فصل 6

Chapter Six

Outside In

In 1963, the Chicago Housing Authority completed construction on a monumental project on the city’s historically black South Side: the Robert Taylor Homes. A vast syndicate of twenty-eight sixteen-story concrete towers, it was the biggest public housing complex in the history of the world.

Built to halt the rise of slum conditions that were taking over more and more neighborhoods, the Robert Taylor Homes were named after a prominent, recently deceased black community leader and architect. Unfortunately, the final product didn’t honor his memory. Not only did the Robert Taylor Homes reinforce the citywide structure of segregation that already reigned in Chicago, they gradually exacerbated the challenges facing the community.

By the 1980s, the Robert Taylor Homes had become notorious as a microcosm of the same problems plaguing dozens of American cities: gang violence, drugs, and people beset with fear, ill health, and disenfranchisement. A grand, much-touted attempt at urban renewal had crumbled into yet another example of urban decline that disproportionately affected African Americans.

If you lived in the Robert Taylor Homes, you didn’t have to turn on the television or read a newspaper to witness the devastating effects that poverty and segregation were having on America during the second half of the twentieth century. You simply had to walk outside your apartment. But within this atmosphere of crime, amid the daily tumult that defined the lives of the Robert Taylor Homes residents, a groundbreaking experiment would soon take place.

When people applied for an apartment in the Robert Taylor Homes, they had no say over the building where they would live. They were randomly assigned to a unit in almost the same way that scientists randomly assign subjects to different groups in an experiment. As a consequence, tenants found themselves living in apartments that, in many cases, looked out onto dramatically different landscapes. Some units faced courtyards filled with grass and trees. Others looked out onto gray slabs of cement.

In the late 1990s, this unique circumstance ended up providing Ming Kuo, a newly minted assistant professor working at the University of Illinois, with an unexpected opportunity. With short dark hair, glasses, a warm smile, and a penetrating mind, Ming was interested in understanding whether the physical surroundings of residents affected their ability to cope with the stress of living in a drug- and crime-filled environment. Like many other scientists, she had been struck by a growing body of research that demonstrated a link between views of green spaces and increased resiliency.

In one particularly compelling study, the environmental psychologist Roger Ulrich had found that patients recovering from gallbladder surgery who were assigned to a room that faced onto a small cluster of deciduous trees recovered faster from their operations, took fewer painkillers, and were judged as more emotionally resilient by the nurses caring for them than patients whose rooms looked out onto a brick wall. But whether glancing at green views would help people manage the emotional turmoil of inner-city life in one of the most hostile environments in the United States was a complete mystery.

When Ming learned about the housing assignment process at the Robert Taylor Homes, she saw a chance to further examine the effects of nature on the mind. So she and her team got to work visiting apartments to see what they could uncover. First, they took pictures of the areas surrounding eighteen Robert Taylor Homes buildings and coded each building’s view for the presence of green space. Then they went door-to-door recruiting participants for their study; in this case, female heads of households. During forty-five-minute sessions held in the participants’ apartments, Ming’s team cataloged how well they were managing the most important issues in their lives: whether to go back to school, how to keep their homes safe, and how to raise their children. They also measured each person’s ability to focus their attention by measuring how many digits they could retain and manipulate from a string of numbers.

When Ming and her team analyzed the data, they found that the tenants who lived in apartments with green views were significantly better at focusing their attention than those whose buildings looked out onto barren cityscapes. They also procrastinated less when making challenging decisions and felt that the obstacles they faced were less debilitating. In other words, their behavior was more positive; their thinking was calmer and more challenge oriented. What’s more, Ming’s findings suggested that the Robert Taylor Homes residents’ behavior and thinking were more positive because they were better able to focus their attention. Trees and grass seemed to act like mental vitamins that fueled their ability to manage the stressors they faced.

