Why does interacting with nature create a sense of peace and serenity? I think I know the answer

I am a sailor. During an earlier single period, I decided to get certified in sailing and booked a trip to Bellingham, Washington, the home of one of the country's best immersive sailing schools. For a week, the six of us and an instructor lived together on a 36 foot Pearson sailing yacht and we sailed the San Juan Islands in Puget Sound. (see stock photo at right). I experienced the joy of sailing, the serenity of being on the water, day and night, for a week, and I did get certified. 

It was during that week on the water that I realized that I was more relaxed and at peace than I had been in a long time. I knew being on the water had something to do with that feeling but it got me thinking. How did that work? I had to figure that out...

Years later, I was doing my sabbatical from jury research and selection and litigation consulting as a leadership consultant at Texas Instruments. TI was a member of MIT's Organizational Learning Center led by Dr Peter Senge and our team spent a week learning about systems thinking in organizations. Eye opening! Senge was a systems thinker and connected to the Santa Fe Institute and Dr Richard Feynman, another systems thinker and a pioneer in the applications of chaos theory to domains outside of physics. I traveled to Santa Fe for a seminar on chaos theory in economics and began reading every book available on chaos theory and that led me to fractal geometry. (Note: the path to understanding is frequently a winding road). It turns out that fractals are a fundamental mathematical component of virtually everything in nature: visual, auditory, sensory, physical, astrophysical, even human anatomy and physiology.

The pattern in that photo of a leaf is a fractal. The math that describes a fractal is over my head, but the concept is clear to me and ubiquitous in the universe. (more about that in an upcoming blog.) So based on my new understanding from systems and chaos theory that everything is connected to everything else in nature, how was I connected to nature, especially the sights and sounds of water and trees and wind that it made me feel at peace?

Finally, a patient with a traumatic brain injury (TBI) that affected his eye tracking ability gave me an idea. It turns out that in normal humans, the pattern of the human eye as it scans the environment is...fractal! And some other research revealed that the pattern of brain waves during relaxation is...yup, a fractal as well. Eureka! (it turns out that both wind and water produce auditory fractals as well.)

So my answer to the question is this: We are designed with eye scanning patterns and auditory receptors that are perfectly matched to the shapes  and sounds occurring everywhere in nature. And when our eyes see and ears hear those patterns that fit with our physiology, that synchrony between our brains and our experience of nature leads to a sense of peace and serenity like no other.

It is now my firm belief that urban dwellers with no access to parks, trees, lakes, streams, nature are biologically at risk for stress related symptoms and illness because their bodies are deprived of the innate biological need to experience nature and its healing, synchronizing fractals. (Note: There is a substantial body of research evidence that hospitalized people with access to nature have shorter hospital stays-they heal faster.)

I believe the Creator made a universe where we are intimately connected to the natural environment through fractals, and we need to experience nature's fractals to be refreshed from the stress of contemporary life. I know that I need the sound of water, the feeling of the breeze, and the sight of waves and sails to feel truly at peace.