8

Only Connect

Our lives are connected by a thousand invisible threads…

—HERMAN MELVILLE

When Harvard Medical School psychiatrist and empathy researcher Helen Riess spoke at our third Blue Mind Summit, on Block Island, she opened her talk with a video of birds over Midway Island, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The skies were filled with seagulls and albatrosses, their wings spread, their calls echoing over the soundtrack of ocean waves and Spanish guitar. Birds were walking and sitting on a green hill; there were close-ups of white and brown gulls together, their heads hovering over speckled eggs in nests; brown and fluffy chicks, taking food from their mothers’ mouths…

Then the image changed: atop grayish sand you could just identify the skeletal head and desiccated body of an albatross, and in the middle of the body, just where the stomach would have been, was a pile of plastic debris—bottle tops, scraps of plastic bags, rectangular bits of unidentifiable trash. The scene, captured by photographer Chris Jordan and cinematographer Jan Vozenilek, shifted to a nest with a lone egg in it, the rest of the nest completely filled with plastic waste. Next you saw a bird lying gasping, twitching, on the ground; in the next picture a human hand reached into the body of that same bird and pulled out handfuls of bottle tops.1

It was very quiet in the room after the video ended. Then Riess said, “Because of this clip, I will never throw a bottle cap randomly away again. That is how empathy works. Empathy takes impressions, images, sounds, and sights, and then something happens in the human mind that translates all of that into a feeling we can’t get away from. Empathy is what connects us to all living beings.” Empathy, she explained, involves higher-order reasoning capabilities that let us imagine how others are feeling even if we don’t feel the same way ourselves. Empathy and reading others’ emotions, intentions, and physical states are thus critical to our ability to function successfully within social contexts. Perhaps that’s why empathy is hardwired into our neurochemistry and neurobiology. Helen’s empathy drove her compassion, which led to her rethinking of those maligned little plastic caps (which now always remind her of the ill-fated albatross on Midway Island). “Empathy by itself is like an electric pump through which no water circulates, and it will quickly overheat and burn,” wrote Matthieu Ricard (whom we’ll meet a bit later under very different circumstances).²

About twenty years ago, scientists in Italy discovered that when macaque monkeys implanted with electrodes in the ventral premotor cortex F5 area³ watched researchers picking up and eating peanuts, the neurons in the monkeys’ brains responsible for the same actions lit up. Because these specialized neurons essentially “mirrored” the actions of others, they were called mirror neurons. Immediately scientists wondered whether people possessed the same kind of neurons, and if so, where they would be located in the brain. Subsequent studies using fMRI imaging of humans showed that groups of neurons in the inferior frontal gyrus responded both to watching and doing the same action.4

Studying mirror neurons has opened up new lines of research into the ways humans relate to each other. “There’s been an explosion of scientific research into shared neural circuits, or what’s going on in our brains when things are happening in other people’s brains,” observed Riess. “In other words, the substrate of empathy.”

The existence of mirror neurons demonstrates that we are wired to connect to the idea that the physical and emotional processes going on inside of you have their resonance inside of me. “Based on… sensory inputs, we can mirror not only the behavioral intentions of others, but also their emotional states,” writes Dan Siegel. “This is the way we not only imitate others’ behaviors but actually come to resonate with their feelings—the internal mental flow of their minds. We sense not only what action is coming next, but also the emotional energy that underlies the behavior.”⁵ We read others’ emotions long before we’re even conscious of it. In another fascinating experiment, psychologist Ulf Dimberg of Uppsala University in Sweden studied the ability of subjects to react to angry and happy faces flashed on a computer screen. Not only did people automatically frown slightly when they saw anger and turn up the corners of their mouths when a happy face appeared, but they did so 500 milliseconds after the picture appeared—faster than the conscious mind could register the image.⁶

Humans also demonstrate high degrees of physiological synchronization: we yawn when someone else yawns, laugh when they laugh, and, in the case of babies, cry when they hear someone else crying. “These sensory, motor and emotional processes are playing an important role in our understanding of others,” says Art Glenberg, a professor in the Psychology Department at Arizona State University and an expert in what is being called “embodied cognition.”7

Unfortunately, empathy also has its downside: when we see someone in distress and say, “I feel your pain,” we sometimes mean it literally. Riess described an experiment conducted by neuroscientist Tania Singer. Singer recruited sixteen couples, and had the female member of each couple spend some time in an fMRI scanner. She then gave each woman an electric shock to her right hand and mapped the areas in the brain that were activated by the pain. Next, Singer let the women know that their spouses had just received the same shocks, and mapped their reactions. Some of the same areas in the brain that had lit up when the women themselves were in pain activated when they knew their spouses were in pain. The circuits associated with feeling pain physically were relatively quiet, but the networks having to do with the emotional aspects of pain lit up significantly.⁸ As Riess pointed out, this experiment showed that while the experience of empathy can lead to a greater sense of connection and altruism, it also can produce emotional distress and even caregiver burnout.

It may seem strange that any of this has anything to do with Blue Mind. But while we’ve been talking about mindfulness in terms of its ability to boost creativity and focus, to help us contextualize our personal lives and better decide what is and isn’t urgent, we haven’t really discussed some of the core elements of the mindful state. Yet this ability to recognize a greater whole is, in the end, the very essence of Blue Mind. In order to shed our stress and distraction, we need to recognize that our lives are part of a larger natural system. The word “holistic” essentially refers to the idea that pieces together are more than the sum of their parts. Our eminence thus comes from realizing that the question mark is more powerful than the exclamation point, that all of our decisions should be understood relative to the inordinate and mysterious hospitality that water allows us to tap into. But in order to reach Blue Mind we have to go beyond ourselves—we need to tap into each other.

Connecting with Nature

We need the sun, the moon, the stars, the rivers and the mountains and birds, the fish in the sea, to evoke a world of mystery, to evoke the sacred.

—THOMAS BERRY, THE GREAT WORK

When scientist (and agnostic) T. H. Huxley was asked to write the opening article for the very first edition of Nature, in 1869, he declared there could be “no more fitting preface” than a “rhapsody” by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. “We are surrounded and embraced by her: powerless to separate ourselves from her, and powerless to penetrate beyond her,” Goethe wrote, and Huxley concludes, “It may be, that long after the theories of the philosophers whose achievements are recorded in these pages, are obsolete, the vision of the poet will remain as a truthful and efficient symbol of the wonder and the mystery of Nature.”9

In study after study, those who choose to spend time in nature speak about its ability to make us feel more connected to something outside of ourselves—something bigger, more transcendent, and universal. Some of my favorite recent studies include a 2011 survey of 452 students in Edmonton, Alberta, which showed that feeling connected to nature led to greater feelings of awe, vitality, purpose, and more positive emotions overall.10 In another study, people who viewed nature scenes and imagined themselves fully immersed in nature were more concerned with prosocial goals and more willing to give to others.¹¹

What is it about nature that inspires this feeling of connection?