As it turned out, Ming’s findings were not a fluke. In the years since her study, more green revelations have followed. For example, using data from more than ten thousand individuals in England collected over eighteen years, scientists found that people reported experiencing lower levels of distress and higher well-being when living in urban areas with more green space. Meanwhile, a 2015 high-resolution satellite imagery study of the Canadian city of Toronto found that having just ten more trees on a city block was associated with improvements in people’s health comparable to an increase in their annual income of $10,000 or being seven years younger. Finally, a study involving the entire population of England below the age of retirement—approximately forty-one million people—revealed that exposure to green spaces buffered people against several of the harmful effects of poverty on health. To put it another way that only slightly exaggerates, green spaces seem to function like a great therapist, anti-aging elixir, and immune-system booster all in one.

These findings raise a fascinating possibility: that the internal conversations we have with ourselves are influenced by the physical spaces we navigate in our daily lives. And if we make smart choices about how we relate to our surroundings, they can help us control our inner voice. But in order to understand how this works, we first need to know which facets of nature appeal to us.

The Force of Nature

In a certain sense, Ming’s work in Chicago with the Robert Taylor Homes didn’t start with her or Ulrich’s work on gallbladder patients. Rather, it emerged out of a scientific husband-and-wife duo’s curiosity about the interaction between the human mind and the natural world.

In the 1970s, Stephen and Rachel Kaplan, both psychologists at the University of Michigan, had begun to advance an intriguing idea: that nature could act like a battery of sorts, recharging the limited attentional reserves that the human brain possesses. They called it attention restoration theory.

Sure, most people knew that a painterly sunset, mountain view, walk in the woods, or day at the beach usually left a person feeling good, but was there more to it? The Kaplans thought that there was because of a distinction related to human attention that William James, one of the founders of modern-day psychology in the United States, put forth more than a hundred years ago. James separated the ways we paid attention into two categories: involuntary and voluntary.

When we involuntarily pay attention to something, it’s because the object of our attention has an inherently intriguing quality that effortlessly draws us to it. In a real-life scenario, you can imagine, say, a talented musician playing on a street corner while you’re walking around a city, and you feel yourself notice the sound and gravitate toward it to stop and listen for a few minutes (and then maybe toss some money into the instrument case before you keep walking). Your attention has been gently reeled in by a process the Kaplans called “soft fascination.” Voluntary attention, in contrast, is all about our will. It captures the amazing capacity that we human beings have to shine our attentional spotlight on whatever we want—like a difficult math problem or dilemma we’re trying to stop ruminating on. As a result, voluntary attention is easily exhausted and needs continual recharging, while involuntary attention doesn’t burn as much of our brain’s limited resources.

The Kaplans believed that nature draws our involuntary attention because it is rife with soft fascinations: subtly stimulating properties that our mind is pulled to unconsciously. The natural world delicately captures our attention with artifacts such as big trees, intricate plants, and small animals. We may glance at these things, and approach them for greater appreciation like that musician playing on the corner, but we’re not carefully focusing on them as we would if we were memorizing talking points for a speech or driving in city traffic. Activities like those drain our executive-function batteries, whereas effortlessly absorbing nature does the opposite: It allows the neural resources that guide our voluntary attention to recharge.

The studies that Ming and her colleagues went on to perform in Chicago were designed to rigorously test the Kaplans’ ideas, and as we’ve already seen, they produced dramatic supporting evidence. Other experiments have likewise illustrated nature’s powers.

One now classic study was done in 2007 just a few blocks from my home in Ann Arbor, when Marc Berman and his colleagues brought participants into the lab and had them perform a demanding test that taxed their attentional abilities—they heard several sequences of numbers that varied from three to nine digits in length, which they were asked to repeat in backward order. Half of the participants then went out for a walk in the local arboretum for just under one hour, while the other half walked down a congested street in downtown Ann Arbor for the same amount of time. Then they came back to the lab and repeated the attention task. A week later they swapped circumstances; each person had to go on the walk not taken the previous week.

