How Nature & Other Physical Environments Impact Your Focus, Cognition & Health | Dr. Marc Berman

Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Mark Berman. Dr. Mark Berman is a professor of psychology at the University of Chicago, where he directs the Environmental Neuroscience Laboratory. His research focuses on how our physical environments, particularly natural environments, impact our brain function, mental health, and cognitive performance. During today's episode, we discuss the fascinating and actionable science of how your physical surroundings indoors and in particular your relationship and interactions with nature can shape your biology and your cognitive abilities. Dr. Berman explains how exposure to very common features in nature, such as fractal patterns, increase your ability to focus, reduce your stress, and improve your mental and physical health metrics, and not just while you're in nature, but after you return indoors for many hours and even days afterwards.

During today's episode, you'll learn about something call attention restoration theory, which turns out to be very important for understanding how different types of indoor and outdoor environments either deplete or restore your cognitive resources. We also discuss practical science-based strategies that anyone can implement, regardless of where you live. So if you're in an apartment or a house, if you have ready access to nature or if you don't, today's episode explains how to design your indoor space, the optimal duration and timing of nature exposure, and the specific visual and auditory elements that will provide you with the greatest cognitive and health benefits. So whether you're a student or a professional looking to enhance your learning capacity, focus, and reduce your burnout, or you're simply interested in optimizing your mental and physical health through exposure to different elements of nature, today's episode provides clear, actionable protocols based on rigorous scientific research. By the end of today's episode, you'll have a toolkit of evidence based strategies that will transform your relationship with your indoor environment and outdoor environments, and you'll learn to harness those to improve your brain and body. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, today's episode does include sponsors.

And now for my discussion with Dr. Mark Berman. Doctor Mark Erman. Welcome. Great to be here, Andrew. I love being out in nature. So I'm excited about today's conversation.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (132 minutes, 23,616 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 10 episodes for $5, and monthly plans are cheaper still.