1KHO 644: The Current Crisis in Human Attention | Dr. Marc Berman, Nature and the Mind

The 1000 Hours Outside Podcast

Ginny Yurich

Kids & Family, Parenting

4.9 • 1.8K Ratings

🗓️ 8 December 2025

⏱️ 62 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Our attention is quietly falling apart and it’s changing who we are as parents, partners, and people. In this powerful conversation, Dr. Marc Berman, professor of psychology at the University of Chicago and a pioneer in environmental neuroscience, explains why our “directed attention” is at a breaking point in the age of constant pings, dings, and screens. Drawing from his groundbreaking research and his new book, Nature and the Mind, Dr. Berman gives us language we can use to understand why we’re so depleted and why a walk outside can feel like someone quietly handing us our life back. This episode weaves together childhood memories under Michigan spruce trees, the birth of a new field (environmental neuroscience), and the sobering reality that our ability to focus may be one of the most important moral and relational issues of our time. But this episode isn’t just a diagnosis. It’s also a deeply hopeful prescription. Dr. Berman unpacks the “50-minute miracle,” showing how a simple walk in a park can boost attention and memory by around 20%, rivaling more invasive interventions and even helping people with depression and ADHD think more clearly and act with more self-control. You’ll hear why kids often melt down after school (their tanks are empty), how nature time after school pickup can restore their capacity for homework and kindness, and how design choices like trees on your street, plants in the classroom, fractal patterns and natural light in your home offer “micro-doses” of restoration throughout the day. From grief and rumination to screen time, executive function, and school policy, this episode is a roadmap for parents who sense that something is off and are ready to rebuild our children’s attention and joy through simple, consistent time in nature. Get your copy of Nature and the Mind here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:27.7	slash setup welcome to the 1000 hours outside podcast my name is jenny urich and the founder
0:33.9	of 1000 hours outside and I have just read a book that everyone should read.
0:38.0	You are going to absolutely love it. It is so important for you, but also for your children. It is called Nature in the Mind, the Science of How Nature Improves Cognitive, Physical, and Social, Wellbeing. Dr. Mark Berman, it's here. Welcome. Thank you for having me. What a book. I took so so many notes this is so timely because we are
0:56.9	attention fatigued we are going to talk about things that are so important today
1:00.9	and you talk about how getting out in nature is one of the things that can help us to
1:05.8	restore our attention it's like only sleep you know mostly we think only sleep does it
1:10.3	but if you get outside in nature this is going to help with your actual cognition. There is so much to learn in this book about directed attention, fatigue. Dr. Berman, we also live in Michigan and I went to the University of Michigan as well. So what a cool thing. So let's kick it off there. Let's kick it off with your childhood when you thought nature was not all that important, but you did love going to your grandma's house and her spruce trees.
1:33.0	Yeah, we spent a lot of time. My grandma Ruth had a, you know, four acres, I think, in Rockford,
1:40.8	Michigan, so in the western part of Michigan. And we used to go there often to visit her. And on her property, she had these really large blue spruce trees in the front. And,
1:52.7	you know, they were kind of majestic looking trees. And we used to play underneath them. Like,
1:58.6	you know, they were so big, you could kind of crawl underneath them and kind of hide. It would be a little prickly, but you could get inside there
2:05.3	and hide. It was almost like a little cave. And we really loved those trees a lot. And my grandma
2:12.1	and my grandpa actually planted those trees when they built their house there. I think she had some intuition that, you know, it was going to be good for the family to have these really large trees there.
2:25.3	And actually, my mom had a really big affinity for those trees too.
2:30.3	And when my grandma sold that house, my mom found a blue-proof sapling that was nearby that just
2:36.8	looked like a Charlie Brown Christmas tree. And she dug it up. And I remember driving back home to
2:43.4	suburb of Detroit to our house. And she planted that blue spruce tree in our backyard. And it also
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