First, the most frequently mentioned “transcendent” aspect of the natural world is its beauty—an increasingly exotic beauty, in our Red Mind world. “Even the person whose sole experience with nature consists of lying on a beach and watching the waves will not be surprised that those who visit the wilderness list aesthetics as one of their main objectives,” writes Winifred Gallagher in The Power of Place.¹² Perhaps because our ancient ancestors saw beauty in the shapes and colors of the natural world, our response to nature’s aesthetics is deep—and often poetic. And the experience goes well beyond the visual: we come across unfamiliar (read: novel) sounds, smells, flora, and tastes that we would not encounter back home. This is the way author and wilderness guide Sigurd F. Olson described one of his most memorable and beautiful moments in nature:

A school of perch darted in and out of the rocks. They were green and gold and black, and I was fascinated by their beauty. Seagulls wheeled and cried above me. Waves crashed against the pier. I was alone in a wild and lovely place, part at last of the wind and the water, part of the dark forest through which I had come, and of all the wild sounds and colors and feelings of the place I had found. That day I entered into a life of indescribable beauty and delight. There I believe I heard the singing wilderness for the first time.13

Nature generously bestows a grandeur that puts us in our place. When he was a teenager, neuroscientist Dan Siegel would ride his bike to the beach, walk along the ocean edge, and think deep thoughts. “I’d watch the waves and be filled with wonder—about life, the tides, the sea,” he recalled. “The force of the moon beckoning the water, raising it up toward the cliffs, then pulling it back down beyond the rocky pools, back out to sea… These tides, I thought, would continue their eternal cycle long after I was gone from this earth.”¹⁴ Trees, grass, water, sand—all are familiar to us, yet the size and scale of nature can make us catch our breath and marvel at its power. In its age, majesty, and complexity, nature dwarfs us—and yet we are drawn there because it puts our humanity into proper perspective. We encounter nature in a very physical sense when we walk, hike, climb, sail, paddle, swim, run, ski, or snowshoe through it; as hiker Adrian Juric says, these elemental forces “resist the sense of self we have worked so hard to establish” and cut us down to size.¹⁵

A 2007 study asked participants to describe a time when they saw a beautiful natural scene and to rate the level at which they felt ten different emotions. Words like awe, rapture, love, and contentment were ranked highest; people tended to agree with statements like, “I felt small or insignificant,” “I felt the presence of something greater than myself,” “I felt connected with the world around me,” “I was unaware of my day-to-day concerns,” and “I did not want the experience to end.”16 When participants in wilderness expeditions in the United States were surveyed in 1998, fully 80 percent said they had a greater spiritual connection with nature as a result of their trips.¹⁷ We realize what I like to think of as a positive lack of control, as opposed to the lack of control we feel in our overstressed, overwhelmed lives. Our inability to have power over our inboxes and bank accounts and waistlines (not to mention the economy and international conflicts) simply makes us feel worse about ourselves. But in nature we realize there is something so immeasurable, so magnificent, that it exists both with us and without us. That recognition can transform our sense of responsibility and renovate our list of priorities.

Recent studies have focused on the different neural networks that we use when focusing on things outside ourselves (the extrinsic network) and when focusing on self-reflection and emotion (the intrinsic, or default network). The brain usually switches between the two, but cognitive neuroscience researcher Zoran Josipovic discovered that experienced meditators could keep both networks active at the same time while they meditated.¹⁸ Doing so lowered the wall between self and environment, possibly with the effect of inspiring feelings of harmony with the world. That ability to simultaneously hold awareness of self and other is called nonduality, or oneness in both Eastern and Western philosophies. There’s a sense of connection with everything, of no separation, of being part of something infinitely large and wonderful. Senses are sharpened; you see, hear, feel, taste, and smell more fully. Feelings of happiness, contentment, bliss, awe, and gratitude arise for no reason—some spiritual masters refer to this as “causeless joy.” There’s a sense of timelessness, or time seems to slow to a crawl. There’s a sense of wanting or needing nothing else. Some would call it communion with the natural world; some would call it the experience of God. Perhaps most people wouldn’t even know to put words of any sort to it.

Meditation can bring us to this state, as can prayer and other spiritual practices. But many of us feel moments or even hours of that sense of oneness and spirituality when we interact with nature, especially with water and the creatures we find there. “One cannot help but develop some form of attachment to the various social and natural landscapes that one encounters and moves through in one’s lifetime, and frequently the feelings one forms in response to a particular place can be especially strong and overwhelming,” state Laura Fredrickson and Dorothy Anderson.19 We become attached to our particular “piece” of nature and treasure it for the experiences we have had there: it becomes our “sacred space.” Your sacred space may be an inaccessible bit of wilderness reached only by foot or canoe; or it may be amidst the waters themselves, as you fished, sailed, or slipped in and felt the power of the water beneath or around you. But whenever or however you enter it, you feel connected to something greater than yourself.

Psychologist Abraham Maslow believed that because man’s “higher and transcendent nature” is “part of his essence,”²⁰ occasionally we can access the mystical consciousness William James described. Maslow called these moments peak-experiences, and described them as “non-striving, non-self-centered, purposeless, self-validating, end-experiences and states of perfection and of goal attainment.”²¹ Psychologists studying these peak moments believe that they share certain characteristics: a complete focus of attention; an absence of fear; a perception that the world is good; a feeling of connection and even merging with the environment; feeling humbled by the experience and fortunate to have participated in it; a sense that time and space have altered and one is immersed in the present moment; a feeling that the experience is real, true, and valuable; flashes of insight and emotions not experienced in daily life; and a realization of the meaningfulness of the experience and the significance for one’s future life.22 When we access these states, we see ourselves not as separate but as “embedded” in our relationships with everything in the world; we are part of everything, and everything is part of us.²³

Many times such peak experiences involve pushing yourself past perceived limitations. Catherine Franssen saw this with skydivers and rock climbers; Jaimal Yogis and other big-wave surfers describe moments in the ocean when “the wave demanded such hyper-focus… there wasn’t even time to differentiate between one’s body and the wave.”²⁴ On the South Fork of the American River in California, a white-water rafter described the experience like this:

The top of the mountain finally gives up at the end of the peninsula that creates the S turn I admire so much. The velocity of the water increases dramatically, the negative ions in the air from the rapids changes everyone’s attitude. As I approach the thunder, my muscles throughout my entire body come to attention—as always, I go through the rocks 100 yards upstream I call the Goal Posts, knowing that if I can float my boat through them, I’ll be OK in Troublemaker. Approaching the final turn… I tense as I grip my oars, I totally relax my mind and go for the flow—punch the hole and slip by the rock. And like magic, another peel off the layers of life, off the old onion, exposing fresh flesh and a new perspective on life.25

This sort of expansive awareness—“a new perspective on life”—is almost inevitably common in such circumstances that combine the natural world and water.²⁶ Indeed, as a spiritual element of the natural world, there seems to be something particular about water that permeates humanity’s consciousness. When seeking to describe the experience of wholeness, limitlessness, and eternity, Freud drew on his correspondence with French writer (and student of Eastern religions) Romain Rolland and called it the “oceanic feeling.”^{27, 28} Many of our spiritual and religious traditions feature water. In the Tao Te Ching (written somewhere between the sixth and fourth century B.C.E.), Chinese philosopher Lao-Tzu wrote, “Of all the elements in the cosmological construct of the world, Fire, Water, Earth, Mineral and Nature, the Sage takes Water as his preceptor.” The Buddha likened life to a river that is always flowing, changing from moment to moment. Water is integral to the creation myths of ancient civilizations from Egypt to Japan. “The spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters” (Genesis 1:2, King James Bible). “We [God] made from water every living thing,” (The Quran, sūrat l-anbiyāa [The Prophets] 21:30). “Darkness was hidden by darkness in the beginning, / With no distinguishing sign, all this was water” (Rigveda 10:129:3). Hindus consider it sacred to bathe in the Ganga, “Mother Ganges”; Christian pilgrims flock to the river Jordan and Lourdes; Islamic pilgrims visit the Zamzam well in Mecca while performing the hajj. Humans ritually use water to cleanse themselves of metaphysical pollution (“The sea can wash away all evils,” says Iphigenia, declaring her brother Orestes cleansed of the murder of his mother),29 and as a means of consecrating the living (baptism with holy water) and the dead (bathing the body before burial). For many indigenous peoples around the world, water represents humanity’s connection to all living things. Elizabeth Woody, a member of the Yakima Nation in Oregon, says, “Water is a sacrament in our religious practices and overarching medicine. It is the central symbol of our cycle of ceremonies. Along the ‘Big River,’ the Columbia, we wake with a drink of water, and close out the day with a sip and prayer.… Water equals all life.”³⁰

