Nature: instructions for use | Andrea Bariselli | TEDxMilano

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In this talk Andrea Bariselli, neuroscientist and psycologist, shares his discoveries about how the brain reacts in different natural environments and stimuli. Today is in fact possible to meter the emotional and cognitive reactions to a product or an experience.

Somewhere, along our way,

we began to confuse comfort

with happiness.

Modern life, today,
is an endless shower of stimuli.

And the human brain
is extremely receptive

to all the stimuli coming from outside.

It is the result of adaptation, survival.

But despite this, since 2010,
human beings have become

what can be considered an urban species.

That is, most of us, more than half of us,

live in an urban context, i.e. in cities,

and it's estimated that around 90 percent
of Americans' and Europeans' time

is spent indoors, inside.

This audience today, all sitting here,
we are a great representation of this.

And the other 10 percent of the time,

5 percent is spent in traffic.

Anyone from Milan
knows this situation all too well.

And there's an interesting
secondary effect, on top of that.

Our brain wasn't designed

to receive such a high quantity
of memory stimuli.

And all this is changing it.

It's changing its structure.

The brain is changing,
according to a rule called plasticity,

both in terms of its structure,
and also its size.

Because it's paradoxically smaller
than that of our ancestors.

And the question is whether
we were really designed for all this.

Namely, if the biological design

that nature and evolution
created for us was this,

i.e. staying sitting down
for a good chunk of the day.

In fact, this puts us
in a state of captivity.

The city has become
a hostile environment.

The explanation is probably
both anthropological and evolutionary.

Homo Sapiens, when it becomes a species -

bad news,

our main goal in mind
wasn't happiness, but survival.

So Sapiens developed
all those defense mechanisms:

fear, the sense of alertness,
the sense of danger.

That's all it needed

to react to the outside world.

Why am I telling you this?

Because I deal with the brain.

We spend our workdays

studying all those feelings and emotions

that happen in consumers' brains.

And as I was saying a moment ago,

10 years ago, at a conference,
I met a colleague

who showed me the first
portable electroencephalogram.

This incredible device

that allows us to see, through our waves,

what's happening in the brain.

It seems like trivial news:

but up until not so long ago,

the electroencephalogram
was a device filled with wires,

where life was, somehow,

simulated inside rooms.

And for the past ten years

we've tried to use this device

to do tests on humans
in their real lives,

i.e. when they do something
within their own lives.

This has allowed us, today,
to have two offices in Italy

and an office abroad,
in San Francisco, California.

And we've become experts

in Real Life Experiences,

that is, in measuring

what's happening in a person
while they go about their daily life.

We do it for several corporations,

from food to fashion,

cars, travel and more.

They ask us to find out

what happens inside us
when we do something.

But what are they asking for?
What characterises us?

The most extraordinary thing
about our species:

emotions.

Emotions are the greatest gift

that nature and evolution
have left us as a legacy.

They're at the same time

both the simplest
and the most complicated thing

we can experience.

Even now, if I asked you

to describe for me, in one word,
or in a few concepts:

what is emotion?

What are emotions?

How do emotions feel?

Where do we feel them?

How do we feel anger,
where and how is it produced?

An emotion, to be defined as such,
needs two components:

one is your brain -
I hope everyone's got one here,

and one is your body,
and I see you've all got those.

This makes us men and women
with an extraordinary gift,

which is that of emotions.

But, there is a "but".

By studying people's emotions,
over the years,

we also came to realise

that human beings, slowly but surely,
are losing their serenity.

We are, in a way, getting sick.

We are getting sick from something
which is our own illness,

that is to say, the modernity and comfort
that we've created ourselves.

And they're starting to give us
a series of problems,

that we all know about.

We've learned so much about modernity,
about technology, cement, cities.

And paradoxically,
the remedy for this disease

is something extremely simple,

and we saw it just by measuring it.

Imagine a treatment,

one that's easy to perform,

free of known side effects,

which improves the functioning
of your cognitive system,

and above all is free,
even if you can't get it on the NHS.

There is one, and it's called nature.

For hundreds of years,

people have taken care
of themselves with nature,

it's nothing new.

