. Dogs are part of nature, and some elements to me too, I think dogs are kind of softly fascinating and interesting. But I do think to get the really most bang for your buck for these nature experiences, they do have to be solitary.

Andrew Huberman:
All right, so minimum 20 minutes, but perhaps on the weekend, you can get out for longer if you-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah, that's right

Andrew Huberman:
... can't do it every day, because I'm not going to say I can't, but I think many people aren't going to manage 20 minutes in nature every single day by themselves.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
But if you can, it sounds like a terrific thing to do, and certainly people are going to start thinking about new concepts like soft fascination and directed attention and the ability to restore directed attention-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yes

Andrew Huberman:
... if something is actually restorative versus passively depleting.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
I want to make sure that I ask you about ... stroke, diabetes, and heart disease.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
You have some really interesting data-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... that people who take on this practice of getting into nature can actually improve their health outcomes beyond just being able to focus better.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right. So there's all this incredible work on physical health benefits of nature. Now, of course, mind and body are united, and that's one thing that we talk about in the book, that it's mind, body are united, and then we have to deal with the environment, too. But it's interesting that there have been these studies about these incredible physical health benefits that people get from interacting with nature. And one of the most incredible ones, I don't know if you're familiar with this, Andrew, was a study done by Roger Ulrich in the 1980s. And what Roger Ulrich was looking at was a hospital corridor in this hospital in Philadelphia. And he looked at, in these hospital rooms, what view did they have out of the window of these hospital rooms. And some of the hospital rooms had views of modest nature, like a tree and some shrubs. Others were just looking out to a brick wall. And it was interesting that patients who were recovering from gallbladder surgery, when they had the view of nature out of their window, this modest view of nature, they recovered from gallbladder surgery a day earlier, and they used less pain medication compared to the people that had the view of the brick wall. And what's cool about this study is that Ulrich didn't have the power to randomly put people in different rooms, but essentially, patients were just randomly put into these different hospital rooms. So it's not like healthier people got the views of nature or wealthier people got the views of nature. These patients were just randomly placed into these different hospital rooms. And the ones that have the modest view of nature recovered faster from gallbladder surgery and used less pain medication. And you got to be thinking, what's up with that? What's the mechanism there? I don't think it's air quality. I don't think the people with the views of nature somehow exercised more. There's something about the aesthetic of nature that can also be physically healing. That's pretty wild. We kind of followed up on that in a study that we did in Toronto, which was kind of cool. We had health data from about 30,000 people in Toronto. And then we had two incredible data sets to quantify green space in people's neighborhoods that we then could relate to health. So the University of Toronto Forestry Department had a data set where they cataloged every single tree on public land in the city of Toronto. So we had data for 580,000 trees in the city of Toronto. We knew the species of the tree and the diameter of the tree at breast height, basically saying how old the tree was. And then my student, Omid Kardan, calculated basically how much tree canopy each individual tree provided. Then we had this other data set that was satellite imagery of the whole city of Toronto, where we could quantify all the other trees that were in people's backyards or something like that. And from those data, we basically related the health data to the tree data. So for one variable, it's subjective. So how healthy do people think they are? How healthy do they feel? And we found that if you just added one tree on their city block, that was related to a 1% increase in people's health perception. Now, that sounds pretty modest, but to get that equivalent benefit monetarily, you'd have to give everybody in that neighborhood $10,000 and have them move to a neighborhood that had a median income that was $10,000 wealthier, or it was also related with being seven years younger. And again, the tree effect was controlling for age, education, and income. So that was pretty interesting. We also had data on more objective health measures. Does somebody have a stroke? Do they have diabetes or heart disease? And there we found if you increased the amount of trees on the street by one tree per neighborhood, that was related to a 1% reduction in stroke, diabetes, and heart disease. Again, sounds pretty modest, but to get that equivalent benefit monetarily, you'd have to give every household in that neighborhood $20,000, have them all move to a neighborhood that's $20,000 wealthier, or it was also related to being one and a half years younger. So pretty incredible. Again, I can't say causality because it's correlational, but I'm fairly confident in the direction because the worst case scenario is just healthier people choose to live in neighborhoods that have more trees, but they can't be younger, they can't be wealthier, they can't be more educated because we controlled for that. Now, for that study, maybe the mechanism could be air quality, or maybe the mechanism could be maybe people are more willing to exercise if there's more trees on the street. But pretty incredible stuff that just increasing the tree canopy a little bit, you could get these physical health benefits.