In 2010, Ian Foster of the University of Montana did a study of the spiritual connection felt by people on canoe trips through the Minnesota Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCA), which consists of approximately 1.3 million acres with 1,175 lakes and hundreds of miles of streams. Much of the BWCA is accessible only by canoe, yet every year more than 250,000 people visit it to hike, canoe, kayak, fish, hunt, or camp. Foster conducted his research by canoeing to different campsites in the area and asking people to describe their experience of the wilderness. “Rather than standing at the trailhead after taking my morning shower and asking them about their trip and experiences, I was there, in a wild landscape,” Foster wrote. “[I] had bathed in the lakes, caught fish for dinner (albeit twice in thirty days), paddled into the winds, and combated the same swarms of mosquitoes.”³¹ He discovered that it was in the beauty and quiet of “plateau-experiences” that people felt the closest to spirit. One man, “Tom,” talked of soaking in “everything—the water, the trees, the sky the breeze.… I just turn off everything else and just soak in what is around me and take time to be thankful for it.”32 Being immersed in the natural experience, with limited social contact and cultural input, and required to interact with nature in much the same way that people native to the area had done for thousands of years—in such conditions, Foster commented, people’s connection to something greater than themselves and to their surroundings was “kindled, stoked, and/or sustained.”³³

In descriptions of their spiritual connection to their environment, Foster discovered that water consistently played a significant part. The natural beauty of water and sky (in the Dakota language, Minnesota means “where the water reflects the heavens”) touched many people. “Mary” described one such encounter:

Yesterday we stayed at a campsite on Hudson Lake and the sky was this bright pink and purple, and it looked water colored—so amazing, like it couldn’t even be real.… As the night gradually came on, the sky was getting darker and the water took that on, and I was just watching these two mediums entirely change all the time.… In that moment you are like, “Why am I here? What put me here in the spot so that I can feel this?”³⁴

Peak and plateau experiences in nature are remarkable not just for their momentary impact, but, more important, for the effects they have when we return to our regular lives. In the middle of a busy day, on the streets of a large city, or in an office, with our eyes locked on the screen of our smartphone or tablet or laptop, taking a moment to remember a transcendent moment when the mind calmed and the heart opened to the beauty and wonder of nature can transport us back to the experience of feeling connected with nature, spirit, the divine, or whatever inadequate name we give it. “Nancy” summed up her own return experience: “I grasped something out there.… It’s like everything is all right. This kind of deep sense of happiness, just by thinking back on it, is so powerful.”35

The Million-Dollar Fish

Fish are friends, not food.

—BRUCE tHE SHARK, FINDING NEMO

The Tsukiji Market in Tokyo is the world’s biggest wholesale fish and seafood market. Every day (except Sundays and holidays) 1,600 vendors sell more than 400 different varieties of seafood, from seaweed to whale. The most prized fish of all is bluefin tuna. Approximately 80 percent of the bluefin caught anywhere in the world makes its way to consumers in Japan.³⁶ Bluefin tuna used to be ground up for cat food because no one wanted to eat it. But starting in the 1970s, it became a delicacy—especially the belly loin cut known as toro. According to seafood wholesaler Catalina Offshore Products, “The high fat content of bluefin toro results in meat that is pink to white color with a rich, buttery taste that melts in your mouth.”³⁷ At the best Tokyo sushi bars, a single piece of top-grade toro can sell for around $24.³⁸

I first visited the market in summertime, but at Tsukiji, it’s considered an honor to buy the first bluefin tuna of the year, so the New Year’s Day fish auction attracts a lot of interest from restaurateurs looking to gain status (and publicity) from a winning bid. In 2013, the winner was Kiyoshi Kimura, owner of a Tokyo-based restaurant chain, who paid $1.76 million for the first bluefin of the year. The tuna weighed approximately 489 pounds, so Mr. Kimura shelled out around $225 an ounce for his prize. However, he reported, the fish would probably bring in only about $4.60 per serving once it reached the customers in his restaurants later that day.39

What businessman would buy something when he knew he would never even come close to recouping his investment? Simple: the jaw-dropping sale price was mostly a matter of national pride, marketing, and good feelings, explained Kimura as he cut up the fish, holding aloft its torpedo-like, silver head to a sea of flashing cameras.

According to a report published just twenty-two days after Kimura’s record-setting purchase, Pacific bluefin tuna numbers were down 96.4 percent from unfished levels.⁴⁰ A further dismaying statistic is that 90 percent of bluefin are caught before they reach an age where they can reproduce.⁴¹ Paying that much for the first bluefin of 2013 was great publicity, free advertising, and a chance to intimidate the competition by demonstrating the size of your bankroll, but as the director of global tuna conservation at the Pew Environment Group, Amanda Nickson, speculated, “You have to wonder what that last fish is going to cost.”⁴²

Why are we willing to pay so much for bluefin tuna, shark-fin soup, or turtle eggs even though (or perhaps because) these creatures are rare or endangered? The million-dollar tuna is a clear example of how the search for immediate gratification, increased status, and our inability to envision long-term consequences can result in what I call the neuroscience of destruction. And is it possible, as David Pu’u says, that with greater self-understanding and self-awareness we can make better choices that can lead to a better future—choices that not only preserve our natural world, but the chance for more access to Blue Mind?

Our Psychological Relationship to the World

We want the maximum good per person; but what is good? To one person it is wilderness, to another it is ski lodges for thousands.

—GARRETT HARDIN, “THE TRAGEDY OF THE COMMONS”

For about five years the city of San Diego has been running a Think Blue San Diego media campaign, including a series of commercials that ran on TV and in local movie theaters. One of the commercials, entitled “Karma,” showed what would happen if someone who threw a piece of trash on the street was affected directly by everything that washed down to the ocean through storm drains. The businessman who has thrown away a gum wrapper while walking (1) gets doused by a soft drink thrown by a woman in a car, (2) steps in dog poop, and (3) is covered in kitchen garbage that another woman throws from her balcony.43 “Think Blue, San Diego,” the voice-over exhorts.⁴⁴ It’s an amusing way to show the effects of a small action—effects that we usually don’t think about because we can’t see them directly.

The brain has an amazing ability to hide a world of truth from us. We’re surrounded by billions of feelings, tactile senses, memories, sounds, smells, and a barrage of voices, and most of the time the brain insulates and protects us from much of it. But that thick padding comes with a cost: it means we really have no idea—most of the time—why and how we do what we do. Our brains excel at rationalization and self-deception, and these tendencies are hardwired into our cognitive apparatus.

