That's space, Julia.

Hello, I'm Florence Williams, your guest host for the week.

Welcome to Radio Headspace and to Wednesday.

As you know, this week we're digging into the science of how nature can improve our well-being.

On that note, today we're going to get into some pretty cool science all around something called fractal patterns.

And if you're like fractal, what? Don't worry, I'll explain.

But more importantly, I'll break down why nature creates them, how they can improve our mood, and why humans find them irresistible.

So what are fractal patterns?

Fractal patterns are highly ordered, such that the same basic pattern repeats at different scales.

For example, you might look at a tree.

There are ways that a leaf will have veins that branch out, and that leaf is attached to a branch that also has different directions that branches out.

That branch is attached to a tree that may have a couple of different shrunks branching out at similar angles.

And then of course, it's part of a larger forest.

Sometimes these patterns are perfectly symmetrical, such as in a snowflake, or sometimes they're a little bit more chaotic, such as in a coastline, waves, clouds, and so on.

We're drawn to patterns because that's the way we learn to read the world.

Our visual perceptual system evolved to read natural landscapes using a search pattern that is fractal.

So we look for patterns in the landscape that are sort of large patterns, and then we go from that to looking at smaller patterns.

We know, for example, the way some animals search for food, like an albatross flying over the ocean, they'll track in these very large scale lines across the ocean, and then they'll zoom in on smaller ones.

And so there's something perhaps deeply soothing and calming when we look at a fractal pattern, because our eyes are resonant with the pattern itself.

We understand how that pattern works.

We know from some scientific experiments that when people look at fractal patterns, their brains start to produce more alpha waves that puts them in a state of sort of alert calmness.

It may help us reduce stress and mental fatigue as well.

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