Everyone loves to cast their eye on a green, grassy, tree-filled view. True, the aesthetics of a beautifully designed building can gratify the soul but there are precious few designed buildings these days and there is nothing quite as restorative as the leaves of a tree bending to a lilting dance at the encouragement of a playful morning breeze. So it is no surprise, and a definite guide to city planning, that a new study has shown students who see a green view out of their classroom window do better academically.
The new study involved students at five separate high schools. The students were randomly assigned to one of three types of classrooms; windowless, looking onto a built space such as a building or parking lot, or with a window looking onto a green space. Each classroom otherwise had a similar size, layout and furniture.
The students took part in one on one experiments in which they did 30 minutes of activities including a proof-reading exercise, a speech, and a mental maths exercise. After these activities the students were given an attention test then a ten minute break where they remained in the classroom and then another attention test.
Throughout the students wore sensors that measured their physiological arousal and stress levels by measuring heart rate, skin temperature, and skin moisture. The students also rated their own mental fatigue and stress at various points throughout the experiment.
The groups in the windowless room and the room looking onto a building showed no difference in their attention tests either side of the break. However, those in the room with a green view did an average 13 per cent better after the break. Similarly, those in the green view room showed a better physiological recovery from stress after the break.
The reason for this is thought to be that when someone focuses on a task they must ward off other distractions which causes fatigue. When you stop focussing you become unintentionally drawn to certain things like trees or a puppy playing and in the process the brain rests and restores. Watching those things happens naturally and doesn’t require effort. So students in a room with a green view will have their attention involuntarily drawn outside during the break and that renews their mental energy. Of course, this doesn’t only hold true for young students in the classroom.
Last year in this column we reported a study from the Journal of Environmental Psychology that involved adult subjects carrying out a boring mental task in a city office block. The task involved watching a computer screen as a series of numbers flashed up and for each number they had to press the corresponding key on the keyboard unless it was the number three. In the middle the subjects were given a 40-second microbreak where they could look at a nearby rooftop. In some instances the rooftop was an ordinary concrete rooftop while others were able to view a green rooftop. The results showed that people who looked at the green roof made significantly fewer mistakes and showed better concentration in the second half of the task than those who looked at the concrete roof.
Current and future urban planning simply must encompass more than plonking down as many dwellings and shopping centres as possible in order to line developer’s pockets. For the sake of the very way in which we think, for every building there must be a planting too.
