nature

Until recent times, attention has always been quite a mysterious faculty. We’ve never doubted attention mattered, but it’s only in the past few years that we’ve appreciated how absolutely central it is for all aspects of cognition, from perception to memory. The rise in our awareness of its importance has come in the wake of, and in parallel with, our understanding of working memory, for the two work hand-in-hand.

In December 2008, I reported on an intriguing study (go down to "Previous study")that demonstrated the value of a walk in the fresh air for a weary brain. The study involved two experiments in which researchers found memory performance and attention spans improved by 20% after people spent an hour interacting with nature. There are two important aspects to this finding: the first is that this effect was achieved by walking in the botanical gardens, but not by walking along main streets; the second — far less predictable, and far more astonishing — was that this benefit was also achieved by looking at photos of nature (versus looking at photos of urban settings).

Now, most of us can appreciate that a walk in a natural setting will clear a foggy brain, and that this is better than walking busy streets — even if we have no clear understanding of why that should be. But the idea that the same benefit can accrue merely from sitting in a room and looking at pictures of natural settings seems bizarre. Why on earth should that help?

Well, there’s a theory. Attention, as we all know, even if we haven’t articulated it, has two components (three if you count general arousal). These two components, or aspects, of attention are involuntary or captured attention, and voluntary or directed attention. The first of these is exemplified by the situation when you hear a loud noise, or someone claps you on the shoulder. These are events that grab your attention. The second is the sort you have control over, the attention you focus on your environment, your work, your book. This is the type of attention we need, and find so much more elusive as we get older.

Directed attention has two components to it: the direct control you exert, and the inhibition you apply to distracting events, to block them out. As I’ve said on a number of occasions, it is this ability to block out distraction that is particularly affected by age, and is now thought to be one of the major reasons for age-related cognitive impairment.

Now, this study managed to isolate the particular aspects of attention that benefited from interacting with nature. The participants were tested on three aspects: alerting, orienting, and executive control. Alerting is about being sensitive to incoming stimuli, and was tested by comparing performance on trials in which the participant was warned by a cue that a trial was about to begin, and trials where no warning was given. Alerting, then, is related to arousal — it’s general, not specifically helpful about directing your attention.

Orienting, on the other hand, is selective. To test this, some trials were initiated by a spatial cue directing the participant’s attention to the part of the screen in which the stimulus (an arrow indicating direction) would appear.

Executive control also has something to do with directed attention, but it is about resolving conflict between stimuli. It was tested through trials in which three arrows were displayed, sometimes all pointing in the same direction, other times having the distracter arrows pointing in the opposite direction to the target arrow. So this measures how well you can ignore distraction.

So this is where the findings get particularly interesting: it seems that looking at pictures of nature benefited executive control, but not alerting or orienting.

Why? Well, attention restoration theory posits that a natural environment gives your attentional abilities a chance to rest and restore themselves, because there are few elements that capture your attention and few requirements for directed attention. This is more obvious when you are actually present in these environments; it’s obvious that on a busy city street there will be far more things demanding your attention.

The fact that the same effect is evident even when you’re looking at pictures echoes, perhaps, recent findings that the same parts of the brain are activated when we’re reading about something or watching it or doing it ourselves. It’s another reminder that we live in our brains, not the world. (It does conjure up another intriguing notion: does the extent to which pictures are effective correlate with how imaginative the person is?)

It’s worth noting that mood also improved when the study participants walked in the park rather than along the streets, but this didn’t appear to be a factor in their improved cognitive performance; however, the degree to which they felt mentally refreshed did correlate with their performance. Confirming these results, mood wasn’t affected by viewing pictures of nature, but participants did report that such pictures were significantly more refreshing and enjoyable.

Now, I’ve just reported on a new study that seems to me to bear on this issue. The study compared brain activity when participants looked at images of the beach and the motorway. The researchers chose these contrasting images because they are associated with very similar sounds (the roar of waves is acoustically very similar to the roar of traffic), while varying markedly in the feelings evoked. The beach scenes evoke a feeling of tranquility; the motorway scenes do not.