According to a theory developed by the Swiss psychologist and philosopher Jean Piaget, when you hide your face from a baby, he or she thinks you’re truly gone—the object (your face) is not a permanent part of the baby’s perception. When you reveal your face again, the baby is surprised and (hopefully) delighted. At a certain point, however, the brain develops enough to realize that whether hidden or not, an object is still there. While there are disagreements about the age at which babies understand “object permanence,” I believe a version of it affects our relationship with water and nature. In the “Think Blue” video, the man who threw out the gum wrapper, the woman who tossed the drink, and the lady who dumped the kitchen garbage without looking where it landed were all subject to the “out of sight, out of mind” principle. If we don’t see our trash washing down storm drains to the beach, we don’t worry about it. If we don’t see homeless people on our way to work, most of us pay little attention to the homeless issue in our community. Unless people feel they and their families are threatened directly—by global warming, water pollution, beach erosion, or toxic waste, for example—then it’s not likely they will pay much attention to the issue.

The flip side of “out of sight, out of mind” is also an example of cognitive blindness—if the environment where we live seems okay, then we don’t really believe there’s a problem. Barton Seaver is a National Geographic Fellow and director of the Healthy and Sustainable Food Program at the Center for Health and the Global Environment at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, and he points out that because we can go down to our local supermarket and see cod on sale every day, it’s hard for us to believe that cod stocks have been decimated. If we visit a river or stream and the water looks and smells clean, we may not believe that the levels of pollution in our creeks, rivers, and streams are rising and the water is unsafe. No need for conservation when you’ve got plenty of water, right?

The most fundamental evolutionary force is the urge of every human to survive. For millions of years, when there were far fewer humans, we could exploit natural resources without the fear of exhausting them. We didn’t have to think much about ecology or sustainability; we could just move on to somewhere else. We were concerned about survival of ourselves, our families, and our species, in that order. And now, because the threats to our species often feel distant and intractable, and survival seems theoretical rather than practical (“Temperature rise? Coastal flooding? A hole in the ozone?”), we find them hard to take seriously enough to do anything about them.

In his famous 1968 paper “The Tragedy of the Commons,” the American ecologist Garrett Hardin stated that people will do things that are against the common good if (1) it will provide them with a greater benefit, and (2) they think they can get away with it. A lobsterman might set out more traps than he’s allowed or put traps in protected areas, for example, because it will bring in more money for his family. We are “hardwired to be very self-centered and self-biased… good consumers but not good conservationists,” comments Michael Soulé, one of the pioneers of conservation biology.45

The same year that Hardin wrote his paper, social psychologists John Darley and Bibb Latané performed a famous experiment: they sat students in a classroom and then slowly filled it with smoke that suggested that there was a fire nearby. If a student was alone in the classroom, he or she usually left quickly. However, if the student sat with a group of two to four other people (who were part of the experiment), and those people did not leave when the room filled with smoke, the student often remained—even if the smoke was so thick he or she could no longer see the other people in the group. Embarrassment and confusion were the two reasons cited by the students for not moving, but they also said they were looking to the others in the room to signal if there was anything wrong.46

The people we are with and the groups of which we are part are the strongest external factors influencing our decisions. Mark van Vugt theorizes that this is part of our hardwired response to the world: starting from birth, we unconsciously copy the behaviors of others around us. But not only the actions: we also imitate their beliefs, views, and decisions. Van Vugt points out, for example, that while most homeowners will say that the conservation behaviors of their neighbors has little effect on their own, the “greenness” of our neighbors is one of the strongest predictors of our own energy and water use. ⁴⁷

On the flip side, we tend to cognitively separate ourselves from those who are not part of our family, group, or tribe. “We all have a compassion blind spot—people we do not see as fully human; whose suffering is not as real as our own, or not as deserving of compassion as our own,” says Stanford’s Kelly McGonigal, describing to attendees of the first Blue Mind Summit a 2007 study of how the brain reacts to people we consider part of extreme “out-groups.” Instead of triggering emotions like pity or compassion, out-group individuals trigger activation in regions of the brain associated with disgust and threat consistent with aversive responses to rotting food.48 It’s part of our evolutionary cognitive programming to feel repugnance in such circumstances, but this tendency often prevents us from feeling either compassion or any kind of responsibility to help cure the problem.

Empathy, Compassion, and Oneness

Compassion is the keen awareness of the interdependence of all things.

—THOMAS MERTON

Matthieu Ricard is a large man with a shaved head, maroon-and-orange robes, and a warm, beautiful smile. A Buddhist monk as well as a photographer, philosopher, and author (who holds a Ph.D. in molecular genetics), he has been the subject of several studies of the neuroscience of happiness, meditation, and mindfulness, and a few years ago he agreed to participate in an experiment to examine the neural signature of compassion. A research team led by Tania Singer asked Ricard to immerse himself in what they describe as three different forms of compassion (nonspecific, compassion for the suffering, and a general loving-kindness) while his brain was scanned using fMRI imaging. The researchers were surprised to see that in response to images depicting human suffering, none of the “empathy for pain” circuits in Ricard’s brain were being activated. Instead, his brain lit up areas associated with positive emotions, affiliation, love, and reward. Intrigued, the researchers asked Ricard to agree to be scanned again while he focused on emotionally sharing the pain of others’ suffering. As he was being observed, Ricard brought up the memory of watching a documentary on children in a Romanian orphanage. “These children were completely emaciated and emotionally abandoned,” he recalled. He promptly exhibited emotional empathy, his emotional pain network firing strongly. After a very short time, not surprisingly, he felt emotionally exhausted and “burnt out.” Ricard was then given the choice either to leave the scanner or to continue the experiment while attempting to shift his feelings from pain to compassion. He continued.

While empathy and compassion are on a continuum of connection, compassion moves from “feel your pain” to “heal your pain.” Indeed, as Ricard’s scan progressed, his fMRI readings indicated that he had “turned off” the pain circuits and “turned on” the most positive areas of the brain associated with compassion. “Engaging in compassion meditation completely altered my mental landscape,” he said. “Although the images of the suffering children were still as vivid as before, they no longer induced distress. Instead, I felt natural and boundless love for these children and the courage to approach and console them. In addition, the distance between the children and myself had completely disappeared.”49

This desire to act links compassion to altruism, that is, actions to benefit others without the expectation of personal benefit. Just as we instinctively imitate others and sense their emotions, we also seem to have an instinctive desire to help others. A series of studies conducted by researchers from Harvard University’s Laboratory for Developmental Studies and the Max Planck Institute in Germany have shown that children as young as fourteen months spontaneously engage in helping behaviors, such as picking up a clothespin when an adult “accidentally” dropped it and then handing it back to the adult. These behaviors occur almost immediately, whether the parent is present or not, and even if the children must overcome obstacles or forsake playing with a new toy to help.50 By now, you should expect that such actions involve neurochemical reinforcement, and that’s certainly the case here: compassion and altruism have been linked to the release of beta-endorphins, the opioid hormones present when we experience feelings of love, warmth, caring, and social bonding. According to neuroscientist Joshua A. Grant, studies at the Max Planck Institute show that “brain regions involved in opioid signaling are active during compassion.”⁵¹ This may explain some of the broader benefits we receive from exercising compassion and altruism, which include better physical health and improved stress response.⁵²

Matthieu Ricard is obviously an exception. But fortunately, you don’t need to be a Buddhist monk with a molecular genetics Ph.D. to train your brain to change empathy into compassion. Even better, that training can happen in a very short period of time. A 2008 Stanford study found that as little as seven minutes of “loving-kindness” meditation increased feelings of closeness and social connection—a seven-point scale measured connectedness, similarity, and positivity—between subjects and photos of complete strangers.⁵³ On the neuroscience side, those who practiced loving-kindness meditation or participated in compassion training have demonstrated greater understanding of others’ emotions and greater executive control.54 Sounds a lot like Blue Mind.