The finding: Participants’ performance on the attention test improved considerably after the nature walk but not the urban walk. Their ability to invert strings of numbers and repeat them back to the experimenter was much sharper. Moreover, the result didn’t depend on whether participants took their walks during the idyllic summer or gloomy winter. No matter what time of year, the nature stroll helped their attention more than the urban one did.

Berman and his colleagues went on to replicate these results in other populations. For example, one study with clinically depressed participants indicated that the nature walk improved their cognitive function and led them to feel happier. Another satellite-imagery study conducted by a different team with more than 900,000 participants found that children who grew up with the least exposure to green spaces had up to 15 to 55 percent higher risk of developing psychological disorders such as depression and anxiety as adults. All of this, along with Ming’s work in Chicago, suggested that the benefits of nature weren’t limited to our attentional reserves. They also extended to our emotions.

Nature’s impact on human feelings made sense given how critical the ability to maintain our attention is for helping people manage their inner voice. After all, many of the distancing techniques we’ve examined rely on focusing the mind; it’s hard to keep a journal, “time travel,” or adopt a fly-on-the-wall perspective if you can’t concentrate. Moreover, the ability to divert our internal conversations away from things that are bothering us, or reframe how we’re thinking about stressful situations, likewise requires that our executive functions not be running on empty. But Ming and other scientists never tested the idea that nature could reduce rumination directly. This occurred in 2015 at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.

Leafy, suburban Palo Alto is a far cry from gritty, crowded Chicago, though it does have a handful of busy streets. Researchers there designed an experiment that had participants take a ninety-minute walk either on a congested avenue or through a green space adjacent to Stanford’s campus. When the scientists compared people’s rumination levels at the end of the study, they found that participants in the nature-walk group reported experiencing less chatter and less activity in a network of brain regions that support rumination.

As a born and bred city dweller, I think it’s necessary to pause here for a moment. Over the last two centuries, human civilization has seen a vast migration from rural areas to urban ones, and by 2050 an estimated 68 percent of the world’s population is expected to live in cities. If you have a citified life, it’s natural to feel alarmed if you’re part of this huge swath of humanity with less access to nature and green spaces. When I first learned about this research, I was certainly disconcerted. I wondered, does having lived in the dense, concrete cities of Philadelphia and New York for the first twenty-eight years of my life mean that I—as well as everyone else with similar urban living experiences—am destined to have worse health, impaired attention, and more ruminative thoughts?

Thankfully, the answer is no. You don’t need to be surrounded by nature to “green” your mind. Recall that the underlying idea in the Kaplans’ attention restoration theory is that the subtle perceptual features of nature act as a battery of sorts for the brain. Well, the visual characteristics that create this pleasing soft fascination don’t just have this effect when you’re physically close to nature. Secondhand exposure to the natural world through photos and videos also restores attentional resources. This means that you can bring nature and its sundry benefits into your urban environment—or any environment, for that matter—by glancing at photos or videos of natural scenes. Virtual nature is, incredibly, still nature as far as the human mind is concerned.

An experiment published in 2016, for example, induced stress in participants using the dreaded speech task. Afterward, they watched a six-minute video of neighborhood streets that varied in their green views. At the low end, participants watched a video of homes on a street without any trees; at the high end, the video toured a neighborhood with a lush canopy of trees. Those exposed to the most views of nature demonstrated a 60 percent increase in their ability to recover from the stress of the speech compared with those who saw videos with the fewest views of green spaces.

While the bulk of the research done on the psychological benefits of nature focuses on visual exposure, there’s no reason to think that our other senses don’t also provide pathways for these startling effects. In 2019, a study found that exposing people to natural sounds, such as rainfall and crickets chirping, improved performance on an attentional task. Such sonic forms of nature may also constitute a soft fascination.

