I didn’t catch any Pokémon tonight but this was my view and I felt inspired to write.
How many times have you got to the end of a long day and just wanted to eat some food, watch something mindless on television and just basically do nothing? Rhetorical question, and I think I know the answer for most people. Tonight I got inspired to touch on an interesting theory that I learned about last week for the first time and one that I wanted to share with the world as I think it can be of positive benefit to us all.
Much has been written in the past few weeks about how Pokémon Go has got people out of their seats and out to the streets and parks looking for the rarest Pokémon. (That’s a sentence I never thought I’d write). I absolutely commend the clever people behind this idea as it encourages people to get up and move. However, what I find challenging in this is that people are still head down in their screen, not taking in the beautiful world we live in whether that be in a park, forest, lake or ocean..
Here’s where the science comes in. Attention Restoration Theory (ART) suggests that your ability to concentrate can increase spending more time in nature. Put simply, nature can rejuvenate your mind. Marc Berman studied how a 50-minute walk in a park can have a 20% improvement in short term memory tests taken shortly afterwards. Conversely walking in an urban environment showed very little improvement in memory capacity & concentration.
Professor Stephen Kaplan pioneered this work in back the 70’s, but in a world of increased urbanization & mobile phone / laptop consumption this work seems so important today. Science is somehow telling us that natural environments slowly, subtly asks for our attention, maybe better described as ‘fascination’, giving the part of our brain required for direct focus and attention time to recover. Interestingly, Kaplan also argued that people’s overall mood improved and quality of life became better as a result of time in nature.
So to summarize, it’s a great thing to get off your ‘backside’ and go for a walk in the park. The benefits may be wider than you realized. If you are out there catching Pokémon, I won’t knock you, for sure that’s a good start. But, try to lift up your head and take in the beautiful nature around you, it might help as it did with me this evening to write this article.
As always, let me know your thoughts & comments!
#movenow
For more information on ART;
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/marc-berman/attention-restoration-theory-nature_b_1242261.html