I should note that the purpose of the researchers was to look at how a feeling (a sense of tranquility) could be evoked by visual and auditory features of the environment. They do not refer to the earlier work that I have been discussing, and the connection I am making between the two is entirely my own speculation.

But it seems to me that the findings of this study do provide some confirmation for the findings of the earlier study, and furthermore suggest that such natural scenes, whether because of the tranquility they evoke or their relatively low attention-demanding nature or some other reason, may improve attention by increasing synchronization between relevant brain regions.

I’d like to see these studies extended to older adults (both of them were small, and both involved young adults), and also to personality variables (do some individuals benefit more from such a strategy than others? Does reflect particular personality attributes?). I note that another study found reduced connectivity in the default mode network in older adults. The default mode network may be thought of as where your mind goes when it’s not thinking of anything in particular; the medial prefrontal cortex is part of the default mode network, and this is one of the reasons it was a focus of the most recent study.

In other words, perhaps natural scenes refresh the brain by activating the default mode network, in a particularly effective way, allowing your brain to subsequently return to action (“task-positive network”) with renewed vigor (i.e. nicely synchronized brainwaves).

Interestingly, another study has found a genetic component to default-mode connectivity (aberrant DMN connectivity is implicated in a number of disorders). It would be nice to see some research into the effect of natural scenes on attention in people who vary in this attribute.

Meditation is of course another restorative strategy, and I’d also like to see a head-to-head comparison of these two strategies. But in any case, bottom-line, these results do suggest an easy way of restoring fading attention, and because of the specific aspect of attention that is being helped, it suggests that the strategy may be of particular benefit to older adults. I would be interested to hear from any older adults who try it out.

[Note that part of this article first appeared in the December 2008 newsletter]

On my walk today, I listened to a downloaded interview from the On Being website. The interview was with ‘vocal magician and conductor’ Bobby McFerrin, and something he said early on in the interview really caught my attention.

In response to a question about why he’d once (in his teens) contemplated joining a monastic order, he said that the quiet really appealed to him, and also ‘the discipline of the hours … there’s a rhythm to the day. I liked the fact that you stopped whatever you were doing at a particular time and you reminded yourself, you brought yourself back to your calling’.

Those words resonated with me, and they made me think of the Moslem habit of prayer. Of the idea of having specified times during the day when you stop your ‘ordinary’ life, and touch base, as it were, with something that is central to your being.

I don’t think you need to be a monk or a Moslem to find value in such an activity! Nor does the activity need to be overtly religious.

Because this idea struck another echo in me — some time ago I wrote a brief report on how even a short ‘quiet time’ can help you consolidate your memories. It strikes me that developing the habit of having fixed points in the day when (if at all possible) you engage in some regular activity that helps relax you and center your thoughts, would help maintain your focus during the day, and give you a mental space in which to consolidate any new information that has come your way.

Appropriate activities could include:

• meditating on your breath;
• performing a t’ai chi routine;
• observing nature;
• listening to certain types of music;
• singing/chanting some song/verse (e.g., the Psalms; the Iliad; the Tao te Ching)

Regarding the last two suggestions, as I reported in my book on mnemonics, there’s some evidence that reciting the Iliad has physiological effects on synchronizing heartbeat and breath that is beneficial for both mood and cognitive functioning. It’s speculated that the critical factor might be the hexametric pace (dum-diddy, dum-diddy, dum-diddy, dum-diddy, dum-diddy, dum-dum). Dactylic hexameter, the rhythm of classical epic, has a musical counterpart: 6/8 time.

Similarly, another small study found that singing Ave Maria in Latin, or chanting a yoga mantra, likewise affects brain blood flow, and the crucial factor appeared to be a rhythm that involved breathing at the rate of six breaths a minute.

Something to think about!

Back in 2010, I read a charming article in the New York Times about a bunch of neuroscientists bravely disentangling themselves from their technology (email, cellphones, laptops, …) and going into the wilderness (rafting down the San Juan River) in order to get a better understanding of how heavy use of digital technology might change the way we think, and whether we can reverse the problem by immersing ourselves in nature.

