LET’S BE REALISTIC. Even if we’re lucky enough to sing for bears in Alaska or to have bonded with nature when we were young, keeping that bond or establishing an evolved relationship with nature is no easy thing.
My office in San Diego is a sea of distraction. Two computers, two printers, a fax/answering machine/scanner, a negative and slide scanner, a radio, and four hard drives sit on my desk; beneath it, a tangle of wires that has baffled me for years. I half expect this mess of ganglia to creep up the stairs one night, like a serial-killer Slinky, and strangle me where I sleep. Right now, however, I see a movement in the bushes beyond the sliding glass door. A spotted towhee dances in the leaves, doing its comical back-kick as it searches for bugs, calling to-wheeeee. Recently, our son Matthew, who has taken up birding with a passion, gave my wife and me a set of 10x42 binoculars and The National Audubon Society Field Guide to Birds: Western Region. He has marked pages of the book with yellow tags to show which birds frequent our territory.
The binoculars and the book are on my desk. The desk is vibrating. I reach for the iPhone.
Robert Michael Pyle would be the first to say that finding a balance isn’t easy. In 2007, Pyle announced in his Orion Magazine nature column that he was thinking about going cold turkey on e-mail. “Time will tell whether I can make a living without e-mail,” he wrote. “In the meantime, I’m going back to the post, and the virtues of patience and silence. My loss, you’ll say. Maybe so. We’ll see . . .”1
Two years later, I e-mailed Bob and asked him how his life was going since he swore off e-mail. It was a bad sign when he answered, quickly. “I have backslid,” he wrote. “You could say I had a hiatus, but I haven’t yet fully succeeded in achieving the ideal. I try to spend as little time as I can on the machine away from writing, however, and do as little as possible on the web.” When he must spend time before a screen to do his daily work of writing, he gets up and goes outside as soon as possible.
Sometimes, even Pyle —as hopeful and energetic a man as you’ll ever meet—gets discouraged about the odds against a human/nature reunion.
Unctuous personalities squawk at us from flat-panel TVs on gas pumps. Billboard companies replace pasted paper with flashing digital screens. Screens pop up in airports, coffeehouses, banks, and grocery-store checkout lines, even in restrooms, above the urinal or mounted on hand dryers. On some airlines, advertising messages reach out to us from the seatback dining tables and motion-sickness bags. Disney advertises DVDs for preschoolers on the paper liners of examination tables in pediatricians’ offices. Perhaps this is our punishment for using the DVR to skip the commercials. “We never know where the consumer is going to be at any point in time, so we have to find a way to be everywhere,” Linda Kaplan Thaler, chief executive at the ad agency Kaplan Thaler Group, tells the New York Times. “Ubiquity is the new exclusivity.”2
This info-blitzkrieg has spawned a new field called “interruption science” and a newly minted condition: continuous partial attention.3
Maggie Jackson, author of Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, reports that a distracted worker takes nearly a half hour to get back to and continue a task; 28 percent of a typical worker’s day is taken up by interruptions and recovery time; constant electronic instrusions leave interrupted workers feeling frustrated, pressured and stressed, and less creative.4 We text more, communicate less. At the UCLA Center on Everyday Lives of Families, Elinor Ochs, a linguistic anthropologist, and a team of twenty-one researchers, have been using the tools of ethnography, ecology, archaeology, and primatology to videotape and study the routines of thirty-two families in the Los Angeles area. The team found that restless family members moved quickly, gathering in the same room only 16 percent of the time; they tended to grunt more than talk; they walked past one another without greeting, barely looking up from the video game, television, or computer. “Returning home at the end of the day is one of the most delicate and vulnerable moments in life. Everywhere in the world, in all societies, there is some kind of greeting.” But not in these families.5
Larry Hinman, professor of philosophy and director of the Values Institute at the University of San Diego, has studied the evolution of robots. One scientist he interviewed remarked that machines are “without entanglements,” and he considered that a positive feature. “Nature is a complex world, and you are born with entanglements, starting with the umbilical cord,” says Hinman. Notwithstanding electric cords, “the technological world is the world of the blank slate; you can redo it without the messiness of reality. A false dream, but that’s what captures the imagination of some people who work in the field of robotics.” This is particularly true in Japan, where demonstration robots are becoming eerily humanlike. “One robot ‘newscaster’ read the news one night on television, and virtually no one noticed,” he says. “Another scientist created a basic prototype with the features of his own young son, who commented, ‘Aren’t I enough, Dad?’ It was devastating to him.”
