{"id":3997,"date":"2013-11-14T06:58:30","date_gmt":"2013-11-14T13:58:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=3997"},"modified":"2013-11-14T07:01:54","modified_gmt":"2013-11-14T14:01:54","slug":"the-mind-in-the-landscape","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=3997","title":{"rendered":"The mind in the landscape"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"constable\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Babbage reports<\/a> on an intriguing new study that links the landscape we’re in (or looking at) to the time scale of our thoughts:<\/p>\n

Sitting in his remote cottage, baby son slumbering by his side, Samuel Taylor Coleridge pondered the little one\u2019s future in \u201cFrost at Midnight\u201d. A study published in the\u00a0Proceedings of the Royal Society<\/em>\u00a0suggests his \u201cabstruser musings\u201d were not that unusual, given his alentours. Mark van Vugt, of VU University in Amsterdam, and his colleagues found that country scenery of the sort Coleridge beheld inspires people to think about the future; concrete cityscapes encourage quick decisions aimed at immediate rewards.<\/p>\n

To reach that conclusion Dr van Vugt and his team randomly assigned 47 participants either to look at three city photographs, or three country photographs, for two minutes each. After that participants were asked to pick between \u20ac100 ($135) now or a larger sum, which grew in \u20ac10 increments up to \u20ac170, in 90 days\u2019 time. Those beholding natural landscapes made the switch to deferred gratification at a sum, known as the indifference point, that was 10% below those who scanned cityscapes. The same was true when another 43 volunteers were asked either to walk in an actual forest outside Amsterdam or in the city’s commercial area of Zuidas.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This reminds me of the work that’s been done on “attention restoration theory,” which posits a link between landscape and attentiveness. I described one relevant study in The Shallows<\/em><\/a>:<\/p>\n

A team of University of Michigan researchers, led by psychologist Marc Berman, recruited some three dozen people and subjected them to a rigorous, and mentally fatiguing, series of tests designed to measure the capacity of their working memory and their ability to exert top-down control over their attention. The subjects were then divided into two groups. Half of them spent about an hour walking through a secluded woodland park, and the other half spent an equal amount of time walking along busy downtown streets. Both groups then took the tests a second time. Spending time in the park, the researchers found, \u201csignificantly improved\u201d people\u2019s performance on the cognitive tests, indicating a substantial increase in attentiveness. Walking in the city, by contrast, led to no improvement in test results.<\/p>\n

The researchers then conducted a similar experiment with another set of people. Rather than taking walks between the rounds of testing, these subjects simply looked at photographs of either calm rural scenes or busy urban ones. The results were the same. The people who looked at pictures of nature scenes were able to exert substantially stronger control over their attention, while those who looked at city scenes showed no improvement in their attentiveness. \u201cIn sum,\u201d concluded the researchers, \u201csimple and brief interactions with nature can produce marked increases in cognitive control.\u201d Spending time in the natural world seems to be of \u201cvital importance\u201d to \u201ceffective cognitive functioning.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I don’t find the results of these studies surprising. They match up pretty well with my own experience. What makes them valuable, I think, is the way they remind us that our minds are part of the world\u2014something that’s easy to forget.<\/p>\n

Image: detail from Constable’s “Landscape with Clouds.”<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Babbage reports on an intriguing new study that links the landscape we’re in (or looking at) to the time scale of our thoughts: Sitting in his remote cottage, baby son slumbering by his side, Samuel Taylor Coleridge pondered the little one\u2019s future in \u201cFrost at Midnight\u201d. A study published in the\u00a0Proceedings of the Royal Society\u00a0suggests […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3997","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3997","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3997"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3997\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4001,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3997\/revisions\/4001"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3997"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3997"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3997"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}