Innately Naturally Therapeutic

In a natural-biological environment our working memory is flooded with benign cues which prevent trauma cues from activating, reinforcing and prevailing.

The human perceptual-cognitive-emotional system evolved in a specific environment - in rich biological nature, not in the artificial structures of civilisation. Unnatural or poorly designed physical environments or social organisations lead to high levels of mental ill health and it is why forest bathing, sitting around a campfire, living without tech of all kinds, makes us all feel a lot better. 

When we take humans out of nature, mental-emotional ill health increases. This is very much Sigmund Freud's Civilisation and Its Discontents. The core channel through which mental dis-ease develops and through which it can be ameliorated is based in the automatic perception and working memory attention capture process.

Perception of natural biological phenomena has a strong element of evolutionary based encoding. We have programming which keeps us in a toned-relaxed highly efficient low level of arousal ready to recognise and attend to beneficial elements in the natural environment and to be prosocial. At the same time we have available for our safety hard-wired and learned long-term memory encoding for rapid attention and high arousal response to threats in that environment. But if this safety system is prolonged it drains our mind and body leading to ill health.

We are built to use the following perceptual heuristic to discriminate between a healthy environment and a threatening one: Safe = complex and rich; Threat = simple and standout.

Threats have pattern characteristics that stand out from the benign biological milieu in a variety of ways. Threats tend to be things which have specific types of simpler pattern, which move fast or have certain patterns of movement, or standing out from the biologically uniform and complex visual, auditory or other sensory background by virtue of their simple angularity, harshness - distinct obvious patterns that don't fit with the richly consistent pattern of nature around us. 

Something moving behind the foreground curtain of leaves grabs our attention. The natural environment that is complex but uniform does not arouse our attention for flight fight or freeze, and allows us to remain relaxed, and fills our working memory with benign search criteria for the flora types that are good to eat and places where it is good to be. However, something simplex that is moving among it will flood our working memory, grab our attention, and pass a signal: Fight, flight, freeze! We may quickly inhibit the response but the working memory process has nevertheless become more attuned to threat responding. Forest bathing fills our working memory with relaxed awareness criteria for all the good stuff that makes us feel whole, but a city street sends constant warning signals.

To understand the distinction between complex and simple in perceptual terms, sand on a beach is highly complex but appears uniform, get on your hands and knees and see the almost infinitely hard to define patterns, the grains are unique. Look away and then look back at one and it will be impossible to find that grain your were looking at. A spider is more simplex, its pattern includes a certain number of legs, with a certain number of joints, and so completely automatically recognisable. Look away and then look there again and you cannot avoid recognising the pattern even from the corner of your eye.

 A city street is simplex, with forms that closely follow the three dimensional planes, its patterns grab working memory and take an automatic path to faster reactive emotional processing.

Civilisation floods our working memory with threat criteria and keeps our flight and flight system at the fore. This is especially relevant to people who have existing mental health conditions and whose long-term memory is loaded with for example cues for anxiety or trauma related conditions, a situation prevalent in the modern social, technological and built environments of civilisation.

Put people in a natural environment and their working memory floods with benign cues which prevent working memory responses from being activated into the fight flight arousal system. People with anxiety and other mental health issues may still experience symptoms even in a natural environment. However, without the constant stressors of the harsh social and urban structures of civilisation, and with the appropriate therapeutic guidance to learn coping strategies in this non-threatening context, their responses will damp down and become more manageable. For the rest of us it is just a more fulfilling place to be.