Review Of Florence Williams 'This Is Your Brain On Nature'

In “This is Your Brain On Nature”, Florence Williams explains psychologist David Strayer’s experiences and theories about Nature and how it affects people and the mind. Strayer believes that nature acts as an antidote to stress, and improves cognitive thinking as well. Williams presents several experiments conducted by Strayer about how nature is directly connected to our health with supporting evidence, but in some situations his hypothesis doesn’t very well apply.

Strayer gives multiple interesting points about nature and it’s connection to the health of the mind. He gives examples of people of history who used nature in a calm and relaxing way to heal and preserve. Cyrus the Great, for example. He built relaxation gardens. (56) This is an interesting point because these people who lived years and years

Just because most people show evidence for the theory that nature heals, doesn’t mean that all people do. In some situations, a different type of environment can affect a person’s health. The people you spend your time with can have an affect on this just as much as nature can. Someone can probably spend majority of their day outside, but a friend or family member who emits high amounts of stress can transfer the negativity between people if an emotional bond is present. Also, if someone is treated poorly they can spend all the time in the world in nature and still feel like crap. Some disorders like asthma and heart disease and diabetes (etc..) are genetic too, so sometimes it’s unavoidable. I personally have multiple medical conditions listed in the article, and I’m constantly stressed out, even though I live on a piece of land with 3 acres far away from other people. According to the evidence presented in the article, shouldn’t I have less of those things? Strayer should consider some outliers like this in his theory to make it more accurate for everyone instead of most of