Your brain on greenery

You go outside, you commune with nature. You feel good. That's familiar and simple enough that it hardly seems like a fruitful area for research. But in recent years, an entire field of environmental psychology has arisen in the efforts to tease out the relationship between nature outside of our heads and psychological and neurological processes inside. Proponents see this as integral to understanding how to heal ourselves – and perhaps the planet. 

These mental processes turn out to be subtle and nuanced. For instance, there's the matter of differentiating stress from mental fatigue. De-stressing is about getting away from the grind, visiting with a good friend, or watching the Tigers win a doubleheader. Mental restoration is different. It comes from a solo walk in the park, or time spent gardening. That was where we began a conversation with Raymond De Young, associate professor of environmental psychology and planning in the University of Michigan's School of Natural Resources and Environment. 

Metro Times: Words like "stress" and "tiredness" are part of our everyday vocabulary, but researchers in your field are working to make some distinctions. 

Raymond De Young: De-stressing might be compared to letting your car cool down after a long, hard ride. We can recover from stress by just taking time off work, getting a good night's sleep, or doing other physically relaxing things: going to a bar, talking with some friends, venting a little. 

But attentional fatigue needs a different kind of restoration. The mental fatigue we're talking about in our research, being tired in the head, is more like an empty gas tank. You've got to fill it up on a regular basis. We use up a part of our brain on a daily basis, and we have to restore it on a similar schedule. 

This need for regular restoration isn't a new idea. But somehow, our culture has gotten the wrong idea about how to go about doing it. We have led ourselves to think that vegging out in front of a TV, hanging out at the coffee shop or playing video games will restore our brains, but it doesn't. 

MT: Why not? 

De Young: We have to start by understanding what is fatiguing. The thing that runs down is a mental resource that directs our attention and allows us to focus on an important task while surrounded by a lot of distractions. We have to suppress these distractions in order to focus on the task at hand. Imagine you're at a meeting at a restaurant, and there is a lot of activity going on around you, but you need to focus on what the person you are meeting with is saying. To do this you have to suppress all of the background noise and movement, the conversations and music, waitstaff activity, even the meal in front of you. This suppression, inhibiting all of those competing pieces of information, is what we use our directed attention to do. 

> Email W. Kim Heron