If you are like me, you may have some attention issues based on living in our modern world.

I know that I certainly have something I struggle with, and the garden initially for

me was a retreat to a world in which the attention span could be developed back in my early

days from coming out of basically video game addiction and trying to, you know, be in the

real world again and pay attention with my eyes and my ears.

And today we have Dr. Ross Cameron back on the show, Research Director within the Department

of Landscape Architecture at the University of Sheffield.

And we've talked Ross about some really fascinating research and connections between ourselves

and the natural world, birds and the natural world.

Now going to this idea of restoring or building attention in the garden via what's called

a real.

And I think many of us listening don't know what a real is, so maybe we should start there.

Okay, well let me just try and deal with attention restoration theory first.

So it's interesting that you mentioned gaming on computers.

So the whole idea of nature being beneficial for our health comes to what's called kind of indirect

attention.

Okay, so when you're on your computer, you're concentrating on which guys moving around

or which cars they are and that's what's called directed attention.

Your brain is working really hard to follow the action.

And then the average working day, when you know that feeling when you come home you've got

a headache, you know you've been directed attention all day, you've been focusing on the

computer and you've had a lot of concentration.

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