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Este artículo habla de la naturaleza en el desarrollo mental de las personas. Frances Kuo hizo un estudio donde comparó a dos grupos de personas: quienes vivían en lugares con vista verde y quienes vivían en lugares con vista gris. La comparación se basaba en analizar habilidades para resolver problemas o tiempos de atención. Los resultados mostraron que las personas que veían árboles y flores a su alrededor en su día a día tenían estas habilidades más desarrolladas.
Kuo dice que simplemente mirar un arbol “refresca la habilidad de concentración” y así las personas pueden manejar de una mejor manera los problemas del día a día. La naturaleza tiene el poder de restaurar la mente según Kuo.
A partir de este estudio Marc Berman donde a un grupo de estudiantes de universidad los hizo caminar durante un día entero por las calles llenas de gente y trafico mientras que a otro los hizo caminar por un parque. Después les tomo el mismo examen a todos donde se calificaban habilidades de concentración, memoria y otras aptitudes básicas. Quienes habian caminado por el parque tuvieron resultados mucho mejores que quieres habían estado en la ciudad. El humor de quienes habian estado en el paque también era considerablemente mejor.
El autor del articulo no dice que hay que huir de las ciudades pero que debemos introducir más verde en ellas y crear espacios verdes dentro de las ciudades para poder dar un respiro al cerebro.
También se habla de la importancia de la diversidad dentro de los parques y las otras áreas verdes. Mientras más variedad de plantas (formas y colores) hay el cerebro se distrae más y puede desarrollarse de una mejor manera. Cuando la variedad de plantas es mayor las personas que frecuentan el parque reciben mejores resultados en tests de bien estar emocional y mental.
En resumen el artículo habla de cómo donde uno vive y lo que le rodea afecta a la actividad del cerebro.
¿Cómo nos puede servir este artículo?
Los parques son un espacio verde dentro de la ciudad. El artículo nos muestra la importancia en el desarrollo mental y si estamos hablando de los niños es más importante aún. Los niños necesitan desarrollar sus mentes para poder crecer como personas completas. La capacidad de concentración es muy importante para quienes entran dentro de nuestro grupo objetivo. Estar rodeados de lugares biodiversos, verdes y coloridos también mejora el humor de las personas y puede mejorar la relación entre las mamas y sus hijos al visitar el parque. En nuestro proyecto de diseño podemos enfatizar en lo natural, lo que nos saca fuera de la cotidianidad de la ciudad.
- By Jonah Lehrer
- August 19, 2010 |
- 1:09 pm |
- Categories: Frontal Cortex
In the late 1990s, Frances Kuo, director of the Landscape and Human Health Laboratory at the University of Illinois, began interviewing female residents in the Robert Taylor Homes, a massive housing project on the South Side of Chicago. Kuo and her colleagues compared women randomly assigned to various apartments. Some had a view of nothing but concrete sprawl, the blacktop of parking lots and basketball courts. Others looked out on grassy courtyards filled with trees and flowerbeds. Kuo then measured the two groups on a variety of tasks, from basic tests of attention to surveys that looked at how the women were handling major life challenges. She found that living in an apartment with a view of greenery led to significant improvements in every category.
What happened? Kuo argues that simply looking at a tree “refreshes the ability to concentrate,” allowing the residents to better deal with their problems. Instead of getting flustered and angry, they could stare out the window and relax. In other words, there is something inherently “restorative” about natural setting – places without people are good for the mind.
To better understand how nature works its psychological magic, let’s look at an important 2008 study led by Marc Berman, at the University of Michigan. (I’ve written about this study before.) Berman and colleagues outfitted undergraduates at the University of Michigan with GPS receivers. Some of the students took a stroll in an arboretum, while others walked around the busy streets of downtown Ann Arbor.
The subjects were then run through a battery of psychological tests. People who had walked through nature were in a better mood and scored significantly higher on a test of attention and working memory, which involved repeating a series of numbers backwards. In fact, just glancing at a photograph of nature led to measurable improvements, at least when compared with pictures of city streets.
Does this mean we should all flee the city? Of course not. It simply means that it’s a good idea to build a little greenery into our life. This isn’t a particularly new idea. Long before scientists fretted about the cognitive load of city streets, philosophers and landscape architects were warning about the effects of the undiluted city, and looking for ways to integrate nature into modern life. Ralph Waldo Emerson advised people to “adopt the pace of nature,” while the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted sought to create vibrant urban parks, such as Central Park in New York and the Emerald Necklace in Boston, that allowed the masses to escape the maelstrom of urban life. (As Berman told me, “It’s not an accident that Central Park is in the middle of Manhattan…They needed to put a park there.”)
Although Olmsted took pains to design parks with a variety of habitats and botanical settings, most urban greenspaces are much less diverse. Instead, the typical city park is little more than an expansive lawn, punctuated by a few trees and playing fields. I’ve got nothing against grass and Little League, but it’s probably worth pointing out that, if you want to maximize the psychological perks of greenspace, this is probably the wrong approach. In a 2007paper, Richard Fuller, an ecologist at the University of Queensland, demonstrated that the mental benefits of green space are closely linked to the diversity of its plant life. When a city park has a larger variety of trees, subjects that spend time in the park score higher on various measures of psychological well-being, at least when compared with less biodiverse parks.
Over at Scienceline, Ferris Jabr has an excellent article on the recent attempts to turn ecopsychology into a rigorous science. He describes an interesting new experiment led by Peter Kahn:
First, Kahn stressed out his participants by giving them a series of math tests. Then he placed some people in front of a window overlooking a grassy lawn with trees, others in front of a large plasma television screen displaying the lawn in real time, and still others in front of a blank wall. As expected, those in front of the window experienced the quickest drop in stress levels, as measured by their decreasing heart rate. Participants also spent far more time looking out the window and at the plasma screen than at the blank wall. But the researchers found an unexpected result.
“Surprisingly, the blank wall and the plasma screen were no different in terms of stress reduction,” said Ruckert. Their study indicates that gazing at an authentic natural space reduces stress, whereas a digital replica of nature soothes only as well as a boring blank wall.
I sometimes wonder if, when we look back at the mass cognitive mistakes of the 21st century, we’ll worry less about the internet and multitasking – people have been multitasking forever – and instead fret about our turn away from nature. The human species is urbanizing at an unprecedented rate. (In the next century, at least 3 billion people will migrate to cities.) And yet, we’re only beginning to understand how living in dense agglomerations of perfect strangers, surrounded by skyscrapers and concrete, actually affects the brain. This work on ecopsychology is an important start.
Image: From my recent trip to the Grand Tetons. This view restored my PFC.
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