07/24/2026
What science can tell us about nature’s impact on kids’ brains
A 90 minute walk in places like forests and parks has the most benefits.
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Fifteen years ago, a radio program caught the attention of Kelsey McWhinnie in Prince George, British Columbia. Its subject was a teacher in the US who started each school day by taking his students outside. McWhinnie, also a teacher at the time, recalls it as the moment she discovered an idea that would help define the rest of her career.
At the time, McWhinnie was teaching at a local high school and the concept of taking students out of the classroom and into nature spoke to her. “The learning impacts and achievement of those kids went up significantly,” she says. That insight led to deeper research and the decision to try it out with her own class. Her students were mostly teenage boys who had mental health designations or presented behavioural challenges and weren’t functioning well in mainstream classroom settings.
“Don’t take your coats off, boys,” she’d say as they arrived each morning. “We’re headed outside.” There, they’d spend 45 minutes talking, eating — connecting. The change she saw in her students was remarkable. It went from flipping desks or sleeping through class to catching up academically. “I saw massive gains,” she says. “I was sold for life.”
Today, McWhinnie brings that experience into her current role as principal of Ron Brent Elementary.
“We’re in an inner-city context, a really vulnerable demographic,” she explains. “To be plain, we have extremely high levels of poverty. Parents struggling to make ends meet, to put food on the table.” To help address that, the school has both a breakfast and lunch program where students can get two hot meals a day. You have to make school a place students want to be, she says. As it turns out, “they want to be outside.”
McWhinnie has been leaning into that knowledge ever since. Brent Elementary has the standard playground and soccer field, as well as a mountain bike park and firepit. Twice a week, she takes the entire student body out for two hours in the afternoon with the goal of moving to a more nature-based philosophy. “Outside, there are zero behaviour issues. Not one. It’s incredible. They get to play and see their friends. It’s all the things they need, and they’re not getting anymore, right? Because screens have taken over their lives.”
The design for Brent Elementary’s new green schoolyard began with the students and included parents and the school’s Indigenous Education Council. When complete, the space — about the size of a basketball court— will feature a spiral path leading to a variety of shrubs and berry bushes, Twiggy Tunnels where kids can play hide-and-seek, and a Builder’s Base Camp for making forts with logs and other natural elements. There’s also a quiet space for downtime, as well as gardens for both vegetables and indigenous plants. While the new space will add biodiversity, McWhinnie is laser-focused on what it can do for students’ well-being. She’ll be able to see all the action outside her office window. Construction begins this spring.
“My dream for this would be that kids access it, are excited by it and know that their voice created action. Because we’re not just asking them for the sake of checking a box. Student voice actually matters. If we want to change education for the better, we have to listen to the kids who are in it.”
McWhinnie speaks about the subject with a kind of evangelical zeal. It’s built on the confidence of lived experience. Increasingly, that experience is being supported by empirical data, including a new meta-survey of brain imaging studies published earlier this year by a team of researchers at McGill University and Adolfo Ibañez University in Chile. Together, they examined more than 100 studies, resulting in one of the most comprehensive reviews to date of how the human brain responds to nature.
Many children, parents and teachers feel as if they know instinctively that spending time outdoors in natural environments feels good, although they don’t know why. This new research aims to provide a language to help express what’s going on inside.
Why does nature have such a positive effect on human emotions and perception? Three influential psychological frameworks attempt to explain. Attention Restoration Theory proposes that natural environments help restore attention that has been fatigued by daily cognitive demands. Stress Recovery Theory posits that viewing natural, non-threatening environments triggers an immediate, positive psychological and physiological shift that reduces stress and promotes recovery from fatigue. The Biophilia Hypothesis suggests that humans have an innate, genetically based need to connect with nature and other forms of life, stemming from our evolutionary history. These frameworks, however compelling, don’t fully explain what’s happening in the brain and body. The research team set out to address this knowledge gap.
Researchers at McGill and Adolfo Ibañez universities found that spending time in nature, even briefly, calms and settles the brain, reduces stress and mental clutter and restores attention. Through the use of EEG and various Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) technologies, the effect is quantifiable.
They tracked a shift in brain activity as subjects were exposed to fractal patterns, such as in branching trees, ferns or pine cones. These universal, repeating patterns found in nature and mathematics are much easier for our brains to focus on compared to the fast-paced, more linear visual stimulation of city life or online experiences. In natural environments, stress settles as the sensory load lessens and the body can transition out of the fight-or-flight mode provoked by much of city life. This results in a slowing heart rate and deeper breathing as activity in areas of the brain alert to threat detection subsides. In this more relaxed state, the task-oriented mindset of daily life dissolves into a more present, restorative attention to the environment. Cycles of rumination give way to improved moods and an overall calmer sense of self. The data reveal that nature exposure reduces signs of stress in the brain, enhances attentional control and promotes both emotional- and self-regulation — mirroring patterns observed in meditative states.
The data suggest that immersive experiences, such as a 90-minute walk in places like forests and parks, had the most benefits. But researchers also found that nature exposure can be thought of as existing on a spectrum. Neurological and physiological benefits can occur rapidly — in as little as three minutes — outside in a space with natural elements, such as plants, bushes and trees, and can lead to measurable changes. It doesn’t have to be a wild ecosystem. Even micro-encounters with nature, such as looking at a potted plant, or even photos of natural environments, are enough to elicit “significant” psychophysiological responses in as little as 90 seconds.
The implications of this research are profound, and help make the case for green urban design and “social prescribing,” where doctors recommend time in nature. It validates the experience of teachers and school administrators like Kelsey McWhinnie who’ve witnessed the calming, restorative, and attentional benefits students receive by spending time outside.
It also points to a possible future, a virtuous circle where nature is increasingly valued, biodiversity multiplies, and the benefits of nature exposure are more accessible — a future in which some students are already deeply engaged.
National Observer:
https://shrlnk.ca/s/04h5RSpl
