This Is Your Brain on Nature | Explorer

[Music] As a nature writer, I've always intuitively known that it was healthy for human beings to be out in the natural world. But it's amazing what science has proven about what nature does to your brain. Some of the scientists I've been talking to would suggest that technology is kind of slowly ruining our lives, ruining them in the sense that it's turning us into kind of fast twitch animals. It's like an alarm clock going off every 30 seconds; it is sapping our ability to concentrate for a long time, sapping our ability to appreciate the natural world, sapping our ability to get away from screens.

One thing that's consistent throughout is that nature has healthy physiological benefits, psychological benefits, and at the risk of sounding hokey, spiritual benefits. We can take our nature in smaller doses; a walk a day would make a huge difference in terms of health. We've seen people going for walks and coming back with greater cognitive power. It does not necessarily... I'm not suggesting everybody go be the row and live and you know become a hermit and live alone, but I would suggest that people remember that there's a world outside of their screens.

As we get more withdrawn from nature and we get more abstracted and kind of timid and smaller in our lives, we romanticize the wild that's been lost. I think the appeal has to do with the fact that we've spent millions of years living in nature and evolving in nature. And now, as we move away from it, some part of us—a kind of wild part of us—misses our original home, our ancestral home, which is nature.