It’s a fluffy old metaphor – but we are all on a path of some kind.

If I was to ask you ‘what path are you on?’ How might you respond? You might think about a goal, a destination; you might think about not being on the correct path. Instead, you might think about where you’ve come from, how you started; you might be trying to work out which fork in the road to take. Paths open up, trail off, disappear, some feel pre-written, some are laid down, fought out, by us.

It’s a useful metaphor – but is it more than a metaphor?

Lines are fundamental to the way humans think. We are a line-making species – we follow lines, often using them to think into the future. The world would be chaos without lines. Lines help us to live coherent lives. We use lines to weave, to make ropes, to thread and sow. We used lines to navigate the seas using the constellations, we use lines to plot on grids and on plans and to sow and grow vegetables and wheat in the fields. We make roads and paths, we fly, we draw, we paint, and, of course, we write symbols, letters, words, and sentences, in lines.

So lines – like pathways – point us somewhere.

Sometimes metaphors like lines and pathways are more than just abstract ideas. They borrow from one thing to help us understand another – they mirror the world. Metaphors can structure our experiences, orientating us in space, making things make sense.

A battle of minds. A weak point in an argument. That boosted my spirits. His mood sank. She’s on the wrong path.

We evolved within a relationship with our environment. As such, it has a direct effect on how we think, the ways we think, it’s possibilities and limits. Our mind is matter – so can we change our minds by changing our environments?

Despite spending 99% of our evolutionary history outdoors, we now spend 93% of our time either indoors or in vehicles. To add another twist, studies have consistently found we’re almost always happier outdoors. And in 2008, we crossed a new milestone: the majority of the planet now lives in a city.

There are a lot of studies that show what we know is pretty obvious: that this can be harmful.

In one study of 400 Londoners, life satisfaction fell by 0.5% for every extra 10 milligrams of pollution in their area.

In a study of 2000 men, environmental noises like traffic of 50db led to a 20% increase in hypertension – or high blood pressure. According to another study of 5000 adults, a 10db increase of noise at night resulted in a 14% rise in hypertension.

Other studies have found that having a school near an airport leads to lower scores in reading tests.

Sound is our primary sense for alerting. It causes autonomic involuntary bodily responses; raising of the heartbeat, twisting of the neck, shifting of the eyes, tensing of the muscles – it’s associated with the release of cortisol and the fight or flight mechanism. The neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky has pointed out that micro stressors can build up over time into chronic stress.

In the office, does constant distraction have the same effect? We’re either sat at a desk performing a task on a singular path, or we’re distracted by all of these other paths around us that we’re not on, but could be. What changes when we get outside, onto a different path?

Walks in the forest have found to decrease cortisol levels by 12%, blood pressure by 1.3%, and heartrate by 6%, and for days after. Studies have confirmed that being in nature reduces anxiety and improves mood.

One experiment has shown 120 individuals films of accidents in workshops. The researchers measured things like sweat levels, heart rates, blood pressure – then showed one group scenes of nature and another urban scenes.

Those who were shown the scenes of nature were back to their baseline in 5 minutes whereas those watching urban scenes were only partway back 10 minutes later.

Another study observed groups of businessmen hiking in the woods for a few hours each day. It found that immunity boosting white blood cells were 40% higher after the walk and still 15% higher a month later compared with those who did not walk.

The scent of oil from hinoki cypress trees has been found to increase those white blood cells too. Other studies have shown creativity improvements by up to 50% sustained 3 days after hiking. The smell of pinene has been shown to lower heartrate and blood pressure. Hospital rooms with windows to nature led to patients needing less time to recover. Housing estates with views of nature have less crime. One study of 40 million people found that people that live in greener areas have lower death rates.

Across Europe, while 60% of work related health issues are physical – bad backs etc – 14% are now psychological – attributed to stress, depression, anxiety, and so on. The Finnish have a phrase for it: burnout syndrome.

Now, this is all quite intuitive – it’s no surprise that a good walk is good for you. The more interesting question is why is this?

Of course, nature isn’t all bird song and flowers – its dangerous, stressful, capricious, too – but, reminding ourselves that we are part of nature, it might be that the natural world holds clues about the mysteries of how and why humans think in the ways we do. And it might help us think differently.

First, there are some obvious reasons that nature might be associated with well-being. First, you need time for recreation – it’s associated with leisure – so you’re more likely to have that time in the first place. You also need more money to live next to a park or in a nice area. Walking improves your cardiovascular fitness, fitness is associated with well-being, so fitter people might already be happier.

But I think there are some more interesting philosophical and psychological reasons for the change too – the change we’re interested in – not just in feeling good – but in thinking differently.

First, there’s the simple difference between what we’re doing indoors and outdoors.

The brain has two modes: they’re called executive and default.

The executive function is office mode. It’s paying attention – usually through the prefrontal cortex – to tasks at hand. Thinking through something – putting the pieces together – intense concentration – resisting compulsion – reasoning, logic.

It’s also difficult – it’s a strain. We’re actually not that great at it – its very methodical and slow, it’s tiring (which is why spacing out feels so good). It’s also very narrow. As in we fade out what else is going on – our surroundings, the radio, conversation – and we focus on one thing at the cost of everything else.

In other words, we’re on one very specific, narrow, difficult path mentally. Of all the things in the universe we could be attending to, we’re attending to this thing. A single thread of concentration. Important, maybe, but singular all the same.

Then there’s the default mode.

Default mode kicks in when we’re not using the executive mode, or when we get tired, when we’re not doing something specific. You cannot be using both modes at the same time. Default mode is meandering, daydreaming, sometimes random and chaotic, taking us down unexpected paths, away from the present.

