A World Ocean

I hope everyone is having a great World Ocean Day today, reflecting on an ocean that needs us just as much as we need it. I wrote a piece for the Scientific American Guest Blog today reflecting on our need to better understand the mind-ocean connection:

The ocean is such a ubiquitous part of our world that we mostly take it for granted. Part of the disconnect between people and the ocean is explained by distance between people and the shore – even a mile can make us half-a-world away if we never make the effort to gaze out on the blue horizon.

Another part may be our lack of basic understanding of how the ocean affects every human being on the planet their entire lives. The ocean buffers our weather, provides us foods and many of modern medicines have been discovered from decades of relentless marine research. Another part of our disconnect may be that we just don’t know how to put into words and describe the emotions of how the ocean affects us.

The latter part is a difficult concept to encapsulate. While poets, song smiths and artists have described the ocean in ways ranging from fury and fear to calm and reflective there is little in historical and modern research that have tested the waters of the neurological basis of our connection to the ocean. Only very recently has this been explored.

Go check it out in its entirety and leave a comment!