Topic: mood

Marc Berman discusses evidence on how exposure to natural environments affects cognition, mood and wellbeing. The conversation contrasts time spent in natural settings with indoor, screen-based and urban environments, and examines the emerging field of environmental neuroscience. It considers how nature may support cognitive performance as well as psychological, physical and social wellbeing.

This talk will (1) describe patterns and correlates of objectively assessed motor activity (2) present findings on the inter-relationships among motor activity, sleep and circadian rhythms and mood disorders; (3) describe potential of cross species studies of motor activity and related systems to inform human chronobiology research

Although analogical reasoning has been assumed to involve insight and its associated “aha!” experience, the relationship between these phenomena has never been directly probed empirically. In this study we investigated the relationship between representational change and the “aha!” experience during analogical reasoning. A novel set of verbal analogy stimuli were developed for use as an insight task. Across two experiments, participants reported significantly stronger aha moments and showed greater evidence of representational change on trials with more semantically distant analogies. Further,