little mysteries called fractals

and the promises they make

Photo by Mila Tovar on Unsplash

Last Saturday, I participated in my first organized group “forest bathing” experience led by a certified Nature and Forest Therapy Guide. If you read my last email, don’t worry, we weren’t naked. It’s really more of a guided sensory meditation than a bath, but let’s be honest, forest bathing just sounds cool.

At the beginning of the two-hour session, the guide offered a brief lesson on fractals. Have you heard the term? Put simply, fractals are visual patterns that repeat themselves — think ice crystals, pineapple skins, ocean waves, etc. Fractals might appear consistent and predictable, like ripples in a pond, or a bit chaotic, like branches upon branches coming from a tree trunk.

Photo by Martin Rancourt on Unsplash

Apparently someone named Benoit Mandelbrot first coined the term in 1975, discovering that mathematic rules apply to these seemingly complex patterns, but that’s probably more than either of us care to know. What we should care to know — and the reason the guide brought it up to begin with — is that looking at fractals has proven to have a therapeutic effect on our brains.

In the past twenty years or so, EEG tests have been used to measure people’s brain waves while they view fractal images. Findings showed that the subjects’ frontal lobes produced feel-good alpha brainwaves, even when they only looked at the images for one minute. Later, MRIs confirmed that gazing at fractals also engage the parahippocampus, the part of the brain that regulates emotions.

Then eye-tracking machines were brought in. Hold on, y’all. It’s getting good.

Photo by Raisa Milova on Unsplash

When people’s pupils were measured while they focused on fractal images, it was found that the pupils used a search pattern that was itself fractal. First, the eyes scanned the scene’s larger elements, then made smaller versions of those same scans. It was concluded that part of why time spent in the natural world reduces stress, increases happiness, and has a soothing affect on our brains is because what we are taking in is a mirror of our own visual processing. We are beholding ourselves.

And not only that, we are beholding kinship itself.

So here’s what I think. I think if you feel alone, you should go out and find a tree. Sit under her and look up at her elaborate splaying of branches and just sit for awhile and let her take care of your poor tired brain. Let the rhythm of her patterns comfort you. Listen carefully as she tells you about all the ways you belong; about how you are exactly where you are supposed to be after all.

Photo by Önder Örtel on Unsplash

Hoping you get outdoors this weekend,

Shannon