I’ve long believed that nature revitalizes the human soul and keeps the mind healthy and sharp. A new bit of research is confirming this to be true.
A paper by Stanford researchers published in the “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences” suggests that walks in the woods or other natural areas soothe the human psyche, just as walks in congested urban areas have the opposite affect. Walks in the these urban areas simulate activity in a part of the brain called the subgenual prefrontal cortex, and area associated with negative mental conditions, including something the researchers called “morbid rumination.”
The rest of us call it obsessing on that bad stuff we can’t do anything about.
The researchers sent subjects out to different parts of the Stanford campus, then studied the moods and scanned the brains of those subjects when they returned. It comes as no surprise that folks who were tortured by the researchers and forced to walk along busy city streets had trouble getting dark thoughts out of their minds.
I didn’t need academic research to convince me of the value of walks in nature, but it’s always nice to have your intuition confirmed by big wig scientists at a prestigious joint like Stanford. Back in my earlier, pre-Montana existence, I did a lot of that morbid rumination stuff, especially when I was stuck in endless traffic jams on the freeways of Southern California. My subgenual prefrontal cortex was apparently a busy place in those days.
I lucked out in my first Montana home, a modest place on a quiet lane south of the town of Hamilton. Our property adjoined a big chunk of Bitterroot River frontage owned by friends who allowed us access, and I spent a lot of time decompressing from stressful days at the local daily newspaper walking along the river.
Then, as my kids grew old enough, they started walking with me. That was the beginning of a tradition that continued through junior high school, the point where most kids get too cool to be seen wandering about with their parents.
Now that they’re older and in college they again appreciate the therapeutic value of walks in nature with their old man. Of course there’s never time these days.
I was fortunate in that my work schedule as a journalist and teacher usually allowed me to pick up my kids from school through most of their elementary years so we could spend afternoons together. Invariably, we filled that after-school time with seemingly pointless wanderings in any nearby natural area. After we moved from Hamilton to Flagstaff, Ariz., our first place was a condo on the edge of town. The adjoining “wood” was a patch of ponderosa pine forest of maybe five acres that bordered the interstate and surrounded by high chainlink fences.
I always felt a little confined by that patch of wood (my subgenual prefrontal cortex remained more active than I prefer), but the kids were preschool aged and still possessed the imagination to see wonder rather than boundaries. Their goal on those walks was always the same: to stop at a huge yellow-belly pine in the middle of the wood that had been killed years before by a lightning strike. The dead tree was sloughing off branches and chunks of bark bigger than the kids, so we didn’t linger long. But no walk was complete until we’d seen the “oldest dead tree in the woods.”
Sometimes parenting isn’t complicated stuff. In those simple after-school walks my kids learned to love the outdoors and be comfortable there.
It also isn’t rocket science to realize that an urban place such as Southern California, where I spent my childhood, is more stressful for kids. When it isn’t safe to play in the yard, much less take a long walk in nature, you can understand why it’s tough for anyone to turn off morbid rumination, whatever that is.