Taken to its extreme, a denatured life is a dehumanized life. As the American naturalist and writer Henry Beston put it, when the wind in the grass is “no longer a part of the human spirit, a part of very flesh and bone, man becomes, as it were, a kind of cosmic outlaw.” There’s no denying the benefits of the Internet. But electronic immersion, without a force to balance it, creates the hole in the boat —draining our ability to pay attention, to think clearly, to be productive and creative. The best antidote to negative electronic information immersion will be an increase in the amount of natural information we receive.
The more high-tech we become, the more nature we need.
During a visit to the Galapagos Islands in 2010, I spent an afternoon at the Tomas de Berlanga School on the island of Santa Cruz. Scalesia Foundation, a nongovernment organization created in 1991 to provide an education alternative for residents of the archipelago, supports the school, which serves the islands’ growing number of children whose parents moved there in pursuit of ecotourism jobs. Even here, on these extraordinary islands—where you must be careful where you put your feet, lest you step on an iguana, lava lizard, sea lion, or blue-footed booby —children know little about their own bioregion.
Not so at this school. With the exception of courses requiring computers, classes are conducted under rough shelters with no walls. Such “forest schools,” particularly popular in Europe, can range from traditional schools that send the students outdoors a few hours a week, to ones that have no buildings at all. Their effectiveness is supported by several studies.
The director of the Berlanga School, Reyna Oleas, is a vivacious former environmental consultant from Ecuador, who, in her former life, helped design more than twenty environmental funds in Latin America and the Caribbean. Now in her late thirties, she moved to the Galapagos in 2007 to open this school. I asked her how the natural world had influenced her way of thinking. Had it made her smarter?
“I’d prefer the word sharpness. I have more sharpness and perpetual awareness,” she said. “Before I came here, my life was . . . dormant.”
She offered an interesting definition of dormant: not asleep, but driven to distraction. “You’re writing e-mail, watching TV, answering the phone. You’ve got your head in so many channels. Your body could collapse and you wouldn’t even realize it. I was smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. I was stressed out. I wasn’t well. Here, I healed, I quit smoking.” And here, her thinking cleared. “When there is something you have to deal with, you go do it. Solutions come more naturally. I can separate the real problem from the static. Before, it was —you have a problem, and everything is huge. And now, if something happens, okay, this is what it is, how are we going to deal with it?”
This seems clear enough: When truly present in nature, we do use all our senses at the same time, which is the optimum state of learning.
At lunch that day, I met Celso Montalvo, a naturalist and expedition leader in his early forties who worked with Lindblad National Geographic Expeditions. Celso spent part of his childhood in the Galapagos. A graduate of the Ecuadorian Naval Academy, he studied computer science in New York but decided to return to the islands he loved. As Oleas and I talked about natural intelligence —or as she put it, sharpness and awareness —Celso jumped into the conversation. He defined natural intelligence as “knowing the signs of nature.”
“I see a kind of a general animal intelligence. I can see this in the fish, I can see this in the birds,” he said. “We all are born with it. It can be triggered again. It’s not that hard. It helps to know biology, but this knowledge becomes much deeper. Every time I step out on the deck or out of the house, I can feel the direction of the breeze; I feel what animals can feel. They can feel the sun rise and the sun set. The plants point in one direction when it is wet and then the other direction when it is dry. Connecting dots. It’s as simple as that. Off the Internet, everything is connecting you with the world. Everything.”