But the real question
we asked ourselves was,

what kind of nature?

Do they all work the same way?

All the people who are walking
in a park today,

who see and enjoy a beautiful day,

are all of them experiencing
the same emotion?

All the people who go
to a forest in the Dolomites -

and many of you spend
their holiday to the countryside -

What's the real emotion you feel?

And above all, can we freeze it?

So that this emotion

can be conveyed to someone else?

Measured, understood in some way?

Because if we can understand things,

we also manage, in some way,
to intake and share them.

And to do this, we started doing
a series of research activities,

as this subject is very dear to us.

And to do it again, I would like
to make you my colleagues.

We're all colleagues right now.

You are all neuroscientists,
you've all received an honorary degree.

I'll tell you how the brain works.

The brain has three small superstructures

that started to develop through evolution,
one on top of the other.

There's the cerebellum,
the famous cerebellum,

which is the home, how might we put it,
of our instinctive reactions;

and the limbic system, directly above it,

which was created,
and maybe not everyone knows this,

when we became a species,

and is the home of our emotions.

When we started to become a species,

and communicate with each other,

we also needed to do it through emotions,

and read them on others.

And lastly, only at the end, very late,

came the cortex,
which is the rational system.

The much-vaunted rationality,
and superior thought.

It only turns up very late on.

In reality, we are interested
in the last two, those ones below,

basically the ones that decide things

and care little about what you think.

It's these ones, when you're
outside a shop, here in the centre,

and there's a pair of shoes -
you don't want them,

but actually that one below
had already decided for you

that your credit card

is about to come out of your wallet
so you can buy them.

I want to give you two examples:
let's get back to nature, the core thing.

Two interesting examples
of how this nature works.

And the first of these examples -
i.e. nature on the brain -

the first example is Madagascar.

This extraordinary land.

And in this example,
in this particular scenario,

I want to talk you about encounters
between wild nature and men.

This is a picture I took,

both to show you how easy it is
to take a picture today,

but actually also to show
how beautiful Madagascar is.

For this project
we brought, for one week,

a group of people, volunteers,

who underwent this incredible torture,

who came with us,

and we visited
many different environments:

the mangrove rivers -

we went to very white beaches, forests
still untouched by human activity.

So with them, we tried to find out

the impact different types of nature
really had on them.

We went by pirogue,
we did some extraordinary stuff.

We tried to experience,

in the most appropriate way
and with minimal impact,

what this reality was.

To better understand
what the results were,

I want to make you my colleagues again
and explain how to read them.

Let's talk about an index
that's called frontal asymmetry,

which is when there's
a polarisation of waves

in one lobe rather than in another.

When these waves - in this case
alpha waves - emitted from our brains,

are found on the left
of your frontal lobes,

subjects were experiencing
a positive attitude,

towards whatever they were experiencing.

When waves were to the right,
the attitude is negative, repulsion,

that is, they are somewhat
[uncomfortable].

And, wait for it, of all the experiences

that these people
experienced in one week,

the two experiences with the highest rate
of, let's call it, discomfort,

the mangrove river and the Lokobe forest

were the experiences they liked the most.

That doesn't seem that much,
but try to imagine the forest.

It isn't a comfortable place.

There were snakes, I saw them for real.

Six-metre boa constrictors,
sleeping under the trees,

insects, humidity - discomfort.

Anything humanly -

in this room, you're sitting comfortably,

it's actually particularly complex there.

But look, that was
the most striking result.

We tried to investigate thoroughly,

and find out what happened
in their brains,

while they were in the forest.

And we did that with two indexes.

The first is the cognitive load,

that is, how much effort
their rational part tried to use

to understand, comprehend
the environment around.

And on the other hand,
the involvement, engagement,

i.e. their capacity to feel at ease.

During the first part of their time there,

the humans - our testers, in this case -

spent about an hour
working out where they were.

Working out if it was dangerous,
whether they had to stay alert.

Do you remember? Our brain
is optimized for fear and survival.

But after an hour in the forest,

their cognitive commitment
mysteriously collapses,

and makes room, instead,
for emotional involvement.

