YOUR BRAIN ON REDWOODS

Like portals to another realm, redwoods offer a way to step outside ourselves and experience life through a wider lens.  But how they cast this spell on us is a mystery that scientists are still unraveling.

“Awe and time in nature have a lot of really beneficial effects.”

PAUL PIFF
Social Psychologist, UC Irvine

FROM THE VIDEO

[Paul Piff] We've done some studies where we actually surround people with big trees, and then studied what that does to them. They report having this experience of awe or this experience of wonder, and as a result, they feel insignificant. And it feels so good. I think that's a really interesting puzzle; what is it about the human mind that so cherishes experiences that make it feel less important? 

In the emerging neuroscientific understanding of awe, what we're seeing is decreased activation in the self-reflective parts of the brain suggesting that awe is associated with an increased attention to the outside environment. 

There's a lot about awe that we don't know, but at this point we know that awe and time in nature has a lot of really beneficial effects. It's been linked to reduced inflammatory cytokines, which are a part of the stress and inflammation response in humans. It slows the heart rate down and gets people to experience a sense of calmness and contentment. It quiets that buzzing of stressors that people carry around with them on a daily basis and reminds you of the bigger, more complex things in the world like nature, that you are an inherent but small part of.

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