The natural world helps us perceive connections; it can also help us fine-tune knowledge.
Wolf Berger, Distinguished Research Professor at the Geosciences Research Division of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and a friend, hikes to clear his mind and to focus. Usually, he walks along the beach at La Jolla, up the paths of Torrey Pines State Park, along the gnarled mud sculptures of the sandstone cliffs frozen hard by time, through California coastal sage where rattlesnakes sun themselves, through groves of the rarest pine in North America, a remnant of an ancient coastal forest. He looks out to sea and follows the porpoises with their curved backs stitching the waves, the dipping gulls.
One day, as he and I walked along a plateau farther inland, he explained the way his scientific mind processes nature. “Soils and plants have a plethora of different hues of browns and greens, and by noting these carefully, one can guess what to expect in terms of rocks and plants when coming closer,” he said. “As I get older, my hearing suffers, but I still enjoy the whispering of the pines and firs in the breeze, and the song of birds. I try to guess the size of each bird from the frequency distribution in its acoustic emissions —perhaps not a very romantic approach. Even more than my senses, my thinking is enhanced in nature.”
Our society seems to look everywhere but the natural domain for the enhancement of intelligence. Gary Stix, writing in Scientific American, reports a boom in pill popping to build brain performance. Many people already take “natural” supplements to enhance or calm the brain—Ginkgo biloba for increased blood flow to the brain, Saint-John’s-wort for depression, and so on. And psychoactive substances have been used for thousands of years to enhance the human ability to envision and then create. As any baby-boom survivor of the 1960s can attest, though, results may vary. Now we’re taking the next leap. “The 1990s, proclaimed the decade of the brain by President George H. W. Bush, have been followed by what might be labeled ‘the decade of the better brain,’” writes Stix. College students and business executives are downing stimulant drugs for routine mental performance, though the drugs were never approved for that purpose. Called neuroenhancers, nootropics, or smart drugs, the smart pills of choice currently include methylphenidate (Ritalin), the amphetamine Adderall, and modafinil (Provigil). “On some campuses, one quarter of students have reported using the drugs,” according to Stix.6 Some people need such medication, of course, but reliance on these drugs remains a massive experiment, with long-term side effects yet to be determined. Beyond drugs, the news media’s imagination is captured by the potential of artificial neural networks —the reproduction or extension of the biological nervous system —to boost human intelligence. Yet an immediately available, low-cost intelligence-enhancing supplement already exists.
The study of the relationship between mental acuity, creativity, and time spent outdoors is a frontier for science. But new research suggests that exposure to the living world can enhance intelligence for some people. This probably happens in at least two ways: first, our senses and sensibilities are improved through our direct interaction with nature (and practical knowledge of natural systems is still applicable in our everyday lives); second, a more natural environment seems to stimulate our ability to pay attention, think clearly, and be more creative, even in dense urban neighborhoods. This research has positive implications for education, for business, and for the daily lives of young and old.
Foundational work in this arena was begun in the 1970s by environmental psychologists Rachel and Stephen Kaplan.7 Findings from their nine-year study for the U.S. Forest Service and later research suggested that direct and indirect contact with nature can help with recovery from mental fatigue and the restoration of attention. In addition to supporting the theory that nature experience can improve psychological health, they also found that it helped restore the brain’s ability to process information. They followed participants in an Outward Bound - like wilderness program, which took people into the wilds for up to two weeks. During these treks or afterward, subjects reported experiencing a sense of peace and an ability to think more clearly; they also reported that just being in nature was more restorative than the physically challenging activities, such as rock climbing, for which such programs are mainly known.
