A Surprising Way to Keep Your Brain Sharp

Attention Is Vital

As a graduate student, your main tool is your brain. When your brain is working optimally, you can focus your attention for an extended period on a reading, a lecture, a statistical analysis, or a writing problem. Without this kind of controlled attention, it’s almost impossible to accomplish anything.

Attention Is Challenging

The truth is, though, that this kind of attention is often difficult. Stephen Kaplan, about whom more in a moment, hearkened back to early psychologist William James in describing focused attention as “voluntary attention” (Kaplan, 1995). This kind of attention requires discipline to sustain amid the distractions of life. It allows us to aim our attention to something that is not necessarily intrinsically interesting, but that we need to attend to. Others have called this “directed attention” (Kaplan, 1995).

Books like The Shallows by Nicholas Carr, The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt, and Deep Work by Cal Newport diagnose (and offer some helpful advice for) our modern attention problems. And I am confident that these authors and many others are correct that the internet, smart phones, and social media have shrunk our attention spans. But in a way, it’s comforting that voluntary attention already posed a problem for James, who was writing in the late 1800s. The difficulty we have in focusing for long periods is a human challenge, rather than an exclusively 21^st century one.

The fact that sustained voluntary attention is vital to grad school success and that such attention requires significant effort means that, as a graduate student, your brain is probably tired. This is where we return to Stephen Kaplan, who with his wife, Rachel Kaplan, developed Attention Restoration Theory (ART).

Attention Restoration Theory

The ART term for a tired brain is “mental fatigue” (Kaplan, 1993). Mental fatigue has serious consequences, “ranging from making small errors to major mistakes, from being annoyed with fellow workers to being irritable and socially irresponsible” (p. 195). ART suggests (and the Kaplans and others have done a lot of work to support) that the best antidote for a tired brain – even better than sleep in some cases – is nature, which provides what they term a “restorative environment.”

The Characteristics of a Restorative Environment

According to ART, four factors need to be present for an environment to be restorative.

Being away – this doesn’t necessarily mean you need to take a vacation to the seaside to restore your attention, but it does mean that you need at least a psychological separation from the environment that is wearing you out.
Fascination – Kaplan (1995) identifies natural objects such as moving leaves, clouds, and sunsets, as possessing “soft fascination.” These things capture our interest without effort, but they don’t occupy all our mental processes. When gazing at a river, we still have plenty of brain capacity for reflection and meandering thoughts.
Extent – a sense of scope and diversity, that there are a variety of aspects of the environment to explore.
Compatibility – the environment is comfortable, fits your purpose, and doesn’t require a lot of effort to navigate. This varies from person to person and situation to situation. If you find pulling weeds therapeutic, an overgrown garden would be a compatible environment. If you want to take a walk, it might be a level path through the forest.

Spending time in an environment with these characteristics can allow you to rest your attentional capacity, regain your well-being, and return to your work strengthened and refreshed. Studies have found that restorative environments often engage the senses on multiple levels (Wei & Hou, 2023), and that more engagement with the environment (walking or gardening, rather than just looking) leads to deeper and more lasting restoration (Mooney, 2020).

What You Can Do

Employing the principles of ART is refreshingly simple. At the most basic level, you don’t even have to leave your desk. Simply looking out the window at a natural scene or looking at pictures of nature can provide a restorative brain break (Ackerman, 2018). One study showed that engaging with nature scenes via virtual reality headgear helped stressed college students relax and feel more positive (Wuyun et al., 2023).

Obviously, though, you’re going to have better results if you can interact with physical nature in a real environment. Again, this can be pretty low impact. Take 10-30 minutes and go outside on the university green, in your back yard, or to a nearby park. Take a couple of hours and explore a nearby forest or other natural area. Even in neighborhoods that are almost exclusively urban, you can often find some natural beauty to enjoy. Maybe it’s a flower growing in a cracked wall, the blue of the sky, a neighbor’s lawn, or the sunrise. Try to engage as many of your senses as possible in whatever natural sights and sounds you find.

Especially if you live in a very built-up environment, it would be a good idea to plan a getaway to spend a day or more in nature and to make this a regular practice. Graduate students are often at the beginning of a long academic career, and it’s going to be a lot more enjoyable – and productive – if you discipline yourself to rest your mind and restore your attention.

References

Ackerman, C. (2018, November 13). What is Kaplan’s attention restoration theory (ART)? PositivePsychology.com. What is Kaplan’s Attention Restoration Theory (ART)?

Kaplan, R. (1993). The role of nature in the context of the workplace. Landscape and Urban Planning, 26(1), 193–201. https://doi.org/10.1016/0169-2046(93)90016-7

Kaplan, S. (1995). The restorative benefits of nature: Toward an integrative framework. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 15(3), 169–182. https://doi.org/10.1016/0272-4944(95)90001-2

Mooney, P. (2020). The restorative landscape. In Planting Design: Connecting people and Place. Routledge. https://www-taylorfrancis-com.libproxy.temple.edu/reader/read-online/2be58d5a-633e-4c6f-a128-f9d8dc6c209f/book/epub?context=ubx

Wei, Y., & Hou, Y. (2023). Forest visitors’ multisensory perception and restoration effects: A study of China’s national forest parks by introducing generative large language model. Forests, 14(12). https://doi.org/10.3390/f14122412

Wuyun, B., Cui, Y., Jiao, R., Wei, Z., Chen, Y., & Lu, L. (2023). Study on the effect of virtual landscape on stress relief of college students. Proceedings of the 2023 3rd International Conference on Bioinformatics and Intelligent Computing, 140–146. https://doi.org/10.1145/3592686.3592712