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June 18 - June 24, 2024
What I didn’t fully realize that evening the semi slid away with our worldly goods was how much the mountains had become my tonic.
Been there.
It was 104 degrees when we arrived, and my hair shriveled up into a pile of Brillo.
There too
Washington had names for weather events I’d never heard of or had to think about: derechos, polar vortices, level 4 hurricanes, heat-index advisories.)
The hurricanes honestly were not that bad
(The DSM hasn’t added it, but presumably they’d want to treat it with a pill.)
...Good to know your biases, I guess
Li, the chairman of the Japanese Society of Forest Medicine, uses some of his insights in his own life. “In fact,” he said, “I use a humidifier with cypress oil almost every night in the winter!” You don’t need to harvest your own; he said standard health-store aromatherapy oils should do the job.
Is Monterey Cypress acceptable? Because I like my coastal trees
“If you have time for vacation, don’t go to a city. Go to a natural area. Try to go one weekend a month. Visit a park at least once a week. Gardening is good. On urban walks, try to walk under trees, not across fields. Go to a quiet place. Near water is also good.”
A fun and challenging measure of intuition and “convergent creativity,” the RAT gives you three words and asks you to come up with a word that links them (like water/tobacco/stove: answer—pipe. Here’s a harder one: way/ground/weather: answer is in the footnote.
So...guessing neurodivergents don't score well on this, if there's only really one acceptable answer.
Kramer sipped a lassi and briefly checked his phone. I asked him if he would be following Strayer’s advice and taking a three-day tech break while in Moab. He peered at me rather severely. “I brought four computers.”
lmao
“Thirty-six percent of people check their cell phones while having sex.
...Do people still have sex with them after? Because I wouldn't.
I worried that the nature justifiers might be overly romanticizing cavemen (especially the men) who presumably got to skip across the veldt stalking game, building up their deltoids and engaging in bro rituals by the light of a crackling fire.
Given that ethnographic studies of the few remaining hunter gatherer communities both now and in the relatively recent past all demonstrate that they work significantly fewer hours than we do and have relatively better health...eh. Maybe not as much romanticising as we'd all like to think.
He was given a knife, one egg and a fire-starting kit and sent off to the woods, alone, for three days.
Pfft. That was just the basic wilderness survival ribbon. Every ten year old in YMs had that.
It’s well known that women living together in dorm rooms are able to synchronize their menstrual cycles;
Wasn't that debunked ages ago?
when visitors to national parks are told the loud airplanes overhead are part of important military exercises, many report being less disturbed by them.
Gotta love American jingoism.
Newman and Taff run experiments out of the university’s Acoustics Social Science Lab, the acronym of which, people noticed, resembles asshole, so they’re switching the name around.
lol
Taylor ran experiments to gauge people’s physiological response to viewing images with similar fractal geometries. The early work was funded by NASA, which wanted to decorate space stations with stress-reducing images (but, interestingly, not images that reminded astronauts of faraway Earth, because that would be too sad-making).
lol
“Why wouldn’t you escape your real life?” asked Valtchanov. “This way, you can enjoy your own living room and it’s relatively cheap. You can go to Hawaii without the bugs and the jet lag.”
Speaking as a photographer, general tech fan, and traveller: there is a huge difference between an image and an experience. No, you don't get the bugs and jet lag. But you also don't get the humidity pressing on your skin, the salt and brine on the breeze, the sand shifting under your feet, the waves lapping against your ankles. Everything that makes travel worth it has to be experienced in person.
We passed a small room with photorealistic bright blue, cloud-speckled ceiling panels, manufactured by a company called Sky Factory, whose motto is “Illusions of Nature.” “Wouldn’t it be nice to have this in your house instead of lights?” he asked. “Wake up and turn the sky on?”
Having been to an utterly terrifying series of hotels in Macau: no. Not at all.
He had to throw out 30 percent of his data because of subjects approaching the puke zone.
Throwing out fully a third of your data just means you're doing shit science.
Can’t we predict our own responses to a particular view? Obviously not, responded Valtchanov, although politely. If so, why would we build such ugly cities and suburbs, schools and hospitals?
...Because building pretty ones costs a hell of a lot more.
He envisions a Yelp-like, crowd-powered app that can make recommendations for the most relaxing outcrop in Central Park or the best route to take to work. “Instead of looking for food you can look for happiness,” he said.