Collectively, these findings demonstrate that nature provides humans with a tool for caring for our inner voice from the outside in, and the longer we’re exposed to nature, the more our health improves. It offers us a playbook for structuring our environments to reduce chatter. And bringing new technologies to bear will likely make it easier to reap the benefits. For instance, Marc Berman and his collaborator Kathryn Schertz have developed an app called ReTUNE, short for Restoring Through Urban Nature Experience. It integrates information concerning the greenness, noisiness, and crime frequency of every city block in the neighborhood surrounding the University of Chicago to come up with a naturalness score. When users input their travel destination, the app generates directions that maximize the restorative nature of the walk, taking into account such practical issues as number of road crossings and length of the walk. If proven effective, a natural next step would be to extend the app to, well, everywhere. Of course, you don’t need the app to maximize exposure to nature in your daily life. Just make a careful assessment of the different environments you move through and modify your routes accordingly.

As our mind’s relationship with nature demonstrates, the physical world is capable of influencing psychological processes deep within us. But nature’s many sources of soft fascination are only one pathway through which we reap these benefits. There is another feature that helps us control our inner voice, except this tool isn’t limited to our surroundings in the natural world. We can also find it at concerts, in museums, and even watching a baby take its first steps.

Shrinking the Self

The excitement that Suzanne Bott felt as she grabbed her paddle and climbed into the raft made her body tingle. For the next four days, she would be paddling down Utah’s shimmering Green River with three other rafts of people. During the day they would take in the tawny, castle-like canyon walls. At night they would talk about the day’s adventures around a flickering campfire.

Despite first appearances from a cursory glance at the group, this wasn’t your average collection of wilderness enthusiasts. Most of the paddlers were military veterans who had seen combat, along with several former firefighters who had been first responders on 9/11. Each person had replied to an advertisement recruiting veterans for an expenses-paid journey on the Green River designed to help them connect with nature. There was, however, a catch: The trip doubled as a research experiment. Even so, all the participants had to do was paddle and fill out a few questionnaires.

Bott was the outlier of the group. She wasn’t a combat veteran and had no experience dousing fires. In 2000, after spending six years earning her PhD in natural resource management from Colorado State University, she felt burned out by the publish-or-perish culture of academia. So she began working in redevelopment, helping revitalize small towns. But Bott remained mindful all the while of the privileged life she led compared with so many other Americans, including her brother, a senior intelligence officer serving in Iraq. While some people’s rumination comes from the things that they do, hers came from what she wasn’t doing. She needed a change.

After working stateside for several years, Bott found a job with a State Department contractor in Iraq that supported the new government’s efforts to take firmer control of different regions of the country. She landed in Baghdad in January 2007 and spent a year deployed in Ramadi, the Iraqi city Time magazine had dubbed “the most dangerous place in Iraq” only a month before she arrived. She spent much of her time there developing a long-term transition strategy for the new Iraqi government, working closely with a small corps of marines and army engineers. Her commute involved donning body armor, traveling in Humvee convoys, and sprinting from vehicles to buildings to avoid sniper fire. She was a world away from cozy Colorado.

Her new career provided Bott with the sense of purpose that had been missing from her life. It also pushed her to an emotional breaking point. She attended memorials for fallen colleagues on a regular basis and witnessed horrors amid her work that she wasn’t prepared for—car bombs, territorial warfare, and assassinations. Carnage became the stuff of everyday life.

In 2010, Bott returned home to the United States, where her chatter took over. Questions about why she survived when so many of her colleagues had not were a continual source of distress. Memories of the horrors she witnessed replayed in her mind, compounded by constant news reports detailing the rise of ISIS in areas where she had so recently lived and worked. Her chatter reached a crescendo in 2014 when she learned that in Syria ISIS had decapitated James Foley, a journalist she worked closely with in Iraq. Against her own better judgment, she watched the decapitation video that ISIS posted on the internet. She hadn’t been the same since. Then she saw the advertisement for the rafting trip.