Andrew Huberman:
That is impressive. For people that don't have the opportunity to plant more trees in their neighborhood, would getting and tending to an indoor plant have any positive effect?

Dr. Marc Berman:
So people have found some effects of having indoor plants. Not necessarily to these physical health benefits, but there's some attention benefits of having indoor greenery. There's also been some benefits Hospitals now are starting to take this seriously, that patients subjectively feel better when there's this greenery around. I've seen other work too, that people that are having some procedures that are very painful, that actually bringing greenery into the hospital rooms can be helpful for reducing feelings of pain.

Andrew Huberman:
Interesting.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. I'm about to embark on putting a bunch of plants in my place. I'm also a big fan of fish tanks.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Mm.

Andrew Huberman:
As long as you take good care of them, underwater scapes are really cool.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
And I like to think, I don't have any data on this, but I like to think that they are passive and restorative. Staring at a fish tank is a lot like being in a dream.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah. In Toronto, there's a Ripley's Aquarium, and they have this tank that's got kelp.

Andrew Huberman:
Oh, yeah.

Dr. Marc Berman:
And you can see the kelp kind of moving in the water. It definitely feels very restorative. And watching the fish swim around also feels very restorative.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. The feeling that might be familiar to people that visited, for instance, the Monterey Bay Aquarium or this aquarium-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yes

Andrew Huberman:
... that you're describing is when the tanks are at eye level or higher, it puts you into this other world, right?

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
Like you're at the bottom of the ocean-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yes

Andrew Huberman:
... or you're in the ocean.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
But the feeling that's always striking to me is when you leave an aquarium, and you're out into the real world again, it feels so different.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
It's what you take away from it that's equally interesting. In the same way that when you walk out of a really great movie-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... the world feels different.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
It feels lighter, brighter.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
It's, of course, physically brighter, but there's really something to it, the contrast-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yes

Andrew Huberman:
... between experiences, which is so much of what we're talking about today.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
I think a lot of people who have some aesthetic sense will be familiar with the experience of seeing a building or walking into a space and you're like, "Oh, this feels good," or, "This doesn't feel right." And sometimes they can point to the clutter or the lack, or whatever it is. Some people are more design-oriented. What's this phrase? It's the feng, fang-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Feng shui.

Andrew Huberman:
Feng shui.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Right. What do we know about nature and physical spaces and how they impact how we feel or even how we think?