Over time, the Kaplans developed their theory of directed-attention fatigue. As described in a paper by Stephen Kaplan and Raymond DeYoung: “Under continual demand our ability to direct our inhibitory processes tires. . . . This condition reduces mental effectiveness and makes consideration of abstract long-term goals difficult. A number of symptoms are commonly attributed to this fatigue: irritability and impulsivity that results in regrettable choices, impatience that has us making ill-formed decisions, and distractibility that allows the immediate environment to have a magnified effect on our behavioral choices.”8 The Kaplans hypothesize that the best antidote to such fatigue, which is brought on by too much directed attention, is involuntary attention, what they call “fascination,” which occurs when we are in an environment that fulfills certain criteria: the setting must transport the person away from their day-to-day routine, provide a sense of fascination, a feeling of extent (enough available space to allow exploration), and some compatibility with a person’s expectations for the environment being explored. Furthermore, they have found that the natural world is a particularly effective place for the human brain to overcome mental fatigue, to be restored.
The Kaplans’ work suggests that nature simultaneously calms and focuses the mind, and at the same time offers a state that transcends relaxation, allowing the mind to detect patterns that it would otherwise miss. Yes, some people might achieve a similar state while walking the streets of New York, or through advanced meditation, or perhaps someday from a pill. The natural world, though, offers its own supplements. “Our work has focused on the many ways in which nearby nature, whether experienced directly or indirectly, can contribute to well-being,” says Rachel Kaplan. “Tending houseplants, the view of a tree from the window, gardening, street trees, planters with flowers at bus stops . . . there are so many ways in which the natural world may benefit people.”
Subsequent research supported the Kaplans’ findings. The researchers Marlis Mang and Terry Hartig, at the University of California – Irvine, compared three groups of backpacking enthusiasts. One group went on a wilderness-backpacking trip and showed improved proofreading performance, while those who went on an urban vacation or took no vacation showed no improvement in this task.9 At the University of Michigan, researchers demonstrated that participants’ memory performance, and attention spans improved by 20 percent after just an hour of interacting with nature, according to results published in Psychological Science in 2008.10 Marc Berman, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, and lead author of the study commented: “People don’t have to enjoy the walk to get the benefits. We found the same benefits when it was 80 degrees and sunny over the summer as when the temperatures dropped to 25 degrees in January. The only difference was that participants enjoyed the walks more in the spring and summer than in the dead of winter.”
Meanwhile, at the Human-Environment Research Laboratory at the University of Illinois, researchers have discovered that children show a significant reduction in the symptoms of attention-deficit disorder when they engage with nature.11 Since grown-ups can exhibit the symptoms of attention-deficit disorder, too, one might speculate that this research is also relevant to the lives of adults.
Most research on how nature experience can improve learning has been conducted with young people. But nature-smart education appears to work for everyone involved, including the teachers. A Canadian study showed that greening school grounds not only improved academic performance of students; it also lowered exposure to toxins and increased teachers’ enthusiasm for being teachers, in part due to fewer classroom discipline problems.12
Schools with greened grounds experience reduced absenteeism. School gardening can improve students’ learning and behavior; students participating in gardening had improved school attitude and teamwork and expanded learning opportunities. Natural views from high schools can positively impact students’ academic achievement and behavior. A study that investigated 101 public high schools in Michigan found that students in schools with larger windows and more views of nearby nature —from classrooms, lunchrooms, and outdoor eating areas —had both higher standardized test scores and higher graduation rates, and a greater percentage of those students planned to attend college. (There were also fewer reports of criminal behavior.)13 Real field trips offer better learning environments than virtual field trips. This isn’t to say virtual field trips (via webcams, for example) aren’t useful, but a real field trip provides a chance for students to use all their senses, spontaneity, and instigative learning—what the researchers called a superior learning environment that goes beyond specific curriculum-based learning.14 So-called at-risk students who have not had much experience in nature show a marked improvement of 27 percent in test scores, related to mastery of science, when they learn in weeklong residential outdoor education programs. They also showed enhanced cooperation and conflict-resolution skills; gains in self-esteem; gains in positive environmental behavior; and improvements in problem solving, motivation to learn, and classroom behavior.15 Typically, these studies controlled for socioeconomic status, racial/ethnic makeup, building age, and size of enrollment.
