Giving Compass' Take:

• Research shows that spending time away from technology and in nature can help address issues such as mental fatigue and restoring attention. 

• How can revitalizing public spaces help encourage more individuals to spend time outside? 

•  Learn more about green spaces and their health benefits. 

Kids and adults pay a price for too much tech, and it's not wholesale.

"A growing body of research shows that juggling many tasks, as so many people do in this technological era, can divide attention and hurt learning and performance," New York Times blogger Matt Richtel writes, reporting on a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Getting more music, art, yoga, meditation, weight-lifting  — whatever — into our lives can help. But technology fasting while spending time in the natural world may be the most effective antidote.

In the 1970s, environmental psychologists Rachel and Stephen Kaplan began foundational work in the study of nature’s healing effect on the mind. Their studies suggested that contact with nature can assist with recovery from mental fatigue and can help restore attention. Meaningful contact with nature can also help reboot the brain’s ability to think. And it excites the senses.

Scientists who study human perception no longer assume we have only five senses: taste, touch, smell, sight, and hearing. The number now ranges from a conservative 10 to as many as 30, including proprioception – the awareness of our body’s position in space, of where we are. We tend to block off many of our senses when we’re staring at a screen. Nature time can literally bring us to our senses.

This is one reason conservation is so important. These days, unplugged places are getting hard to find. Even some parks and campgrounds now offer Wi-Fi — the theory being that people just won’t get outdoors if they can’t tweet. (Insert bird joke here.) For sanity, what we really need are No Wi-Fi Zones and Phone-Silent Sanctuaries. Especially for people who can’t afford a cabin on private land.

Read the full article about going on techno-fasts to reboot the mind by Richard Louv at Children & Nature Network.