The natural inclination of compassion is to extend and expand outward. As psychology professor David DeSteno commented, this is the goal of most meditation practices in spiritual and secular traditions: to “break free” from concepts that divide us and to view all creation with compassion and love.⁵⁵ When we do so, we can reshape our brains to tap into the experience of unified consciousness, or oneness with all things—including Blue Mind at its most powerful.

Hearts and Minds

No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be.

—ISAAC ASIMOV

“Neuroscience tries to understand two questions,” says the director of Duke University’s Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, Scott Huettel. “We try to understand why we value something—why there are some things we care about—and how we make trade-offs between the things we value.” Value is assessed based on both internal and external factors. The emotional brain is hardwired to overvalue instant gratification and undervalue future rewards. Vanderbilt’s David Zald, whom we met earlier when discussing addiction, tells us that studies in rodents show there are twice as many cells in the orbital frontal cortex that respond to immediate reward as cells that respond to the signal for a delayed reward. This is why we will eat the chocolate cake that’s in front of us even though we have a longer-term goal of losing ten pounds, and why we find it hard to save for retirement when we’re in our twenties and thirties. It’s also one of the biggest barriers to making long-term changes that will decrease our carbon footprint.

So what will make us change our destructive ways? Fear can be a great short-term motivator, but the muffling power of habituation and the damaging distraction and suffocation that come from its Red Mind qualities makes us choose “flight” over trying to stay and do something. Jacques Cousteau once said, “People protect what they love.” When you keep crying “Wolf!” about the environment again and again, when you tell people the world’s going to end tomorrow and they wake up and it’s still there, they stop paying attention.

People won’t respond positively when we bore the heck out of them with a lot of facts. They won’t respond with action when we make them feel guilty or bad about themselves. Yet that’s exactly what the environmental movement has been doing: scaring people, making them feel bad, and overloading them with data.

Luca Penati is managing director of content and social at Ogilvy & Mather, and as an expert in shaping brands for companies, he understands what moves opinion and action. At Blue Mind 1 he said, “We know from painful experience that the most potent facts and rational arguments for conservation have mostly fallen on deaf ears. Storytelling helps us to communicate the urgency of the situation and the need for immediate action in a more powerful way. Storytelling is as old as history itself, and all great communicators have been brilliant storytellers. Now, neuroscience confirms that storytelling has unique power to change opinions and behavior.” So for those hoping to raise awareness and commitment, we must put together simple, emotionally compelling messages in the form of a picture or a story. We don’t want to fall asleep every night to nightmares of a dead ocean, burning rivers, and toxic tap water. As Barton Seaver comments, “People didn’t come into my restaurant to be told ‘bad, human, bad’—they came in for the joys of food. We want the human relationship with nature to be based on abundance, a relationship that encourages us to participate in the resilience, the restoration, and the reciprocal relationship that we need to have with nature.”

Our (Layered) Relationship with Water and the World

The yearning to interact with the natural environment is inscribed in human nature.

—ERIC LAMBIN, AN ECOLOGY OF HAPPINESS

As humans, we define ourselves in terms of our relationships—with family, social group, community, and nation. The Blue Marble photo reminds us of our most fundamental relationship: with our natural habitat. It’s a relationship we may deny and ignore, but ultimately it is not something we can really take for granted. We must exist within this physical space, drawing upon its resources, interacting with it in ways big and small. We smile because the sun is shining, or feel depressed when there are too many days of rain or snow.56 We marvel at nature’s beauty in a flower, a raindrop, a waterfall, a mountain. We watch in horror as tsunamis, hurricanes, floods, or tornadoes wipe out entire communities in minutes. We enjoy a stroll in a park or a bicycle ride through the country. Perhaps we sunbathe on a beach, or an apartment patio, or an urban rooftop. We visit aquariums or zoos, or watch nature documentaries. Unless we live in hermetically sealed environments far underground, away from any natural light, water, or air, we cannot escape our relationship with the natural world.

Our relationship with nature can be described as egocentric, anthropocentric, and biocentric. An egocentric orientation sees nature only from the perspective of what it can do for me personally. Can it provide food for my dinner plate, clean water for my shower, or a place for me to surf or boat or swim? Anthropogenic centers around the human side of the equation. It evaluates nature from the perspective of how humanity interacts with it—and how nature serves humanity’s needs and desires. The anthropogenic view would look at the Gulf of Mexico in terms of the oil that can be extracted from beneath its seabed, the annual haul of shrimp, redfish, and oysters from its waters, and the value of tourism along its shores. On the other hand, a biocentric perspective sees humanity as part of nature, rather than separate from it. We interact with nature as with an equal partner, so to speak; we may look at the human need to harvest fish, for example, but we also take into account the effects of our fishing practices on the species we eat and the marine environment in which we cast our nets. We move from “humanity’s needs first” to the recognition that we are participating in a dance of interdependence with our planet and its denizens, and that caring for our partners is, in fact, caring for ourselves. We understand that we have an interdependency that runs deeper than ecosystems, biodiversity, economics. Nature needs us, and we need nature. This enlightened self-interest is at the core of our very existence.

What creates this understanding? What switches us from egocentric or anthropocentric to biocentric? The same factor that moves any relationship from separate to intimate: love. I believe that this natural love is innate within humanity, bred into our DNA. As ecopsychologist Theodore Roszak describes it, we have an “empathic rapport with the natural world that is reborn in every child and which survives in the work of nature poets and landscape painters.”57 There also is an aesthetic element to our love of nature. We can marvel at the glories of the ocean’s might (is there a surge of feelings quite as divine as those that come from standing on a cliff just above the waves crashing upon the Cornwall coast?), majestic trees, broad rivers, clear streams; we can see and appreciate the incredible variety of plant and animal life with which we share the world. When we are exposed to nature, we are programmed to be fascinated by it, and often that fascination turns into an emotional bond.

“When we walk the beach, play in the surf, or go for a swim in our favorite slice of the sea, we get in touch with what’s going on there. We begin to care about that place. We become invested,” writes river activist Christopher Swain.⁵⁸ With immersion in nature, our attachment deepens. Immersion moves us from disinterested appreciation to active participation. “The more experience a person has with nature, the stronger the pull toward it,” writes Stephen Kaplan. “I argue that our species has a general preference for and valuing of natural stimuli, because with a very few units of experience, a great many people find a natural environment to be profoundly affecting. When people who’ve had little previous outdoor experience say they want to make it an important part of their lives in the future, as often happens following participation in a nature program, that’s compelling. In a short time, something important happens to all kinds of people in natural places.”59

Nature is “not just a heap of disjunct parts, but dynamic, intricately organized and balanced systems, interrelated and interdependent in every movement, function, and exchange of energy,” writes ecologist Joanna Macy. “Each element is part of a vaster pattern, a pattern that connects and evolves by discernible principles.”⁶⁰ When we seek to understand more about the natural world around us, when we can begin to see the interconnections between diverse kinds of life, between ocean currents and shorelines, between us and all the creatures and climates that exist on our blue planet, a deeper relationship is born. And from that deeper relationship arises an instinctual desire to protect what we love.