This sounds like hell.
“There’s a difference between pretty and psychologically valuable.” He adjusted my hands in front of the image. “If you point the camera a bit upwards to get more of the blue sky, it will rate better.” He shrugged. “I’m not saying it’s perfect.”
Go out and touch some grass, Dr Frankenstein.
Moomin the talking snowman.
Snowman? I thought it was a cow.
The good news for city dwellers is that just fifteen to forty-five minutes in a city park, even one with pavement, crowds and some street noise, were enough to improve mood, vitality and feelings of restoration.
To elevate mood and stave off depression most reliably, Tyrväinen told me, “five hours per month is the lowest amount of time to get the effect, then after, if you can go for ten hours, you will reach a new level of feeling better and better.”
Five hours per month means getting out there in the verdure a couple of times a week for about thirty minutes. To achieve ten hours a month requires spending about thirty minutes in nature five days per week. Or, as one of Tryväinen’s colleagues told me, “two to three days per month outside the city would bring the same effect.”
As the epidemiologist Ian Alcock put it, if you want to be happy, there is a simple, scientific formula: “get married, get a job and live near the coast.”
That last one is part of why I'm so hesitant to move. An hour's drive from the coast is already too far, I don't think I could handle any further.
if you are depressed or anxious, social walking in nature boosts your mood, assuming you’re walking with people you like; if you want to solve problems in your life, self-reflect and jolt your creativity, it’s better to go alone, in a safe place.
When we walk, we naturally go to the fields and woods: what would become of us, if we walked only in a garden or a mall? — HENRY DAVID THOREAU
I mean. The Mall in London is pretty nice. Can take it to St James' Park, too.
Among certain circles in psychology (those circles, admittedly, residing largely in California),
Lol
Burke’s essential ingredient of vastness is hard to simulate on a screen, although a background soundtrack by John Williams certainly helps.
Yes it would
The steep country that hemmed in the river was never ideal for human habitation. In 1980, Congress made the isolation official, designating the river and its surrounding mountains the largest chunk of the wilderness system in the Lower 48. The Frank Church–River of No Return Wilderness, sometimes just called “the Frank,” stretches across 2.3 million acres in the part of Idaho that starts to get skinny. The river running through it carves a long, forested gorge deeper than the Grand Canyon.
Were the inverse-PTSD effects of awe real and if so, would they show up in the brains that needed them most?
From experience: I suspect whether or not a major source of your trauma is included with the awe-inspiring views makes a pretty huge difference.
According to the latest iteration of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, symptoms of PTSD cluster around four subgroups: reexperiencing (flashbacks, nightmares), avoidance and withdrawal, bad moods and depression, and hyperarousal, such as jumpiness, vigilance, aggression and sleep problems.
Always forget how many of these I have until they're listed out like that.
17 children aged eight to eleven with ADHD walk for 20 minutes with a guide in three different settings: a residential neighborhood, an urban downtown street and a park setting. After the park walk they performed so much better memorizing numbers in backward sequence that the improvement was equal to the difference between having ADHD or not having it, as well as to the difference between not being medicated at all and experiencing the peak effects of common ADHD medication.
The backwards number memorisation test *sucks* omg
Interestingly, Finland reports the same percentage of children diagnosed with ADHD as the United States: about 11 percent, mostly boys. But while most adolescents in the U.S. are taking medication, most in Finland are not.
That's as much about social perceptions of pharmaceutical use as anything
globally, depression is responsible for more healthy years lost than any other condition, according to the World Health Organization.
Tell me about it.
Under the fifty-year leadership of one ruling party—and mostly one man, the late Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew—Singapore grew into the third-most-successful economy in the world, ranked higher than the United States on GDP per capita, educational attainment, standard of living and life expectancy. Its accomplishments are all the more impressive given that the place had virtually no exportable natural resources, little room to expand, and a surging population made up of a potentially volatile mix of ethnicities.
Go LKY?
This winter, we had a blizzard big enough that it stopped virtually all mechanized air and street traffic for a couple of days. The deer took back the streets, bounding through the city in the snow. People frolicked in the streets too, sledding down boulevards, doing handstands, stomping around between shoveling sessions.
If this is the blizzard I'm thinking of, it really was pretty awesome. First time I really got to build a snowman.
