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June 18 - August 7, 2021
the brain is deeply affected by the setting in which it operates.
“employs the mind without fatigue and yet enlivens it; and thus, through the influence of the mind over the body, gives the effect of refreshing rest and reinvigoration to the whole system.”
Olmsted
Jay Appleton memorably named “prospect” and “refuge.”
When, today, we turn to nature when we’re stressed or burned out—when we take a walk through the woods or gaze out at the ocean’s rolling waves—we are engaging in what one researcher calls “environmental self-regulation,” a process of psychological renewal that our brains cannot accomplish on their own.
"Environmental self-regulation"
restoration:
psychologist William James
William James
There are two kinds of attention, wrote James in his 1890 book The Principles of Psychology: “voluntary” and “passive.”
There is, however, an optimal attitudinal stance we can adopt: what researchers call “open monitoring,” or a curious, accepting, nonjudgmental response to all we encounter.
ReTUNE
reTUNE
it’s what you see along the way.
Fractals
may not take conscious note of fractal patterns, but at a level deeper than awareness, these patterns reverberate.
Fractal patterns
Number 14.
Pollock!
exposure to nature relieved pain and promoted healing in patients recovering from surgery.
Ulrich
biophilic design.
Biophilic Design
MICRORESTORATIVE EXPERIENCES
“I hope for the preservation of the groves of giant trees simply because it would be a shame to our civilization to let them disappear,” he remarked. “They are monuments in themselves.” These and other “natural resources,” he continued, should be “handed on unimpaired to your posterity. We are not building this country of ours for a day. It is to last through the ages.”
Teddy Roosevelt
Scientists theorize that the “soft fascination” evoked by natural scenes engages what’s known as the brain’s “default mode network.”
awe. Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, has led much of the recent research on awe; he calls it an emotion “in the upper reaches of pleasure and on the boundary of fear.”
Awe
dangers that threaten our kind and our planet today.
I am curious about the selection of the word "kind".
“neuroarchitecture”
Christopher Alexander, author of the classic book A Pattern Language
Christopher Alexander's "A Pattern Language "
The privacy afforded by walls represented a truly revolutionary extension of the mind, maintains John Locke, professor of linguistics at Lehman College of the City University of New York.
Walls!
MIThenge.)
The brain evolved to continually monitor its immediate environment—to be, in effect, distractible, lest nearby sounds or movements signal a danger to be avoided or an opportunity to be seized. And organizational environments are full of the kind of stimuli that distract us most.
Second: we are especially attuned to the sound of speech, especially when the words are distinct enough to make out.
Third: we are especially attuned to the nuances of social interactions,
Perhaps most regrettably, people’s intellectual performance while listening to music they prefer is “significantly poorer” than when listening to music they dislike.
Our attention is pulled especially powerfully to the gaze of other people; we are uncannily sensitive to the feeling of being observed.
The feeling of being observed
Once we spot others’ eyes on us, the processing of eye contact takes precedence over whatever else our brains were working on.
Eye closure “helps people to disengage from environmental stimulation and thereby enhances the efficiency of cognitive processing,”
Closing eyes
On their home turf, teams play more aggressively, and their members (both male and female) exhibit higher levels of testosterone, a hormone associated with the expression of social dominance.
The "Home Field Advantage"
But the home advantage is not limited to sports.
In the lean office, found Knight and Haslam, participants invested a low level of effort in their assigned work; they were listless and lackadaisical. In the disempowered office, subjects’ productivity was similarly mediocre; in addition, they were very, very unhappy. “I wanted to hit you,” one participant confessed to the experimenter in a follow-up interview, describing how he felt as “his” office was rearranged to the researcher’s liking. In the enriched office, participants worked harder and were more productive; in the empowered office, people performed best of all. They got 30 percent
...more
Implications for WFH and Covid-19 pandemic?
“intermittent collaboration.”
they can pull up the hood of their vestment,
that most effective mental extension: a private space, persistent and therefore familiar, over which they have a sense of ownership and control.
For this extension of mind by physical space, there can be no better model than the studiolo.
The "studiolo"
Self-referential images and messages are not mere decorations—whether
As the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has written, we keep certain objects in view because “they tell us things about ourselves that we need to hear in order to keep our selves from falling apart.”
For all of us, the objects on which our eyes come to rest each day reinforce what we’re doing in that place, in that role.
Does this include things like statues?
Frederick Winslow Taylor,
A sense of ownership extends from the individual to the organization, and it flows through physical space.
Murphy and her colleagues have advanced a theory of “prejudiced places,” which they define as places that “unequally tax the emotions, physiology, cognitive function, and performance of some groups more than others.”
“prejudice-in-places model,”
Systemic
“ambient belonging,”
Ambient Belonging
“method of loci”:
mental strategy that draws on the powerful connection to place that all humans share.
"Method of Loci"
“We are far better and more experienced at spatial thinking than at abstract thinking. Abstract thought can be difficult in and of itself, but fortunately it can often be mapped onto spatial thought in one way or another. That way, spatial thinking can substitute for and scaffold abstract thought.”
Spatial an Abstract thinking
“infantile amnesia”—the fact that we can’t recall much about our earliest years. Because very young children are not able to move through space under their own locomotion, the theory goes, they may lack a mental scaffold on which to hang their memories. Children’s impressions of their own experiences may become well enough structured to be memorable only once kids are able to move about of their own volition.
Infantile Amnesia. This reminds me of the "blind" kittens.