Outside-In: We Are Affected by What We Experience

To heal the ocean, we must heal ourselves.

—DR. ROD FUJITA

On the Fourth of July 2010, I flew into New Orleans and watched from above as fireworks lit the night sky—I’d never seen fireworks from that angle before. A few hours later, I was flying over something else that I’d never seen before but hope never to see again. Our small Cessna traced the coastline of Louisiana and Mississippi, documenting the flow of oil and tar balls onto islands, wetlands, mangroves, and beaches, and the inadequacy of the bright yellow and orange booms floating here and there but more often than not beached, twisted by the wind and waves. This industrial disaster was the result of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the largest in U.S. history.

We turned offshore, looking for deep water. Beneath us lay muddy, oily water, and then we could see the edge between deep blue and shallower oily water extending into the distance. I’ve spent my adult life working for the ocean, with the endangered animals living in it, and beside the people who depend on it. I’ve seen the wholesale destruction of species by commercial fishing, illegal hunting, and the destruction caused by plastic pollution. But none of that prepared me for the sight of thousands of square miles of destroyed ocean habitat—and the smell of bands of oil extending off into the distance, demarcated by the deep blue of the Gulf. I still think of Deepwater Horizon every time I pump gas into my tank or ride my bike behind a truck on a busy street.

I spent two weeks helping with the rescue and rehabilitation of sea turtles, pitching in however I could. During the BP oil spill and immediately afterward, 4,080 birds and 525 sea turtles were found dead. More than 16,000 miles of coastline from Texas to Florida were affected. And the human toll was equally bad—the physical, psychological, ecological, and economic impact was massive. Thousands of fishermen, rig workers, and people in the tourism industry lost their jobs. More than 174,000 businesses and individuals filed claims with the Gulf Coast Claims Facility for losses due to the spill.61 People complained of coughs, nosebleeds, itchy eyes, sneezing—all symptoms of crude oil exposure, according to the director of the environmental and occupational health sciences program at Louisiana State University. Others who were involved with the massive cleanup operation reported chest pain, dizziness, respiratory problems, and gastrointestinal upset, which may be due to exposure to the chemical dispersants used to break up the oil. Psychologically, people fared no better. Mental health professionals in Louisiana reported increases in post-traumatic stress, anxiety, and depression; upticks in calls to mental health and domestic violence hotlines; and admissions to women’s shelters.62 Stefan E. Schulenberg, professor of psychology and director of the Clinical-Disaster Research Center at the University of Mississippi, who has made an extensive study of the psychological effects of disasters like the Gulf oil spill and Hurricane Katrina, observed symptoms in clinic patients including anger, irritability, stress, anxiety, depression, disruptive eating and sleeping patterns, and drug and alcohol use.⁶³

Researchers examining the effects of the spill on directly and indirectly affected communities in Florida and Alabama found that while residents in all communities displayed clinically significant depression and anxiety, the highest levels of psychological stress were linked to loss of livelihood and income.⁶⁴ Several chapters back, we talked about the love most fishers have for their occupation—a love that keeps them working in the most dangerous occupation in the country. The people who live along a coastline often come to love the beaches, the breeze off the water, the endless horizon, the constant variety of wave, surf, and sand. Now, imagine a place that you love fouled and smelling of oil and covered with black goo. Think of how helpless and angry it might make you feel. Imagine that the very thing that provided all the watery benefits we’ve talked about throughout this book now produces feelings of disgust and may make you ill. I know that the Gulf oil platform workers, oystermen, barge captains, helicopter pilots, sport fishing guides, and beachcombers all felt the same deep pain and profound loss that I did, only much, much more.

Or perhaps, like some people, you take action: around 55,000 workers and volunteers participated in cleaning up immediately after the Gulf spill. The people I saw participating in that cleanup may have been sad, or angry, or determined, or just plain “business as usual” blasé—but when we talked among ourselves after spending the day up to our elbows in black gunk, shoveling sand, or cleaning sea creatures and birds in the hope they could be restored to health, you could tell that everyone involved had a deep connection with nature and water that lit them up inside. We would swap stories of our favorite beaches and the most magical moments we’d ever spent in, on, or around the water. This, too, is a sort of communion.

“Today we participate almost exclusively with other humans and with our own human-made technologies,” writes David Abram. “We still need that which is other than ourselves and our own creations.… Direct sensuous reality, in all its more-than-human mystery, remains the sole solid touchstone for an experiential world now inundated with electronically-generated vistas and engineered pleasures.”65

Without connection, there is no emotional drive to care for the world. Without connection, the egocentric and anthropocentric views take over, and value in the natural world is defined only by what can be put to use by humans. What’s worse, considerations of the emotional, cognitive, spiritual, creative, and health benefits of water and nature are left off the balance sheet entirely. These elements make us better human beings, but because they are not measurable, they’re not valued.

Ocean advocate Jean-Michel Cousteau, son of Jacques-Yves, always says, “When we protect our waters, we protect ourselves.” Human health is intimately linked to environmental health. If our food, air, and water aren’t well, neither are we. But there’s much, much more to it than that. The vast benefits that people around the world derive from healthy waterways go beyond the waters we drink and the fish we eat. What we receive from healthy water is invisible, personal, intimate, and something I believe we can’t thrive without. My hope is that as we fill in the blanks with research and further conversations, our understanding of how good it is for us to be by the water will become a powerful argument for keeping our world’s waters clean, healthy, and free. But understanding is never enough. Humans make decisions and take action based on emotion, first and foremost. So when it comes to making decisions to care for our world, we must engender powerful emotions, and the best way to do that is by the stories we tell.

Telling the Story of Water

Don’t talk to their minds; talk to their hearts.

—NELSON MANDELA

Granted, a few people respond to the combination of fear, guilt, and doomsday information; but those who are left have no desire to be part of the club. They see many “doom and gloom” environmental activists coming and think, “You make me feel sad and bad about myself. You make me feel guilty for brushing my teeth and taking showers that last more than five minutes, or eating the wrong kind of fish, or washing my car in the driveway because the runoff will pollute rivers and streams.” We can’t continue to inundate people with negative information as we try to change their minds about things like “sustainability,” “overfishing,” and “climate change.” Social science research has demonstrated that new information can cause people to be even more entrenched in their beliefs.66 Our intentions are pure, certainly; our hearts are in the right place. As David Pu’u observes, “So many times as communicators we see something incredible, we think we have the answer, we see a problem that we can fix, we want to rush out and tell everybody.” The problem is that the problem-based approach isn’t working. Assaulting people with new information doesn’t work either. We need to do something different.

So, how do we tell the story of water?

In A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold wrote, “We can be ethical only in relation to something we can see, feel and understand, love or otherwise have faith in.” I believe in telling a different story, a Blue Mind story, about our relationship to the world. It’s time we recognize what economists, marketers, and politicians have known for years: that deep-seated, inscrutable emotions, not simply rational thoughts, rule human behavior. Our deepest, most primordial emotions drive virtually every decision we make, from what we buy to the candidates we elect. We need to tell a story that helps people explore and understand the profound and ancient emotional and sensual connections that lead to a deeper relationship with water. The Blue Mind story seeks to reconnect people to nature in ways that make them feel good, and shows them how water can help them become better versions of themselves.