One of those psychologists has now co-authored a study involving 56 people who participated in four- to six-day wilderness hiking, electronic-device-free, trips organized by Outward Bound schools. The study looked at the effect of this experience on creativity, comparing the performance of 24 participants who took the 10-item creativity test the morning before they began the trip, and 32 who took the test on the morning of the trip's fourth day.

Those few days in the wilderness increased performance on the task by 50% — from an average of 4.14 pre-trip to 6.08.

However, much as I like the idea, I have to say my faith in these results is not particularly great, given that there was a significant age difference between the two groups. The average age of the pre-hike group was 34, and that of the in-hike group 24. Why the researchers didn’t try to control this I have no idea, but I’m not convinced by their statement that they statistically accounted for age effects — which are significant.

Moreover, this study doesn’t tell us whether the effect was due to the experience of nature, simply the experience of doing something different, or the unplugging from technology. Still, it adds to the growing research exploring Attention Restoration Theory.

View from my window

I’m a great fan of nature myself, and count myself very fortunate to live surrounded by trees and within five minutes of a stream and bush (what people in other countries might call ‘woods’, though New Zealand bush is rather different). However, whether or not it is a factor in itself, there’s no denying other factors are also important — not least, perhaps, the opportunity to let your mind wander. “Mind wandering”, it has been suggested, evokes a unique mental state that allows otherwise opposing networks to work in cooperation, and stimulates problem-solving.

This is supported, perhaps, in another recent study. Again, I’m not putting too much weight on this, because it was a small study and most particularly because it was presented at a conference and very few details are available. But it’s an interesting idea, so let me give you the bullet points.

In the first study, 40 people were asked to copy numbers out of a telephone directory for 15 minutes, before being to complete a more creative task (coming up with different uses for a pair of polystyrene cups). Those who had first copied out the telephone numbers (the most boring task the researchers could think of) were more creative than a control group of 40 who had simply been asked to come up with uses for the cups, with no preamble.

In a follow-up experiment, an extra experimental group was added — these people simply read the phone numbers. While, once again, those copying the numbers were more creative than the controls, those simply reading the numbers scored the most highly on the creativity test.

The researchers suggest that boring activities that allow the most scope for daydreaming can lead to the most creativity. (You can read more about this study in the press release and in a Huffington Post article by one of the researchers.)

Remembering other research suggesting that thinking about your experiences when living abroad can make you more creative, I would agree, in part, with this conclusion: I think doing a boring task can help creativity, if you are not simply bogged down in the feeling of boredom, if you use the time granted you to think about something else — but it does matter what you think about!

The wilderness experiment has two parts to it: like the boring task, but to a much greater degree (longer span of time), it provides an opportunity to let your mind run free; like the living-abroad experiment, it puts you in a situation where you are doing something completely different in a different place. I think both these things are very important — but the doing-something-different is more important than putting yourself in a boring situation! Boredom can easily stultify the brain. The significance of the boredom study is not that you should do boring tasks to become more creative, but that, if you are doing something boring (that doesn’t require much of your attention), you should let your thoughts wander into happy and stimulating areas, not just wallow in the tedium!

But of course the most important point of these studies is a reminder that creativity - the ability to think divergently - is not simply something a person 'has', but that it flowers or dwindles in different circumstances. If you want to encourage your ability to think laterally, to solve problems, to be creative, then you need to nurture that ability.

I talk a lot about how working memory constrains what we can process and remember, but there’s another side to this — long-term memory acts on working memory. That is, indeed, the best way of ‘improving’ your working memory — by organizing and strengthening your long-term memory codes in such a way that large networks of relevant material are readily accessible.

Oddly enough, one of the best ways of watching the effect of long-term memory on working memory is through perception.

Perception is where cognition begins. It’s where memory begins. But here’s the thing: it is only in the very beginning, as a newborn baby, that this perception is pure, uncontaminated by experience.

‘Uncontaminated’ makes it sound bad, but of course the shaping of perception by experience is vital. Otherwise we’d all be looking around wide-eyed, wondering what was going on. So we need to shape our perception.

For example, if we’re searching for a particular object, we have a mental picture of what we’re looking for, and that helps us find it quicker. Such predictive templates have recently been shown to exist for smell as well.

