Trading Blackberry for Blackberries

Last week, the New York Times reported on five neuroscientists who had spent a week in May in remote Utah, rafting and camping and hiking in the wilderness. The object of their trip was to see how — and if — being both out of doors and out of reach of modern technological equipment might affect the brain. Does tranquility, they wanted to know, help attention, memory and learning? Does constant heavy multi-tasking with cell phones and computers and Blackberries fatigue the brain?

And so the scientists camped above a river, and when night fell admired the Big Dipper sparkling in the sky above them. They were soothed by the song of crickets and the rippling of the river.

By day, they kayaked, watched goslings swimming, hawks diving, bighorn sheep on rocky promontories. By their third day in the wilderness, time was slowing down. The scientists discovered they were becoming more reflective.

Their research continues. Was it being at one with nature or the exertion of their hiking and kayaking that brought them peace?

On the Vineyard, surely a similar study could be made. If it is exertion that the neuroscientists find renews the mind, one can find kayaking, canoeing, fishing, sailing and hiking here too. If it is oneness with nature that invigorates the brain, to do so on a summer holiday these days means avoiding farmers’ markets and the fair, Illumination Night and antiques auctions, Whaling Church lectures and concerts, and the art openings. It means instead a simple walk at a Sheriff’s Meadow or Trustees of Reservations’ property. Or perhaps it means a red-gold sunset above Menemsha, gathering beach plums at Lambert’s Cove or blackberries along the sandy roads of Aquinnah.

The Romantic poet William Wordsworth long ago put it best:

“One impulse from a vernal wood will teach you more of man, Of moral evil and of good than all the sages can.”