But we have to tell the right stories in the right ways. A teacher in Oakland, California, demonstrated an effective way to tell the story of our natural world. For several months, first graders at the Park Day School turned their classroom into an ocean “habitat.” They made fish out of aluminum pie plates and colored paper, and papier-mâché octopi with dangling tentacles of brown paper. The walls were draped with blue tarpaulins, mimicking water; patches of red paper “coral” dotted the floor of the classroom. Students each chose different creatures to study and then presented their projects to the class. All the other children in the K–8 school came to tour the classroom; there was a special presentation in the evening for the class’s parents. The kids loved it; everyone agreed that the project was a huge success. The next morning the children walked in to see their beautiful ocean habitat covered with “oil.” Black plastic garbage bags draped the coral, the fish, the octopi, the art projects. “There’s been an oil spill,” their teacher told them. After a classroom discussion of oil spills and environmental harm, the children put on plastic gloves and cleaned up the “oil.” It was a visceral learning experience for the kids, about the problems we face and also about the ways in which humans can help.67

The Big Splash

Throughout this book you’ve seen the many ways that water is good for us—physically, cognitively, sensuously, financially, creatively, productively, spiritually, and healthfully—even when our brains sense it only indirectly through art, sound, certain words, the flow of a pencil, or the texture of an object. But for me, and for millions of people everywhere, the best and biggest benefits of water are all emotional (provided we are sufficiently internally hydrated). We love being in, on, under, around, or near it. We plan our vacations to spend time with water, and dream of the next chance we can get to jump on a surfboard or into a boat, visit a beach or lakeside or urban pool, or even slip into a bath or hot tub at the end of a long day. Try as we might, no amount of scientific data, fMRI scans, EEG readings, or carefully designed research projects can really show us exactly what we feel at those moments. And while real estate agents and economists can calculate the water premium to the penny and ecologists can track the movements of water molecules on their journeys through the web of life, they can’t put a price on the moments when we experience water’s beauty firsthand.

“If you want people to care about water, take them to the beach,” Michael Merzenich says. “And don’t do it just once: do it twenty or thirty times at least across their childhood. Because each time you do that, they’re going to incorporate their positive feelings about it into the person that they are.” A few years ago, psychologists at the University of Toronto conducted a revealing experiment: they split volunteers into two groups and, replicating the conditions of a call center, gave each group instructions on how to ask for donations from those they reached. Both groups had the same instruction sheet except for one thing: one group’s sheet included a photo of a runner winning a race. “Much to my astonishment, the group that saw the photo raised significantly more money than the control group,” one of the psychologists said. The surprise was so great that the experiment was rerun repeatedly, always with the same results. But here’s what was so amazing about what happened: when the members of the groups that raised the most money were asked about what effect the picture of the victorious woman had on their soliciting, the same answer came back: “What picture?”68

Water primes us to feel certain things without letting us know it inspired the relevant neurochemical reactions. Our joy about water can do the same when it comes to helping others recognize why protecting it is so important. If the picture in our brains is of the summers we spent by the pool, the dolphins we saw playing in the water, the lazy afternoons in a boat, the thrill of standing next to a thundering waterfall in the middle of a forest, frog-kicking our way toward an iridescent fish hanging out near a coral reef—our “solicitation” will be more successful even without our knowing why.

Such personal appeals are crucial to combating the abstraction that makes standard appeals unsuccessful. In his book Give and Take, Wharton professor Adam Grant writes about an Israeli study that showed that attaching a patient’s photo to his or her CT exam increased the radiologist’s diagnostic accuracy by 46 percent. Simply putting a face to the image caused the radiologists to feel a stronger connection to the patient.⁶⁹ The challenge is that water isn’t a person, and often showing photos of polluted beaches or dead birds doesn’t really create the kind of relationship a photo on a CT scan would. “People will form a stronger attachment to and will do more for an individual than they will for a group, so maybe we should be thinking of the ocean as an individual,” suggested Petr Janata at Blue Mind 2. Indeed, when we tell stories of our own interactions with water we turn “water” into a personal, individual experience, and an unforgettable memory.

Here, too, Blue Mind can help. In 2013 researchers in the United Kingdom studied 104 visitors to the National Marine Aquarium in Plymouth to see what effects such visits would have on their attitudes and intentions. Half the people received informational booklets on behavioral solutions for overfishing, and the other half simply visited the aquarium. Based on before-and-after surveys, time spent at the aquarium caused improvements in all participants’ attitudes toward marine sustainability; adding the booklet also improved intentions as well. “A visit to an aquarium can help individuals develop what we term a marine mindset, a state of readiness to address marine sustainability issues,” study authors wrote.70 The combination of direct experience and emotional engagement found in the aquarium was an essential first step; giving people suggestions for potential behaviors was an invaluable second step. A fish tank may not be equivalent to feeling the undertow suction sand from around your toes, but it’s still a catalyst.

The stories we need to tell must be couched in plain language, without knots and tangles of scientific jargon. People are not stupid; they will understand even the most complex ideas as long as they are presented in direct ways and real language. Even when we are speaking of the intricate interactions of oceans and rivers and runoff and, yes, the neuroscience of why we love water, we need to make these concepts clear and show how they are applicable to all of us.

Psychologist Daryl Bem⁷¹ theorizes that our perception of ourselves is shaped by the ways we actually behave, rather than merely our perception of ourselves. Every time we decide to put our trash into the bin instead of throwing it on the street, for example, it’s yet another confirmation of our identity as someone who cares about the environment. We build our “self” through our actions.72 This makes sense, because we know that consistent actions reshape the pathways in our brains. By offering stories that include a call to action, we help them build an environmental self-identity that influences our values and choices. Every small successful action, recognized and celebrated, makes us feel good and causes us to want more of the same. Such consistent actions can subsequently become habits. Then we no longer have to think about whether we bypass the plastic disposable water bottle in favor of the stainless-steel one to carry with us, or choose the sustainable seafood option on the menu, or carpool or take our bicycles to work as often as possible. In San Francisco there is a wonderful Vietnamese restaurant called the Slanted Door, owned by Charles Phan, who emigrated with his family from Vietnam in 1977. Charles owns seven restaurants in the Bay Area and is one of the top restaurateurs in the state. A while ago he decided to make his restaurants supersustainable. He cut plastic use, chose organic ingredients, started composting, and bought only sustainable seafood. When I asked him, “How did you get so far ahead as far as environmental issues are concerned?” he answered, “I’m not an expert on sustainability, but I talk to people who are. I get their best advice and apply it. By the way, what do you think could make my restaurant better?” Just then, a waiter walked by with a tray of drinks, each of them with a plastic straw. I pointed at him and said to Charles, “I’d make straws available only upon request.” He said, “We’ll start that on Monday!”

The Blue Mind choice can be that simple.

A Pocket Full of Ocean

I live in a place where blue and happiness intersect all year round. We call it the Slow Coast. It’s about fifty miles of cool, peace, and quiet—just a jump south of San Francisco, isolated by a mountain range but just fifteen miles as the crow flies west of Silicon Valley and a few miles north of Santa Cruz—with a smattering of great organic farms, tons of wildlife, country lanes, comfortable lodging, forest trails, pocket beaches, state parks, and a scenic, rocky coastline. Summer temperatures usually hover around 70 degrees, traffic is minimal, and nothing and no one will hurry you along. If your idea of a good time is an unhurried walk on a windy beach, picking your own food and then eating it, chilling out with a glass of wine, listening to some live music, then hitting the sack early to wake for a wildlife hike or bicycle ride, the Slow Coast could be a place for you, too, to get your Blue Mind on.