More research is needed on adult learning, but the studies and theories related to the young are relevant in any discussion of intelligence, no matter what the age of the student.16
Got dirt? A study conducted by Dorothy Matthews and Susan Jenks at the Sage Colleges in Troy, New York, has found that a bacterium given to mice helped them navigate a maze twice as fast. The bacterium in question is Mycobacterium vaccae, a natural soil bacterium commonly ingested or inhaled when people spend time in nature. The effect wore off in a few days, but, Matthews said, the research suggests that M. vaccae may play a role in learning in mammals. She speculated that creating outdoor learning environments where M. vaccae is present may “improve the ability to learn new tasks.”17 Smart pill, meet smart bug.
Even if the bacteria research turns out to be on the mark, don’t expect anyone to start handing out smart bugs in the classroom or the boardroom. But, whether conducted on adults or children, the growing body of research associating learning ability with time spent in nature does have implications for teaching methods at all levels, as well as implications for the design of school grounds and buildings. This thinking extends to colleges and universities, and to how educational institutions and businesses might offer extended or continuing education programs. One can imagine a nature-based trend in education that would rival the explosion of high-tech virtual education. This research also suggests that individuals can proceed on their own to gain a natural intellectual and creative advantage by tapping into nature.
Still, most people need a little help from their friends to sharpen their minds in nature. Jon Young, a longtime wilderness-tracking teacher, works with adults and children in the Bay Area through the Regenerative Design Institute in Bolinas, California. “You almost never find one person being connected to nature and the whole community not being connected to nature,” he says. “There are cultural practices that get the whole community involved in what amounts to ‘nature-connection practice.’” He works with up to two hundred adults a year, teaching them how to become nature-connection mentors. In his courses, Young applies the methods outlined in Coyote’s Guide to Connecting with Nature, a book he coauthored with Ellen Haas and Evan McGown. Among the exercises and rituals: body radar, the six arts of tracking, mapping, mind’s eye imagining, listening for bird language, and plant concentration. His school teaches navigation skills, the awareness of time of day, understanding that certain birds have returned from their migration, the anticipation of seasonal change, knowing where the mushrooms are going to pop up on the hillside because of the rain patterns. “All that is deeply embedded in our—can I call it software? I hate to use that analogy. It’s the operating system our hardware is designed to run with, if you will. . . . And when we are connected to nature, all those functions turn on by themselves. We play outside, we track, we wander around. And a couple months into it, there’s a light that turns on in their eyes and they suddenly say, ‘Ah, this is great. I haven’t felt this way since I was nine.’ It’s as if there’s some sort of neurological phenomenon happening when that reawakening happens. Some adults feel guilty about that; they think learning has to hurt. The educational systems that we are used to are about information transfer.” If that approach is used exclusively, people tend to hold the information in their short-term memory, bring it out for a test, “and then they let it go—it’s not going to fill the memory banks long-term.” At the other end of the spectrum of learning environments is what Young calls “full connection.” He offers this example: “An eleven-year-old girl who has made a deep connection with a horse can tell you an extraordinary amount of information about horses, and she won’t even know where it’s coming from. She’ll be able to tell you this information through animated, engaging storytelling. I always remind people that if we do nature connection effectively, the information will come along for the ride.”
The word intelligence gives Young pause. “I think of the nature connection as more nutritive, in an emotional, intellectual, spiritual sense. It’s such a profoundly deep part of who we are as human beings, and our potential.” Thus, Young wonders if we’re talking about intelligence or something he would call innate awareness. “Intelligence may be in the context of this larger awareness, a subset of a larger perceptual body. It’s the big container, larger than the collection of intelligences. It’s the background system.”
Creative genius is not the accumulation of knowledge; it is the ability to see patterns in the universe, to detect hidden links between what is and what could be.