During the evening after their first day out on the water, Bott filled out a brief questionnaire that asked her to rate how much she experienced several different positive emotions. A team of scientists, led by a psychologist named Craig Anderson from the University of California, Berkeley (who was also participating in the trip), were hoping to use the paddlers’ responses to understand the impact of the common but grossly understudied emotional experience of awe.

Awe is the wonder we feel when we encounter something powerful that we can’t easily explain. We are often flooded by it in the natural world when we see an incredible sunset, mile-high mountain peak, or beautiful view. Awe is considered a self-transcendent emotion in that it allows people to think and feel beyond their own needs and wants. This is reflected in what happens in the brain during awe-inspiring experiences: The neural activity associated with self-immersion decreases, similar to how the brain responds when people meditate or take psychedelics like LSD, which are notorious for blurring the line between a person’s sense of self and the surrounding world.

The feeling of awe, however, is by no means restricted to nature and the great outdoors. Some people experience it when they see Bruce Springsteen in concert, read an Emily Dickinson poem, or take in the Mona Lisa at the Louvre. Others may have awe-drenched experiences when they see something extraordinary in person, like a high-stakes sports event or a legendary object such as the U.S. Constitution, or witness something intimately monumental, like an infant taking its first steps. Evolutionary psychologists theorize that we developed this emotion because it helps unite us with others by reducing our self-interest, which provides us with a survival advantage because groups fare better against threats and can achieve loftier goals by working together.

But the Berkeley team wasn’t solely interested in whether shooting down roaring rapids would lead the rafters to experience awe. They figured it would. What they really wanted to know was whether the amount of awe they experienced on the trip would have any lasting impact on their stress and well-being after it was over.

So, at the beginning of the rafting trip and a week after it was complete, Anderson asked the rafters to fill out a set of measures indexing their levels of well-being, stress, and PTSD. Much had happened between the two assessments. They rafted dozens of miles over the course of their four-day trip, spent numerous afternoons hiking along the riverbanks, and looked at prehistoric petroglyphs created thousands of years ago that led them to muse on the forgotten societies that had once trod the same ground beside the river as they did now. Would the effects of these experiences dissipate after the trip, or would they leave something behind?

When Anderson crunched the numbers after the study ended, he found that participants displayed significant improvements on each of the well-being measures after the trip ended; their stress and PTSD levels declined, while their overall levels of happiness, satisfaction with life, and sense of belonging improved. Those were interesting results on their own. But the most fascinating finding concerned what predicted them. As Anderson and his colleagues expected, it wasn’t a function of how much amusement or contentment or gratitude or joy or pride that paddlers felt during each day of the rafting trip. It was how awe inspiring it felt. Suzanne felt all of these boosts, including a more tranquil inner voice. “That rafting trip changed my perspective dramatically,” she told me two years later.

When you’re in the presence of something vast and indescribable, it’s hard to maintain the view that you—and the voice in your head—are the center of the world. This changes the synaptic flow of your thoughts in similar ways as other distancing techniques we’ve examined. In the case of awe, however, you don’t have to focus your mind on a visual exercise or on reframing an upsetting experience. In this sense, it’s similar to saying your own name: You just have the experience, whatever it happens to be, and relief follows. When you feel smaller in the midst of awe-inspiring sights—a phenomenon described as a “shrinking of the self”—so do your problems.

The Berkeley Green River white-water rafting study is just one example of a burgeoning line of research linking awe to physical and psychological benefits. Another study, for instance, showed that awe leads people to perceive time as being more available, pushing them to prioritize time-intensive but highly rewarding experiences like going to a Broadway show over less time-intensive—but also less rewarding—material ones like purchasing a new watch. Meanwhile, on the physiological level, awe is linked with reduced inflammation.

The influence of awe on behavior is so strong, in fact, that others can’t help but notice it. One set of studies found that “awe-prone” people came across as humbler to their friends. They also reported higher humility and had a more balanced view of their strengths and weaknesses—both hallmark features of wisdom—and more accurately credited the role of outside influences on their successes.

