The Nature Cure

Doctors from California to South Korea believe they’ve found a miracle medicine for our mental health and creativity.

- Florence Williams

WHEN YOU GO TO THE DESERT with David Strayer, don’t be sur-prised if he sticks electrodes to your head. A cognitive psychologist at the University of Utah who studies the mind’s ability to think clearly, Strayer understands the relentless distractions that pummel our modern brains. But as an avid backpacker, he thinks he knows the antidote.

On the third day of a camping trip in the canyons near Bluff, Utah, Strayer, sporting a rumpled T-shirt and a slight sunburn, is mixing an enormous iron pot of chicken enchilada pie while explaining the “three-day effect” to 22 psychology students. Our brains, he says, aren’t tireless three-pound machines; they’re easily fatigued by our fast-paced, increasingly digital lives. But when we slow down, stop the busywork, and seek out natural surroundings, we not only feel restored but also improve our mental performance. Strayer has demonstrated as much with a group of Outward Bound participants, who scored 50 percent higher on creative problem-solving tasks after three days of wilderness backpacking.

“If you can have the experience of being in the moment for two or three days,” Strayer says as the early evening sun saturates the red canyon walls, “it seems to produce a difference in qualitative thinking.”

Strayer’s hypothesis is that being in nature allows the prefrontal cortex, the brain’s command center, to rest and recover, like an overused muscle. If he’s right, when he hooks his research subjects—in this case, his students and me—to a portable EEG device, our brain waves will show calmer “midline frontal theta waves,”a measure of conceptual thinking and sustained attention, compared with the same waves in volunteers hanging out in a Salt Lake City parking lot.