To connect the dots, as Celso Montalvo from the Galapagos school put it. Ralph Waldo Emerson, in a speech at Henry David Thoreau’s funeral service, described his friend’s many talents: “He was a good swimmer, runner, skater, boatman, and would probably out-walk most countrymen in a day’s journey. . . . The length of his walk uniformly made the length of his writing. If shut up in the house he did not write at all.”18 These walks not only stimulated his creativity, but had practical, day-to-day application: Thoreau’s outdoor experiences made him a sought-after land surveyor; he could not only outline boundaries with exactitude, but could explain the ecological workings of an area in great detail. An amateur stream-watcher and river-gazer, he knew the secrets of local waters long before professional hydrologists took their measures.
When NPR commentator John Hockenberry reported the research that revealed greater mental acuity after a nature walk, he pointed out that Albert Einstein and the mathematician and philosopher Kurt Gödel, “two of the most brilliant people who ever walked the face of the earth, used to famously, every single day, take walks in the woods on the Princeton campus.” Well, we’re not all Einsteins. But we’ve all experienced that eureka moment when the brain is relaxed in a positive state.
As with the studies of learning ability, most research on the relationship between nature experiences and creativity involves young people. In 2006, for example, a Danish study found that outdoor kindergartens were better than indoor schools at stimulating children’s creativity. The researchers reported that 58 percent of children who were in close touch with nature often invented new games; just 16 percent of indoor kindergarten children did.19 One explanation, for adults as well as children, is suggested by the “loose parts theory” in education, which holds that the more loose parts there are in an environment, the more creative the play. A computer game has plenty of loose parts, in the form of programming code, but the number and the interaction of those parts is limited by the mind of the human who created the game. In a tree, a woods, a field, a mountain, a ravine, a vacant lot, the number of loose parts is unlimited. It’s possible, then, that exposure to the loose but related parts of nature can encourage a greater sensitivity to patterns that underlie all experience, all matter, and all that matters.
In 1977, the late Edith Cobb, a noted proponent of nature-based education, contended that geniuses share one trait: transcendent experience in nature in their early years.20 Environmental psychologist Louise Chawla of the University of Colorado offers a broader view. “Nature isn’t only important to future geniuses,” she says. Her work explores “ecstatic places.” She uses the word ecstatic carefully. Rather than applying the contemporary definition of delight or rapture, she prefers the word’s ancient Greek roots —ek stasis—meaning “outstanding” or “standing outside ourselves.” These ecstatic moments are “radioactive jewels buried within us, emitting energy across the years of our lives,” as Chawla puts it. Such moments are often experienced during formative years. But, because of the brain’s plasticity, and individual sensitivities, they can happen throughout life.
And so can the creation of new neurons, the brain cells that process and transmit information. It’s reasonable to speculate, then, that time spent in the natural world, by both restoring and stimulating the brain, may lead to bursts of new neurons —“nature neurons,” as my wife puts it.