It's like, at a certain point,
the brain had said:

"Hey, calm down.
That's as bad as you can get".

The decibels only come
up to a certain point,

we have the animals
catalogued in some way,

the people here
are somehow not dangerous ... "

It began to implement
a series of mechanisms

as if it felt at home.

And the result is so striking

that it even managed
to outclass places like this.

This is the beautiful Nosy Iranja.

It's a strip of sand linking two islets,

that appears and disappears
with the rhythm of the tides,

and I really wanted to show you
in order to emphasise

how hard the week
we spent in Madagascar was.

(Laughter)

I swear: none of us, in our team, wanted -

one morning we fought
about going to the beach.

It was really complicated.

We're those little ones there.

It's an aerial photo taken by a drone.

Enough beaches, let's move on.

Let's talk about ...

Honey!

When nature ends up on the plate.

Honey is an extraordinary substance.

A gift that's made for us
by these tiny beings,

which - to digress,
a piece of news I read yesterday:

50 percent of the honey harvest this year

will be lost due to climate change.

Honey is disappearing!

And, in addition to this,
perhaps not everyone here knows

that one honey in two
of those sold on the market

comes from abroad.

In Italy, of course.

So they come from China
or other Eastern countries.

And 75 per cent of honey
found in major retail stores

isn't honey, but a mixture
of sugars, flavourings, molasses,

which makes it smell and taste
like honey, but it's not honey!

75 per cent,

I mean, it deserves a talk of its own,
to tell you all about it.

And, in addition, what makes it
even more complicated,

is that the real product,
honey from bees,

it's about three times as expensive
than the fake honey.

And the question we asked ourselves,

but also that different beekeepers'
associations have asked us,

precisely concerning this problem, is:

is our brain able, spontaneously,

to tell an authentic product
from a fake one?

That is, are we able

to recognise a product
which comes from nature,

compared to a product
created in a laboratory?

So we took another group of consumers,

subjected them to the umpteenth
test to see how it worked,

and we took three samples of honey,
comparable by type,

only the last one,
organic honey, being real.

And we asked them to taste those sample,

and then we asked them
to express a conscious preference,

to tell us which one was their favourite,
if they noticed some kind of difference.

Clearly it was a blind test,

none of them knew which was the real one,

nor the purpose of the test.

And in the meantime we measured.

When explicitly asked,

none of them express an overall
preference for the real honey -

I mean, the bee-made one.

But look what happened
inside their heads:

the electroencephalogram,
i.e. their most instinctive part,

manages to pick out the real honey
10 out of 10 times!

As if our brain knew things

that we ourselves
aren't able to understand!

More, much more:

the real honey managed
to stimulate areas -

like the temporal one,
which we see lit up here,

which is the home of our memories,

pleasant activation,
harmony with what's happening.

And even made waves, called Theta waves,

which are typical of meditation
and deep relaxation.

Honey!

And it's incredible,

something that not even the consumers
managed to recognise.

What am I getting at with this?

There's so much out there to discover.

Today it's like we're looking out
at this huge edge

which lets us see a little further,

a little closer to the whole planet,
the bigger picture.

And for our whole lives, we carry around

the most wonderful and complex system
that the Universe has created,

which is our brain.

Still, our ignorance on this complex topic
is abysmal: we know nothing.

And only in the last few years
have we managed to shed some light

on what its rules are,
its systems, its mechanisms.

And there's a simple reason
for this scientific delay:

in order to study complex systems,
you need computers.

Thanks to technology,

today we can study huge amounts of data

that weren't manageable before.

In reality, it's like we're saying
that only thanks to technology

can we now recover
the oldest part of ourselves.

Including contact with nature.

So our wish, our dream, for all this

is that our efforts, however modest,

may be part of a collective effort.

Of a collective will to be able to see

what marvels take place inside our brain

and what a marvel,
despite what's happening,

human beings are.

Because basically,

by trying to protect
what's around us, and love it,

we'll feel the desire to make it ours.

And just by trying to save

our relationship
with nature and the world,

we'll try to save ourselves a little too.

Thank you.

(Applause)