Drift — Brain Cooler

a slow touch plants a seed

the mechanism

Soft fascination

Directed attention is a finite resource: it runs out. Attention Restoration Theory shows that stimuli with nature-like qualities engage involuntary attention instead, letting the depleted system replenish.¹ Even photographs of nature measurably improve executive attention.²

What you're watching is a Gray-Scott reaction-diffusion system, the mathematics behind brain coral, fingerprints and animal markings. It grows like nature because it computes like nature: effortless to watch, impossible to predict, never repeating.

Three minutes of being away. That's the dose.

Kaplan, The restorative benefits of nature, Journal of Environmental Psychology, 1995.
Berman, Jonides & Kaplan, The cognitive benefits of interacting with nature, Psychological Science, 2008.