Coleridge said something along the lines of\u00a0how sentimentality is false emotion, the human longing for a lie. If this is true, then agrarian sentimentality, the longing for an existence of yester-century that seems more primitive, pastoral, and rural, is a particularly pernicious lie. Whenever I hear someone yearn\u00a0for the bucolic\u00a0freedoms of the prairie life, the southern farm, or the Victorian manor, I see flashes of the dust bowl, slavery, and skyrocketing infant mortality rates. Yes, you had the special blessing of churning your own butter, but you also had polio. Yes, our naturalist ancestors were free of digital screens, but they were also free of the knowledge of events going on around their nation and the world and the attendant ability to do something about them, even if that just meant prayer.<\/p>\n
That is not to say that we should avoid the\u00a0life lived in close proximity\u00a0to soil and root. In my experience, people who\u00a0nurture\u00a0a balance in their lives between urban and rural, community and nature, seem to exhibit a deeper sense of perspective and personal satisfaction. There is something about field work done with hands that can bring a deep inner peace\u00a0(particularly when it is complemented by the protective\u00a0refuge of modern technology).<\/p>\n
This is a biblical notion as well. In the Old Testament, blessings of Israel were inextricably tied to the land, so that behavior in the city would be expected to have influence over the fruit of the land itself. Ancient Israelites were not expected to be purely agrarian, but they were expected to recognize that town and country were deeply fused spaces.<\/p>\n
We should not be surprised therefore that this balance between town and country is encoded in how our bodies work.<\/p>\n
The New York Times has an interesting, if not intuitive, story<\/a> about the effect of nature on the human brain. A recent study shows how walks in nature can have an observable effect on a person’s negative thoughts, including anxiety and brooding. I was a bit surprised that\u00a0“brooding” is an observable category.<\/p>\n So for the new study, which was published last week in Proceedings of the\u00a0National Academy of Sciences, Mr. Bratman and his collaborators decided to\u00a0closely scrutinize what effect a walk might have on a person\u2019s tendency to\u00a0brood.<\/p>\n Brooding, which is known among cognitive scientists as morbid\u00a0rumination, is a mental state familiar to most of us, in which we can\u2019t seem to\u00a0stop chewing over the ways in which things are wrong with ourselves and our\u00a0lives. This broken\u00adrecord fretting is not healthy or helpful. It can be a\u00a0precursor to depression and is disproportionately common among city\u00a0dwellers compared with people living outside urban areas, studies show.<\/p>\n Perhaps most interesting for the purposes of Mr. Bratman and his\u00a0colleagues, however, such rumination also is strongly associated with\u00a0increased activity in a portion of the brain known as the subgenual prefrontal\u00a0cortex.<\/p>\n If the researchers could track activity in that part of the brain before and\u00a0after people visited nature, Mr. Bratman realized, they would have a better\u00a0idea about whether and to what extent nature changes people\u2019s minds.<\/p>\n Mr. Bratman and his colleagues first gathered 38 healthy, adult city\u00a0dwellers and asked them to complete a questionnaire to determine their\u00a0normal level of morbid rumination.<\/p>\n The researchers also checked for brain activity in each volunteer\u2019s\u00a0subgenual prefrontal cortex, using scans that track blood flow through the\u00a0brain. Greater blood flow to parts of the brain usually signals more activity in\u00a0those areas.<\/p>\n Then the scientists randomly assigned half of the volunteers to walk for 90\u00a0minutes through a leafy, quiet, parklike portion of the Stanford campus or next\u00a0to a loud, hectic, multi\u00adlane highway in Palo Alto. The volunteers were not\u00a0allowed to have companions or listen to music. They were allowed to walk at\u00a0their own pace.<\/p>\n Immediately after completing their walks, the volunteers returned to the\u00a0lab and repeated both the questionnaire and the brain scan. But the volunteers who had strolled along the quiet, tree\u00adlined paths\u00a0showed slight but meaningful improvements in their mental health, according\u00a0to their scores on the questionnaire. They were not dwelling on the negative\u00a0aspects of their lives as much as they had been before the walk.<\/p>\n <\/p><\/blockquote>\n <\/p>\n Read the rest<\/a> here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Coleridge said something along the lines of\u00a0how sentimentality is false emotion, the human longing for a lie. If this is true, then agrarian \n [...]<\/a>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":642,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3,4,62,74,1],"tags":[84,86,123,138],"class_list":["post-640","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ancient-near-east","category-anthropology","category-science","category-technology","category-uncategorized","tag-agrarianism","tag-anthropology","tag-neurology","tag-technology"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.sunergoi.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/FlowerTree_1024.jpg?fit=1024%2C768&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5ESBE-ak","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sunergoi.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/640","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sunergoi.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sunergoi.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sunergoi.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sunergoi.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=640"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.sunergoi.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/640\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sunergoi.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/642"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sunergoi.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=640"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sunergoi.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=640"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sunergoi.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=640"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nAs might have been expected, walking along the highway had not soothed\u00a0people\u2019s minds. Blood flow to their subgenual prefrontal cortex was still high\u00a0and their broodiness scores were unchanged.<\/p>\n