Longwood Gardens is a renowned destination in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, filled with beautiful walking paths and natural flora, the ideal setting for a study that explores how nature affects the brain — insights that could inform everything from urban design to mental health interventions.

Recently, a team of graduate and undergraduate students strolled the grounds while recording their brain activity. They wore portable headwear equipped with neuroimaging technology known as functional near-infrared spectroscopy, as well as sensors that measured physiological activity like heart rate and electrical properties of the skin.

“Existing studies with traditional approaches have accumulated overwhelming knowledge but are limited in scope such as being only in artificial lab settings and with simplified tasks,” says Hasan Ayaz, provost solutions fellow and professor in the School of Biomedical Engineering, Science and Health Systems.

Ayaz, along with Aroutis N. Foster, interim dean of the School of Education, and other key collaborators including Senior Vice Provost Rajneesh Suri, shared insights from the project in a paper in Applied Human Factors and Ergonomics International 2023 Proceedings titled, “Evaluating the restorative impact of nature through multimodal mobile sensing of neural, physiological, and behavioral activity in ambulatory settings.”

The paper confirmed the benefits of nature on a person’s well-being while proposing the next step in the team’s work: to investigate “the inter-relationship of psychological, neural and peripheral responses to nature immersion with an eye toward understanding how these may be beneficial to society.”

The study contributes to the emerging interdisciplinary field of neuroergonomics, which seeks to study the brain’s health and performance in real-world environments. By capturing how the brain reacts to natural beauty, the research seeks new evidence of nature’s cognitive and emotional benefits, potentially shaping how green spaces can promote well-being.

Since 2020, Drexel has conducted several multidimensional courses and projects in collaboration with Longwood Gardens.