However, it was on the Slow Coast that not long ago I got a glimpse into the other “blue mind”—the kind of “blues” that no form of water or watery happiness can erase. I had a phone call scheduled with a friend, Drew Landry, who works on the Gulf of Mexico coast to raise awareness through his music and advocacy about the lingering effects of the 2010 oil spill. I knew it would be an intense conversation, so I went out to my other “office,” on the bluffs over the Pacific Ocean a short ride from my house. During the call I watched gray whales pass by on their way to Mexico, otters diving in the kelp beds, seals and sea lions, countless seabirds, and a family down on the distant beach with their dog, taking it all in. It was a glorious day: it helped me keep my equilibrium as Drew and I talked about the incalculable stress that has wrecked lives and families along the Gulf Coast and led to suicides in communities where for years water had been only a source of happiness, identity, and prosperity.

After the call ended, as I walked back along the trail that parallels the railroad tracks and leads to Highway 1, I passed a man carrying a box. He also appeared to be enjoying the coast, so I simply nodded and said hi. He nodded back, and I continued on my way to the Davenport Roadhouse, a restaurant on the other side of the highway, for lunch and another meeting.

During lunch I noticed the chef, owner, and manager of the restaurant all leaving in a hurry and heading down the path to the bluffs. I commented to my associate that they must be going to check out the whales. Several minutes later, however, the chef, Erik, came back and said there was a man lying on the ground on the other side of the railroad tracks. (The housekeeper at the inn on the second-floor balcony had looked out and seen him fall.) I got up and immediately headed back to the bluffs, thinking that perhaps my EMT training could be of use until emergency services arrived.

It was too late for that. The man was slouched over the tracks, face down, a .45-caliber pistol by his foot. He had shot himself in the chest, spun around, and collapsed.

It was the same fellow I had passed on the trail. The box he carried was a gun case.

As we stayed by his body until the authorities came, I wrestled with my feeling of responsibility for not helping this stranger. All I could think was that I should have invited him to go for a swim or a walk out to the edge of the bluffs. We could have talked about how beautiful the ocean is. I could have told him stories about the life history of the whales and the otters.

When the deputy arrived, he told me that it’s not all that uncommon for people to come to the coast to commit suicide. It’s difficult to get up the nerve to kill yourself, he said, and ironically, the calm offered by the ocean helps people relax enough to do so.

My worldview was scrambled. The ocean doesn’t help everyone? When you’ve loved water as much and for as long as I have, it’s hard to wrap your head around the fact that other people don’t feel the same. Amir Vokshoor, the medical researcher we met earlier when discussing the positive effects of the color blue, reminds us that while many people experience positive emotions around the ocean and other natural spaces, sociocultural influences play a part in how we respond to such stimuli. “Some individuals have a sense of awe about the ocean, while others, due to various experiences in their upbringing, have a strong fear response,” he remarks. Stephen Kaplan adds, “It’s terribly important to realize that within all people there’s a very strong pull toward nature and also a fear of it.… People don’t like to feel helpless or scared, and nature can certainly make us feel that way, especially if we’re not equipped to deal with it.”73 Author David Foster Wallace described it as the “marrow-level dread of the oceanic I’ve always felt, the intuition of the sea as primordial nada, bottomless, depths inhabited by cackling tooth-studded things rising toward you at the rate a feather falls.”⁷⁴ Even sound artist Halsey Burgund, who’s spent years recording people’s responses to being by water, has heard a few comments like, “You feel a sense of fear because there’s just a vast expanse of water around you. It was mysterious because it went so far.”

In his descriptions of what he calls “nature deficit disorder,” Richard Louv points out that because so many children and adults spend their days in completely man-made environments, they develop aversions and even fears about what they view as dirty, untamed, and dangerous natural environments. More specifically, people who suffer from aquaphobia (irrational fear of water) may have had bad water experiences as children, or simply were terrified when faced with a completely unfamiliar element. “Every swimming teacher is eager to claim that water and swimming are great fun. I think they are lying,” said Ilkka Keskinen of the Department of Sports Sciences, Jyväskylä University, Finland. “The water gets into your ears and your hearing is disturbed. It also tastes bad and… it feels very uncomfortable when it goes up your nose. And when it goes into your mouth and you breathe it, you probably think that you are going to die.”75 (As befits a Scandinavian researcher, Keskinen also fixates on frigid water temperature and how it “turns you blue.”) Chlorine might kill germs, but it doesn’t make our eyes feel better; salt isn’t much comfort, either.

Yet an increasing amount of evidence is showing that even if we fear the untamed quality of nature, of wild waters, there is still something in us that needs natural connection in order to be happy. Louv tells the story of how his father, a chemical engineer who had once reveled in growing enough Swiss chard in his garden to feed the entire neighborhood and described that summer as “one brief Eden,” became depressed and no longer spent much time outside. He retired to the Ozarks to garden and fish, but did neither. Eventually he, too, took his own life. “Which came first, the illness or the withdrawal from nature?” writes Louv. “I honestly don’t know the answer to that question. But I often wonder what my father’s life would have been like if the vernacular of mental health therapy had extended… into the realm of nature therapy.… As I watched my father withdraw, I wished that he would quit his job as an engineer and become a forest ranger. Somehow I believed that if he were to do that, then he would be all right. I realize now, of course, that nature alone would not have cured him, but I have no doubt it would have helped.”76

I, too, share Louv’s belief in the power of nature to help heal us and make us happier. Yet as I walked homeward after the coroner had taken the man’s body away, I wondered whether water is a mirror for our darker emotions as much as it is an engine for our happiness. Water quiets all the noise, all the distractions, and connects you to your own thoughts. For many people, this brings feelings of happiness and calm. In the case of the man on the railroad tracks, perhaps the calm had turned into a final resolve. I didn’t know a single thing about him other than that he was wearing a blue T-shirt and blue jeans, and he had shot himself on the Slow Coast. But I felt a need to let the man’s family know that he seemed to be enjoying the beautiful day and that his very last moments were filled with sun and ocean and whales—and a quiet nod from a stranger.

A few days afterward, I stopped by the restaurant, and Erik said that the man’s family had come by to retrieve his car. They mentioned that he had a terminal illness and had decided to end his life rather than suffer. In a strange way, that made me feel better. The man in the blue T-shirt had made an impossible decision, and he had come to the edge of the ocean to clear his mind, relax, and say goodbye on the most beautiful day of the year. I hoped that in his last moments there was perhaps a moment of, if not happiness, at least peace.

In the waves and the rivers and the lakes and the ponds we see what was, what is, and what is beyond us. Now we must figure out ways to make sure we are also seeing what will be.

Preserving, protecting, and restoring our waters are tasks for many lifetimes, and sometimes the effort can seem overwhelming. But as long as we stay connected with all of the many, many blessings that water provides, and continue to keep that love in the forefront of our minds and hearts, as long as we remind ourselves to hope, then our stories will help connect others to water and encourage them to do what they can to help care for this beautiful Blue Marble world. Blue Mind helps us strip away the anxious complexity and distraction of a Red Mind world. “If you just sit and observe, you will see how restless your mind is,” Steve Jobs explained. “If you try to calm it, it only makes it worse, but over time it does calm, and when it does, there’s room to hear more subtle things—that’s when your intuition starts to blossom and you start to see things more clearly and be in the present more. Your mind just slows down, and you see a tremendous expanse in the moment. You see so much more than you could see before.”77 And there is no wider panorama than what we see when we look outward from the beach.