There is an important caveat to consider when thinking about the role that awe plays in our emotional lives. While the bulk of research links it with positive outcomes, scientists have shown that a subset of awe-inducing experiences can trigger negative feelings. Let’s call these encounters “awful” in the negative sense: the sight of a tornado, a terrorist attack, or believing in a wrathful God. (Research shows that approximately 80 percent of awe-related incidents are uplifting and 20 percent aren’t.) These kinds of experiences are considered awe inspiring in the sense that they, like a majestic sunset, are so vast and complex that we can’t easily explain them. The difference is that people perceive them as threatening. And it turns out that when you inject a bit of threat into the awe equation, that can, perhaps not surprisingly, turn thoughts into chatter.

The operative power of awe is its ability to make us feel smaller, nudging us to cede control of our inner voice to a greater grandeur. But there is another lever that our physical environments can pull to improve our internal dialogues that is the opposite of giving in to life’s wild vastness—a lever that doesn’t help us cede control but rather helps us regain it.

The Nadal Principle

In June 2018, the Spanish tennis superstar Rafael Nadal stepped onto the clay courts of the French Open to battle in the tournament’s final match in pursuit of his eleventh championship there. That summer day in Paris, with fifteen thousand fans waiting restlessly to watch a world-class match, he and his opponent, the Austrian Dominic Thiem, came out of the locker rooms, ready to compete. Nadal did what he always does before a match. First, he walked across the court to his bench with a single racket in his hand. Then he took off his warm-up jacket as he faced the crowd, bouncing back and forth vigorously on the balls of his feet. And as usual, he placed his tournament ID card on his bench facing up.

Then the match began.

Nadal jumped ahead right away, winning the first set. After each point, he fiddled with his hair and shirt before the next serve, as if arranging them back in place. During breaks in the action, he sipped a power drink and water and then returned both exactly as they had been—in front of his chair to his left, one precisely behind the other, aligned at a diagonal with the court.

Two sets later, Nadal beat Thiem and left the French Open victorious yet again.

Although you might think that competing against world-class athletes and making sure you don’t pull a muscle are the most essential parts of professional tennis, that’s not true for Nadal, one of the greatest players in history. “What I battle hardest to do in a tennis match,” he says, “is to quiet the voices in my head.” And his quirky customs on the court, which many of his fans find amusing but strange, provide him with a perfectly reasonable method of doing so.

By always placing his ID faceup, carefully arranging his water bottles so they are perfectly aligned in front of his bench, and making sure that his hair is just right before a serve, Nadal is engaging in a process called compensatory control; he’s creating order in his physical environment to provide him with the order he seeks internally. As he puts it, “It’s a way of placing myself in a match, ordering my surroundings to match the order I seek in my head.” This tendency to structure elements in our environment as a buffer against chatter goes beyond contexts in which our performance is being evaluated. It extends to any of the spaces that we occupy. As a result, humans infuse order into their external surroundings—and by extension their minds—in a variety of ways. Some are very similar to Rafael Nadal’s. This might explain the global influence of Marie Kondo and her 2014 best-selling book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. Her philosophy of decluttering our homes by only retaining objects that give us joy is a strategy for influencing how we feel by imposing order on the environment.

But how does the ordering of our surroundings influence what’s happening inside our minds? To answer this question, it’s crucial to understand the pivotal role that perceptions of control—the belief that we possess the ability to impact the world in the ways we desire—play in our lives.

The desire to have control over oneself is a strong human drive. Believing that we have the ability to control our fate influences whether we try to achieve goals, how much effort we exert to do so, and how long we persist when we encounter challenges. Given all this, it is not surprising that increasing people’s sense of control has been linked to benefits that span the gamut from improved physical health and emotional well-being, to heightened performance at school and work, to more satisfying interpersonal relationships. Conversely, feeling out of control often causes our chatter to spike and propels us to try to regain it. Which is where turning to our physical environments becomes relevant.