Time awareness may also be a factor. As noted in the report “Healthy Parks, Healthy People,” issued by the Deakin University School of Health and Social Development, in Melbourne, Australia: “City life is dominated by mechanical time (punctuality, deadlines, etc.) yet our bodies and minds are dominated by biological time.” We know that conflict between biological and mechanical time —jet lag comes to mind —can lead to irritability, restlessness, depression, insomnia, tension, and headaches. In addition, “the experience of nature in a neurological sense can help strengthen the activities of the right hemisphere of the brain, and restore harmony to the functions of the brain as a whole,” the university report explains.21 “This is perhaps a technical explanation of the process that occurs when people ‘clear their head’ by going for a walk in a park. . . . Furthermore, in the act of contemplating nature, researchers have found that the brain is relieved of ‘excess’ circulation (or activity), and nervous system activity is also reduced.”22
Whatever the process, creative people are often aware of being drawn to the outdoors for refreshment and ideas. “I always work outside, if I can. It’s important to grab the instant thought,” says writer Hilary Mantel, the 2009 winner of the prestigious Booker Prize.23 American painter Richard C. Harrington continues in the tradition of artists who gain inspiration from being outdoors. He writes: “For me, to be removed from the environment, not to be outside on a regular basis, leaves me stressed, depressed, and generally unhappy.”24
Sculptor David Eisenhour, who is in his fifties, lives in a small town in Washington State. I met him one day in 2009 at the other side of the continent, at the Chautauqua Festival in upstate New York, where his art was featured. As a boy, he lived in a trailer with his father in a northern Pennsylvania farming community. He spent most of his free time in the wild, but he also kept aquariums filled with frogs, fish, crayfish, and insects. A good microscope took him deep into another world. Today, his cast-metal pieces express natural forms that seem familiar, yet his inspiration often comes from objects or creatures so small they escape notice. Lichens or beetles take on surprising shapes in his hands. His Chautauqua display was a large and unlikely sculpture of a dung beetle’s helmet; it looked rather like a Triceratops, and it was beautiful. As he sat on a rock wall near the display, he talked about the link between nature and inspiration.
“The reason my career seems to be progressing is that the imagery I’m doing isn’t sentimental but it is very organic and very primordial looking. It’s coming into its time because people are wanting this connection to the natural world. It opens up that childhood fascination again,” he said. “I search for the imagery that, on a macro- or a microscopic level, is repeated. You’re looking more at the building blocks of life. Somewhere in our simian brain, subconscious, we have all that information. We’ve just lost access to it . . . the fact that the spiral of a snail shell and the spiral of the Milky Way galaxy are the same thing.”
But the main reason he chooses this imagery, he says, is because “being in nature quiets my mind and out of that quietness is where the real art happens.”
In the summer of 2009, several colleagues and I were invited to actor Val Kilmer’s Pecos River Ranch, in New Mexico, to speak with him about his plans to create a sort of art museum/creativity center on his property. What struck me most during the visit was not the actor’s vision, but a small black-and-white photograph on the fireplace mantel. The image was of a thunderhead above water. Under it, in Kilmer’s cramped handwriting, was this inscription written for his son: “Inspiration is confirmation . . . xox Dad.” In the bottom corner of the photo, he added a P.S. “But if you ever run out of ideas, just go outside.”
One more thought before we move on to physical and emotional health. While still considering the arena of nature and intelligence, let’s punch some holes in the false dichotomy of nature and technology.
When my sons were growing up, they spent a lot of time outdoors, but they also played plenty of video games —more than I was comfortable with. Every now and then, Jason and Matthew would try to convince me that their generation was making an evolutionary leap; because they spent so much time texting, video-gaming, and so forth, they were wired differently. In response, I pointed out that my generation had said something similar about drugs, and that didn’t work out so well. Chances are, neither will electronic addiction, which is why the nature balance is so necessary. What’s different now is not the presence of technology, but the pace of change—the rapidity of the introduction of new media and adoption of new electronic devices.
Gary Small, a neuroscientist at the University of California - Los Angeles, suggests that the pace of technological change is creating what he calls a “brain gap” between the generations. “Perhaps not since early man first discovered how to use a tool has the human brain been affected so quickly and so dramatically,” he writes in his book, iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind.25
If Small is right, then my response to my sons —that evolution doesn’t work that fast—may be overstated.
Small and his colleagues used MRI imaging to study the dorsolateral area of the prefrontal cortex, which integrates complex information and short-term memory and is instrumental in decision making.26 Two groups were tested: experienced, or “savvy,” computer users; and inexperienced, or “naïve” users. While doing Web searches, the savvy users’ dorsolateral area was quite active, while in the naïve users, the dorsolateral area was quiet. As the Canadian magazine Macleans reported: “On day five, the savvy group’s brain looked more or less the same. But in the naïve group, something amazing had happened: as they searched, their circuitry sprang to life, flashing and thundering in exactly the same way it did in their tech-trained counterparts.”27 After this short period of time, had the naïve subjects “already rewired their brains?” People over thirty, whose brains were fully formed when they first came to the Web, can also become proficient in the virtual universe. But teenagers’ brains are particularly malleable, more apt to be shaped by technological experience.