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah. It's a really interesting question, and there's a couple interesting things that we've done that's related to this. So one design concept that people talk about quite a bit now is this idea of biophilic design, so trying to mimic patterns of nature in architecture. And you can imagine a Gaudi building in Barcelona that's got all the curves, and Gaudi was trying to mimic nature in a lot of his buildings, and people really like that kind of architecture. And so we collaborated with this architect, Alex Coburn, and we basically took a bunch of building facades and had people basically look at these facades and rate how much they like these buildings and building interiors. And then we also had them do this game on the computer where we'd show them a few of these architectural scenes on the screen, and they'd have to move them around, lumping the ones that are most similar together and lumping different ones somewhere else. And when we analyzed the data, we saw something really interesting, which is that people lumped together a lot of this architecture that had a lot of the fractal patterns on one side, and other kinds of architecture that was more brutalist with the straight lines on the other side. And when we had people, actually another set of people, rate these images for how natural they thought they were, people were actually using naturalness to make these similarity judgments, suggesting that even in an architectural scene, people will see nature in a building. And it may not even be conscious, and they like that kind of architecture better. They find it more comforting. And so again, when we're talking about a nature revolution like we do in the book, it's maybe not just even about putting real nature in, but even building spaces trying to mimic the patterns of nature that might also have some benefits. So we found that to be pretty interesting. Another student of mine, Kate Schertz, led another set of studies where we collaborated with this foundation that was called TKF Foundation. Now it's called Nature Sacred. And this was a foundation that built many parks in the Baltimore, DC, Annapolis, Maryland area. And they built, like, 100 of these parks, and what they also do in these parks is they would put a bench, this characteristic bench in the park, and underneath the bench was a journal. And people could write things in the journal. And so I found this foundation, and I got a small grant from them to do some research with them, and they actually transcribed all these journal entries digitally. And we also had pictures of these parks. And so one thing that we did is we ran a topic model on these journal entries to see what are some themes that people are talking about. And a lot of these parks were actually near churches or hospitals, so people wrote concepts related to religion, they wrote things about nature, and they also wrote things related to spirituality. So one analysis that we did, we also had another set of people rate the parks for how natural they were based on the pictures, and we found that if the park was rated as being more natural People actually wrote more about things related to naturalness. Okay, not too surprising, but a nice sanity check. What was even more surprising is with computer vision algorithms, we could quantify the amount of curved edges in these park pictures. And it turns out if the park had more curved edges in it, people wrote more about topics related to spirituality and their life journey.

Andrew Huberman:
Wild.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Pretty wild. It gets wilder. So that was very correlational, and we kind of found, I don't know, maybe there's some kind of confounding variables there. So we did another study where we actually manipulated, we had images that had more curved edges or less curved edges, and also images that were more natural and less natural, and we did an online study where we would show people one image and then had them select, when you look at this image, do you think it's related more to nature or time or spirituality? And it turns out if the picture had more curved edges in it, people were more likely to say, "Yeah, this picture kind of has me thinking about spirituality and my life journey." So that's causal. It gets even crazier. Because we were kind of wondering, when we looked at some of the images, we were saying that some of the images that don't have as much curved edge structure, they have more water in them. So maybe there's something about having water that maybe makes you think less about spirituality. I don't know if I believe that, but maybe there's something in there. So we did something even crazier. We took these images, and we scrambled them. So we have this image, and it looks like a park with trees and some water, and then we scramble all the pixels, and now you can't really tell what it is anymore. It just looks kind of like a Jackson Pollock painting. It turns out if those scrambled images have more curved edges, people also say they think more about spirituality and their life journey.

Andrew Huberman:
Wild.

Dr. Marc Berman:
So there's something, we don't know the mechanism, but there's something interesting there about just perceiving these curved edges that has people thinking more about spirituality.

Andrew Huberman:
So it can't be object-related because-

Dr. Marc Berman:
No

Andrew Huberman:
... they're scrambled.

Dr. Marc Berman:
That's right.

Andrew Huberman:
This is almost reminiscent-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yes

Andrew Huberman:
... of this connect-the-dot experiment, where if the dots are more distantly placed, it seems to trigger some different form of cognition related to creativity.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
If nothing else, it's becoming increasingly clear that visual scenes have a profound impact on our cognition, and I don't even know what brain network to think of when we think about spirituality. Probably somewhere down in the temporal lobe, because if you don't know where something is in the brain, you almost always say- ... it's down in the infratemporal lobe where all the other sort of mysterious stuff is. Super interesting. This also tells me that I need to introduce more curved edges to my home environment.

Dr. Marc Berman:
And people seem to really like curved edges, and even they find that in other species, that other species tend to prefer curvature and curved edges.

Andrew Huberman:
If you had a magic wand, and you could wave that magic wand, and have people change one, maybe two behaviors on a daily and weekly basis-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yep

Andrew Huberman:
... on the basis of everything that you've learned from your work and related work, what would you wish with that wand?

