1/ An investor is a professional observer. In one sense, it has never been easier: we have never had this many tools and information at our fingertips. But in another sense, it has never been more difficult: our brain is fatigued trying to attain signals from noisy news flows.
2/ As William James wrote, "We see, but we do not see: we use our eyes, but our gaze is glancing. We see the signs, but not their meanings. We are not blinded, but we have blinders."
3/ Trapped behind our Bloomberg screen, frivolously searching for new patterns, we become isolated from everything, including our own increasingly abstract thoughts.
4/ “In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion,” Albert Camus wrote in the 1940s as he contemplated the modern megalopolis. But where should we flee from the traffic and high-rises in order to clear our mental windshield?
5/ Richard Jefferies answers, "The exceeding beauty of the earth yields a new thought with every petal. The hours when the mind is absorbed by beauty are the only hours when we really live. To be beautiful and to be calm, without mental fear, is the ideal of nature."
6/ Science is proving what we all know as an elemental truth of existence: when we get closer to nature—be it untouched wilderness or a backyard tree—we do our overstressed brains a favor. Not only do we feel refreshed, but our cognitive functioning improves too.
7/ There’s something about being in nature that allows the prefrontal cortex, the brain’s command center, to rest and recover, like an overused muscle. This permits a more reflective state, which enhances higher-order thinking, restores mental energy, and boosts creativity.
8/ And it doesn’t take much to achieve that: short doses of nature such as walking in a city park or any green space for as little as 25 minutes is enough to give our prefrontal cortex a rest and boost cognitive capacity. We are physically and mentally more healthy.
9/ When the prefrontal cortex quiets down, the brain’s default network kicks in which enables us to picture other perspectives and scenarios, imagine the future, remember the past, create meaning from experiences, and understand our self in a transparent way.
10/ Researchers found what Emerson insisted long ago, that “nature is medicinal.” People living near nature or more green space have fewer stress hormones in the blood and fewer health problems, including depression, migraines, anxiety, heart disease, diabetes, and asthma.
11/ The natural world can offer us more than beauty in our technology-filled urban world. Before nature vanishes bit-by-bit, let us not forget the sage words of Thoreau: “All nature is doing her best each moment to make us well— she exists for no other end. Do not resist her.”