‘Predictive templates’ are the perceptual version of cognitive schemas. I have mentioned schemas before, in the context of expertise and reading scientific text. But schemas aren’t restricted to such intellectual pursuits; we use schemas constantly, every day of our lives. Schemas, or mental models or scripts, are mental representations you’ve formed through your experiences, that tell you what to expect from a given situation. This means we don’t have to think too hard when we come up against a familiar situation; we know what to expect.

That also means that we often don’t notice things that don’t fit in with our expectations.

I could talk about that for some time, but what I want to emphasize today is this point that thought begins with perception — and perception begins with the body.

For example, it probably won’t surprise anyone that an educational program for young children, “Moved by Reading”, has been found to help young elementary school children understand texts and math word problems by getting them to manipulate images on a computer screen in accordance with the story. Such virtual ‘acting out’ helped the children understand what was going on in the story and, in the case of the math problems, significantly reduced their attention to irrelevant information in the text. (You can read the journal article (pdf) on this; those who are registered at Edweek can also read the article that brought this to my notice.)

More surprisingly, at the Dance Psychology Lab at the University of Hertfordshire, they’ve apparently discovered that different sorts of dancing help people with different sorts of problem-solving. Improvised dance apparently helps with divergent thinking, where there are multiple answers to a problem. Very structured kinds of dance help with convergent thinking, where you’re looking for the single answer to a problem. The researchers also claim that improvised dance can help those with Parkinson's disease improve their divergent thinking skills. (I’m using the words ‘apparently’ and ‘claim’ because I haven’t seen any research papers on this — but I wanted to mention it because it’s a nice idea, and you can read an article about it and listen to the head of the Dance Lab talk about it in a 20-minute video).

We can readily see how acting out text can reveal details that in reading we might gloss over, and it’s only one step from this to accept that gesturing might help us solve problems and remember them (as I’ve reported repeatedly). But the idea that dancing in different ways might affect how we think? Not so easily believed. But in a recent news report, I talked about two experimental studies that demonstrated how moving your hands makes you less inclined to think of abstract solutions to problems (or, conversely, that moving your hands helps you solve problems physically), and holding your hands close to the object of your perception helps you see details, but hinders you from abstracting commonalities.

This idea that the way you hold or move your body can affect what we might term your level of perception — specific detail vs global — is perhaps echoed (am I drawing too long a bow here?) in a recent observation I made regarding face-blindness (prosopagnosia). That it may be, along with perfect pitch and eidetic memory, an example of what happens when your brain can’t abstract the core concept.

Our own personal experience, supported in a recent study of scene perception, indicates that we can’t do both. At any one time you must make the choice: to focus on details, or to focus on the big picture. So this is contextual, but it’s also individual — some people will be more inclined to a detail strategy, others to a global strategy. Interestingly, this may change with age. And also experience.

One aspect of cognitive flexibility is being able to control your use of detail and global perception. This applies across the board, in many different circumstances. You need to think about which type of perception is best in the context.

In the realm of notetaking, for example, (as I discuss in my book Effective notetaking), your goal makes a huge difference to the effectiveness of your notetaking. The more specific the goal, the fewer notes you need take, and the more targeted they are. Generally speaking, also, the more specific your goal, the faster you can read/select.

But of course there’s a downside to being fast and targeted (there’s always a downside to any strategy!) — you are likely to miss information that isn’t what you’re after, but is something you need to know in a different or wider context.

There’s something else interesting about speed of processing: we associate faster processing speeds with higher intelligence, and we associate concentration with faster processing speeds. That is, when we’re concentrating, we can read/work faster. Contrariwise, I believe (though I don’t think there’s any research on this — do tell me if you know of any), if we can force ourselves into a faster mode of operation, our concentration will be better.

So fast is good, but risks missing relevant information — implying that sometimes slow is better. Which leads me to a thought: is another way of looking at Csikszentmihalyi’s famous “flow” the idea that flow is achieved when you get the speed just right? And can you therefore help yourself achieve that flow state through physical means? (Inevitably leading me to think of t’ai ch’i.)

Some thoughts for the day!