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yeah. So I think in a couple things. So one, the easy one is just people need to get out into nature more. And they need to do it, especially when they feel mentally fatigued. I think that's easier than saying, "Get off of the devices."

Andrew Huberman:
It's not going to happen.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
Not entirely.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Not entirely.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Marc Berman:
So I think forget about that for a moment. Go out in nature, and do it without your phone and be engaged with it. And if you don't have access to nature, try these simulations. Bring nature into your home. You can even have fake plants in your home. There's been some evidence that even fake plants can work. Get some nature sounds going. Maybe think about where you're going to take your next vacation. Maybe think about going to a national park or something like that. So that's one thing. The other thing, and it's building up, in the book, I want to start this nature revolution where we really take this work seriously. And I think part of it is that I think everybody has this intuition that nature is good for us, but it's sort of like, eh, it's an amenity, not a necessity. It'd be nice to have, but we don't really need it. And I think if I wanted to wave my magic wand, I would want to change that to actually, no, nature, these experiences are a necessity, not an amenity. And it's not just a necessity because of climate change and things like that. It's a necessity for us as humans to reach our full potential. We can't reach our full potential without nature. So I think that's another critical element. And then I think when people start feeling it and feeling the effects, then I think we need to start changing a lot of things. Like schools, they want to take away recess, and they want to take away playtime outside, right? And that's almost exactly counter to what I would recommend. I would recommend that we actually want to have more recess and more recess out in nature. Think about this, Andrew. This would be incredible, but what if school's like an eight-hour day, what if instead of eight hours of instruction, it was six hours of instruction and two hours of a nature break?

Andrew Huberman:
I'd go back to school.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Well, Kids might perform better. It actually might be revolutionary. Kids might actually perform better. Sometimes people talk to me about nature schools and doing all the learning in nature. I'm not so sure about that, like doing calculus when wind is blowing my papers around, but definitely to take a break out in nature. Give the kids a break in nature. They might actually learn more. It might be this win-win kind of thing where they would actually learn more from less. Same thing with work. We would need to redesign schedules around work that maybe your employees will be more productive if you can give them some of these nature breaks. And then, I want to start building out from that. It's like we have not built the built environment to improve people's psychological well-being. Right? We basically built the built environment to move goods efficiently, house people efficiently, but when have you ever been in a place where they're like, "We built this school to increase people's directed attention," or, "We built this school to make people more cooperative." What we're finding is that interacting with nature kind of does both things. So we need people, there are architects that are starting to do this, but we need to incorporate these natural elements into all built spaces. And then I think, going out even more is that in a city, you want to jam as much nature as possible into cities. And I love cities. Cities are great. They're beacons of innovation, wealth. We even find that bigger cities have lower racial biases, and we actually find that depression is lower in bigger cities per capita. But we can do a lot more, and I think by kind of naturizing cities, can be really, really beneficial. And then, a lot of people don't live in cities, but I have family that live in rural areas, and often, yeah, they're surrounded by nature, but it's not really nature they can use. It might be more agricultural. So I think even in these more rural places, you need to think about, hey, is the nature that's actually there really usable for people to get restoration?

Andrew Huberman:
Sunai, absolutely love the work you're doing. I especially love it because it's grounded in data.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
It's grounded in laboratory data, and it's grounded in real-world data. And I just asked you for two, and I'm actually very gratified that you offered six, I think. That's very much the sort of answers I tend to give, right? I'm going to ask you one question, but I end up asking you four. So that's not just welcome, it's invited and encouraged here. I think the work you're doing is extremely important because it's highlighting these principles of brain function and psychological health that are unaware to most people about themselves and others. Certainly, even as a neuroscientist, I like to think of myself as psychologically-minded. This notion of passive but depleting, it just has never occurred to me until I got familiar with your work, and more so during today's conversation. I also am delighted, believe it or not, that you didn't use the word forest bathing. I guess that's two words. And I want to be very clear, it's not because I don't think forest bathing is a wonderful concept. What is more lovely than bathing in a forest? I imagine people maybe with clothes, minimal clothes, maybe no clothes, who knows, in the forest, greenery everywhere, and we've heard of this incredible set of discoveries and this concept from Japanese laboratories about forest bathing. But the problem with the term forest bathing is that it implies you need a forest.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
And it implies that you need to bathe, which sounds like a vacation. It sounds like something that you really have to devote a ton of time to. And so I'm a big fan of forest bathing, as a concept and as a practice, but I really appreciate that your work is focused on what people can do in a real practical sense as we bring more nature-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right

