I had a very nice visit with a group of young high school students this morning who are part of a program called Waterloo Unlimited. This is the second chance I've had to speak to students in this program, and on both occasions I've been blown away by the caliber of the questions from the students. For this morning's talk, I re-purposed a talk that I had given to a university crowd, and I deliberated for a while over whether the content of the presentation might have been pitched a bit high for a high school audience. Given the very insightful questions asked by the students, my worries were unfounded. Indeed, I could have jacked up the content of the talk a few more notches and they would have probably enjoyed the stimulation. The students really seemed to resonate to the idea that exposure to natural settings causes big changes in our behaviour, our mood, our feelings, but they also leapt without prompting to the implications of these ideas for the design of video games.
I had some interesting conversations with the leaders of the program after the formal presentation was over, including the suggestion by Rae Crossman a poet/educator/wilderness wanderer/very cool guy that it might be interesting to look at the effects of narrative itself on bodily states. If we can be transported to wilderness by convincing visuals of rainforests and beaches, then perhaps Wordsworth's finely crafted descriptions of pastoral scenes, for example, might also transport us and produce positive affect and improved health.
At the very end of proceedings, I had a final conversation with a wonderful young man who asked me whether, given the known power of exposure to nature to effect improvements in mood and health, why it was that doctors didn't actually prescribe such things. It's a great question. When we think about health and our homes, we usually leap to ideas about air quality, the presence of toxic substances in household goods, and the like. Rather than thinking about the molecules that are bouncing around in our homes, what if we thought more about their vistas and views?
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