Marc Berman

Marc Berman is an environmental neuroscientist and Professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago, where he directs the Environmental Neuroscience Lab. He is best known for turning a folk intuition — that time outdoors clears the head — into measurable cognitive science.

Berman helped found environmental neuroscience, the study of how physical surroundings shape the brain and how the brain, in turn, designs the surroundings that reshape it. Building on the attention restoration theory of his graduate mentors Steve and Rachel Kaplan, he ran some of the first studies to show that interacting with nature improves objective performance — working memory and directed attention — and not merely mood. His more recent work reaches for mechanism, asking what low-level visual statistics of a natural scene (compressibility, entropy, fractal structure) make it easier for the brain to process and therefore restorative. He is the author of Nature and the Mind: The Science of How Nature Improves Cognitive, Physical, and Social Well-being (2025).

Core positions

Berman argues that directed attention is a finite, depletable resource that natural environments replenish, because nature supplies ‘softly fascinating’ stimulation that engages involuntary attention while leaving directed attention to recover. He stresses that the cognitive benefit is separable from mood — you gain it even on a walk you hated — which rules out a merely hedonic explanation. He frames access to nature as a necessity for cognition rather than an amenity, and presses his field to quantify the effect in terms policymakers and designers of cities, schools, and hospitals can act on.

In the wiki

• Marc Berman on Attention Restoration, Nature, and Environmental Neuroscience — attention restoration theory, the objective cognitive dividend of a nature walk, softly fascinating stimulation, and the compression-and-fractals account of why nature restores