One view is that people who experience too much technology in the formative years will stunt the maturation of normal frontal lobe development, “ultimately freezing them in teen brain mode,” as Macleans puts it. “Are we developing a generation with underdeveloped frontal lobes, unable to learn, remember, feel, control impulses?” Small writes. “Or will they develop new advanced skills that poise them for extraordinary experiences?”28
Optimistic researchers suggest that all this multitasking and texting is creating the smartest generation ever, freed from the limitations of geography, weather, and distance —all those pesky inconveniences of the physical world. But Mark Bauerlein, an English professor at Emory University, in his book, The Dumbest Generation, reels out studies comparing this generation of students with prior generations, finding that “they don’t know any more history or civics, economics or science, literature or current events” despite all that available information.
Here is a third possibility: We may be developing a hybrid mind. The ultimate multitasking will be to live simultaneously in both the digital and the physical world, using computers to maximize our powers to process intellectual data and natural environments to ignite all of our senses and accelerate our ability to learn and to feel; in this way, we could combine the “primitive” powers of our ancestors with the digital speed of our teenagers.
Evolution may (or may not) be out of our hands, but as individuals we can accept and celebrate our technological skills at the same time that we seek the gifts of nature essential for the realization of our full intellectual and spiritual potential.
The best preparation for the twenty-first century may be a combination of natural and virtual experience. An instructor who trains young people to become the pilots of cruise ships describes “two kinds of students, those who are good at video games, who are terrific with the electronic steering; and those who grew up outside —they’re far better at having a special sense of where the ship is. We tend to get one or the other kind.” The ideal pilot, he says, is the person who has a balance of high-tech and natural knowledge: “We need people who have both ways of knowing the world.” In other words, a hybrid mind.
New strategies of personal discipline will be required to integrate or toggle between these seemingly incompatible ways of being in the world. Perhaps a fifteen-year-old can begin to show us the way.
On his LinkedIn page, Spencer Schoeben describes himself as “Marketing Manager at Teens in Tech Networks; Founder, Chief Site Architect at Twitloc; Web Developer at Cassy Bay Area; Webmaster, Social Media Editor at Paly Voice; and Founder of Netspencer (Self-employed).” A full tech plate. He also does time as a student at Palo Alto High School. Schoeben expresses pride in his knowledge of the computer world, and he sees the plusses of living “a life of connectivity,” as he puts it, on his Web site. “No matter where I am, no matter what I am doing, everything and everyone that I care about is at my fingertips.” But he also describes the impact of two weeks of summer camp at Hidden Villa, a nonprofit educational organization with an organic farm and natïve vegetation in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains south of San Francisco. He writes that he wasn’t keen on going to Hidden Villa, at first. “I was thinking about how hard it would be for me to survive without an Internet connection.” But off to camp he went, where he “made French fries from potatoes which we picked and I even walked a goat through the woods. It turned out okay. Actually, it turned out amazing. I couldn’t believe that I had done it.” And he learned that there are “thousands and thousands of species of trees and plants and animals that don’t use an ounce of electricity.”
When he got home, he went straight to his room and grabbed his laptop and paged through twelve days of e-mail and Facebook notifications. “But I just didn’t care. What I really wanted to do was go outside and have fun in the real world.” Perhaps the best way to live, he realized, “is in the middle.” He can remain passionate about technology —“There is no use ditching it”—but the Internet is not the universe. “It’s hard to realize how isolated your life can be . . . until you experience what it’s like to live on the other side.”
Spencer has a new map for his life. At least for now, he intends to balance the technological world with experience in that world of natural connections. In pursuit of that hybrid experience, he quotes Carl Sagan: “Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”