Andrew Huberman:
... into cities, into homes, into rural areas, that's accessible. Hopefully, people will forest bathe.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
Continue to or go out-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yes

Andrew Huberman:
... and forest bathe. But what you're talking about is very practical, and very feasible for people to get 20 minutes alone, nature walk, maybe with a dog, maybe just alone, disconnect, as a way to be able to engage focused attention better. Or who knows, maybe just to get back into life and enjoy non-focused attention, hanging out with your kids or your spouse-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right

Andrew Huberman:
... or whatever it might be, friends.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
So, very excited about the book, which comes out soon. We'll put a link to the book in the show note captions, of course. And I'm delighted you're doing this work and that you're going to continue to do this work, even though you have the unfortunate honor of being a chair, which basically means you get a lot of administrative duties. You've still kept up your research and are continuing to.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
If ever there was an example of where research can really be put to practical use for people, and the book is helping disseminate that, certainly this conversation will as well. It's you and what you're doing. So thank you. I really appreciate it, and come back again and update us on the latest data-

Dr. Marc Berman:
Great

Andrew Huberman:
... when there are more data.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Great. Thanks so much for having me on the podcast.

Andrew Huberman:
Great. Will do, and I'll get into nature today.

Dr. Marc Berman:
Great.

Andrew Huberman:
Thank you. Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Mark Berman. To learn more about his work and to find a link to the presale of his new book, please see the show note captions. If you're learning from and/or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's a terrific zero-cost way to support us. In addition, please follow the podcast by clicking the follow button on both Spotify and Apple. And on both Spotify and Apple, you can leave us up to a five-star review. And you can now leave us comments at both Spotify and Apple. Please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode. That's the best way to support this podcast. If you have questions for me or comments about the podcast or guests or topics that you'd like me to consider for the Huberman Lab Podcast, please put those in the comments section on YouTube. I do read all the comments. For those of you that haven't heard, I have a new book coming out. It's my very first book. It's entitled "Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body." This is a book that I've been working on for more than five years, and that's based on more than 30 years of research and experience. And it covers protocols for everything from sleep to exercise to stress control, protocols related to focus and motivation, and of course, I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included. The book is now available by presale at protocolsbook.com. There you can find links to various vendors. You can pick the one that you like best. Again, the book is called "Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body." And if you're not already following me on social media, I am Huberman Lab on all social media platforms. So that's Instagram, X, Threads, Facebook, and LinkedIn. And on all those platforms, I discuss science and science-related tools, some of which overlaps with the content of the Huberman Lab podcast, but much of which is distinct from the information on the Huberman Lab podcast. Again, it's Huberman Lab on all social media platforms. And if you haven't already subscribed to our Neural Network Newsletter, the Neural Network Newsletter is a zero-cost monthly newsletter that includes podcast summaries as well as what we call protocols in the form of one to three-page PDFs that cover everything from how to optimize your sleep, how to optimize dopamine, deliberate cold exposure. We have a foundational fitness protocol that covers cardiovascular training and resistance training. All of that is available completely zero cost. You simply go to hubermanlab.com, go to the Menu tab in the top right corner, scroll down to Newsletter, and enter your email. And I should emphasize that we do not share your email with anybody. Thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Mark Berman. And last but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.

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