In order for you to truly feel in control, you have to believe not only that you are capable of exerting your will to influence outcomes but that the world around you, in turn, is an orderly place where any actions you engage in will have their intended effect. Seeing order in the world is comforting because it makes life easier to navigate and more predictable.

The need for order in the external world is so strong, one study found, that after recalling a chatter-provoking incident and focusing on their lack of control, participants actually saw illusory patterns in images. In lieu of other avenues for simulating order, their minds led them to imagine the patterns. In another experiment, participants who couldn’t control the noise levels in their surroundings were asked to choose either a postcard of a water lily with a black border that conveyed the idea of structure or a similar postcard that lacked a border. On average, they preferred the one with the structured border, another visual shorthand for order.

What scientists have discovered, however, is that just like Nadal we can simulate a sense of order in the world—and by extension in our own minds—by organizing our surroundings and making sure that our physical environments conform to a particular, controllable structure.

The fascinating thing about seeking compensation for chaos in one area (that is, our minds) by creating order in another (that is, the physical environment) is that it doesn’t even have to have anything to do with the specific issue that is throwing off our inner voice. This is why imposing order on our environments is so useful; it’s almost always easy to do. And the value of engaging in this practice is impressive. For instance, one experiment demonstrated that just reading about the world described as an orderly place reduced anxiety. Unsurprisingly, research indicates that people who live in more disadvantaged neighborhoods—such as the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago, and likely the areas of Iraq where Suzanne Bott worked—experience more depression, in part because of disorder they perceive in their surroundings.

In contemporary culture, many people view overly frequent attempts to order one’s environment as a sign of pathology. Consider, for example, a subset of people with obsessive-compulsive disorder who are strongly motivated to arrange things so they are orderly. What this research on compensatory control suggests is that these people may simply be taking the strong desire people have to establish order in their surroundings—in order to gain a sense of control—to an extreme. There is logic to what they do, even if restraint is lacking.

What makes OCD harmful—a psychological disorder—is that the need that people with this condition display for order in the environment is excessive and interferes with their normal daily functioning. As a parallel case, our need for order can also get out of control in our larger social surroundings. Just look at the recent proliferation of conspiracy theories online, in which the chaos and upheaval of events are attributed to the shadowy (and orderly) plan of diabolical forces. In this case, people are grasping for order through a narrative mechanism, but often to the detriment of others (the conspiracies are, after all, usually false and based on an absence of evidence).

What research on our need for order and the benefits of nature and awe makes clear is how closely intertwined our physical environments are with our minds. They’re part of the same tapestry. We’re embedded in our physical spaces, and different features of these spaces activate psychological forces inside us, which affect how we think and feel. Now we know not only why we are drawn to different features of our environment but also how we can make proactive choices to increase the benefits we derive from them.

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In 2007, the last of the Robert Taylor Homes was demolished. The city had long since moved out all of the residents, and the once famous symbol of urban blight, segregation, and social disorder was set to be redeveloped into a new complex of mixed-income homes and retail and community spaces. Such a positive, orderly transformation would likely be awe inspiring to the people who remember the crime and violence the buildings were once home to.

Whether the new iteration will have green space integrated into its design in a way that benefits its residents is yet to be determined, but the legacy the original complex left behind still reverberates through the history of Chicago, and the history of science. It is a lasting example of how our environments play a pivotal role in shaping what we think, feel, and do and the importance of actively taking control of our surroundings for our own benefit.

For all the power of our environments, though, we don’t just gain psychological relief from our surroundings and the things that fill them. As we saw with the need to exert control, there are also specific things we do in our environments that can help us harness our inner voices, but imposing order the way Nadal does is only the beginning. The methods at our disposal are often so strange, and their effects so strong, that they almost seem like magic.