The late nineteenth century psychologist William James had a beautiful way of describing it: ‘most people probably fall several times a day into a fit of something like this: The eyes are fixed on vacancy, the sounds of the world melt into confused unity, the attention is dispersed so that the whole body is felt, as it were, at once, and the foreground of consciousness is filled, if by anything, by a sort of solemn sense of surrender to the empty passing of time’.

Our default mode is fascinating because on the one hand it seems wild and untamed, pulling us away from the task at hand, away from discipline and purpose, away from the present moment, but on the other, it could be the source of something more….

Sometimes it’s difficult to see the path you’re on when you’re on it. And there’s a modern tendency to believe in a singular path that we keep treading down – continual improvement, steady progress, a single destination.

This mirrors the way we’ve understood history in the modern era – a linear progression towards technological, political, industrial improvement. We just need more – more productivity, more wealth, more scientific facts – and all will be well.

Charles Dickens satirised this view in the opening pages of Hard Times. His character, the teacher Thomas Gradgrind, proclaims, ‘now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!’.

What we tend to forget is that this idea of a singular, rational, logical path – working away with our executive office functioning – isn’t just singular, rational and logical. It’s also what philosophers call contingent – it’s accidental, has particular causes, is the product of certain values, beliefs, cultural ideas, and motivated by wider sociological contexts, ideologies, change, economics, and other people, The singular mode of thought is totalitarian. But paths are multiplicitous.

So what does it mean to change those pathways of firing neurons? There are plenty of studies that show that nature not only makes you feel better, but it makes you think differently.

Some have found that people walking in nature ruminate over negative thoughts less, which is a change in a way of thinking. In another study, researchers showed one group of people scenes of nature that were simple, flat, and predictable, while showing another group scenes of nature with winding paths, unpredictable landscape, and obscured scenery, scenes that evoked a sense of adventure and mystery. The latter group remembered the details of the scenes more successfully. In other words, exploration activates memory – a change in a way of thinking. Walking also gets you into a flow state – a state that’s an odd combination of default and executive functioning – one thought easily follows another in a state of deep absorption. A change in a way of thinking.

Psychologists Rachel and Stephen Kaplan have argued that nature can restore mental theory. They call it Attention Restoration Theory and they’ve shown how nature provides the gentle but not too over-engaging stimuli required to be gently distracted from your own conscious thoughts, creating a relaxing internal mindset.

They call it soft fascination – when attention is held by gentle stimulation. That there’s something about gentle rolling clouds, the sound of a steam, the green of the hills, the movement of leaves – that allows a person to reflect and introspect in a restorative way.

All of this adds up to what we all know: in a rut? Get outside.

So many of our greatest minds agreed.

Nietzsche said, ‘all truly great thoughts are conceived while walking’.

Beethoven said, ‘the woods, the trees and the rocks give man the resonance he needs’.

Rousseau said, ‘there is something about walking that stimulates and enlivens my thoughts’. And also, ‘I can only meditate when I’m walking. … When I stop I cease to think; my mind works only with my legs’.

Writer and architect Frederick Law Olmsted said in 1865 that nature ‘employs the mind without fatigue and yet exercises it; tranquilizes it 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’.

So there’s the gentle changing of pathways you get from being outside, but there can also be an extreme changing of pathways too.

The eighteenth century politician Edmund Burke wrote an influential treatise on that feeling we get when we see something fantastic and awe-inspiring – a towering waterfall, an imposing mountain, a stormy sea, a powerful storm – the sublime.  

He said, ‘the passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is Astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror’.

What is this astonishment and why horror? The sublime, he said, is a sense of awe at the power that something has over us, our difficulty in understanding it, of comprehending it, the vastness of it, the insignificance of ourselves up against it.

Emerson wrote ‘standing on the bare ground, my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space, all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing’.

Studies have found that people who have watched awe-inspiring videos were more likely to help them pick up pens they pretended to drop. They’re kinder. It has also been shown to lower stress markers.

Awe puts us in a mode of thought that is reflective of the greater whole – the interconnectedness of everything.

We need to return to the question: what’s at the root of all this?

The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has influentially argued that we think with our bodies as much as our minds – we feel sensations, emotions, affects on our bodies – the pressure on the feet, the photon on the eye, the quickening of the heart – before we think.

He said, ‘feelings point us in the proper direction, take us to the appropriate place in a decision-making space, where we may put the instruments of logic to good use’.

In other words, the mind is larger than the mind, because it is ‘neurally connected to almost every nook and cranny of the remainder of the body by nerves’.

He continues that, ‘if body and brain interact with each other intensely, the organism they form interacts with its surroundings no less so. Their relations are mediated by the organism’s movement and it’s sensory devices’.

There’s a form of therapy called horticultural therapy. Speech therapy tries to get a patient talking again after an accident or an illness. A speech therapist shows a patient an apple and says ‘apple’ – but a horticultural therapist takes the patient into the garden where they can feel the earth, taste, hear, see the movements of the tree – it sparks memories.

I think this tells us a lot about how the brain works. When we’re tying to work through an argument, build a presentation, write a letter, finish or start a project, think through a problem – whatever it is – if you have a block, a frustration, and even if you don’t – switch up on as many pathways as possible physically, and then corresponding neural paths switch over too.

We feel thought as much as we think it – it comes through feeling, through the moving of the legs and the beating of the heart. The senses – sensation – provide the raw mechanical movement that puts motion into thought. Each sense can bring a different perspective – firing the neurons and combining pathways in new and different ways.

So if your thinking is flat find a hill, if it’s grey find green, if it’s silent, find the gentle notes of rustling and birdsong, the smell of pinene mixed with memory and dopamine. Get outside and think.

Sources:

Florence Williams, The Nature Fix
Lakoff & Johnson, Metaphors We Live By
Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error