Effects of studying in unusual places on memory performance, mental energy, and physical wellbeing

Background
I’ve been studying biomedical engineering for two and a half years and I can already see its tremendous impact on how my mind processes things. Numbers of experiments I ran and scientific papers I had to read tend to infinity and I realized college taught me two things about life. First, I see objects and their operating as potential little research projects. Everything surrounding me raises questions. Is there any physiological basis for happiness seemingly springing from eating this hamburger? How much dopamine gets released in the brain while eating a hamburger and what other pleasurable activities does it compare to? Is the quantity of dopamine released consistent over time? Could it be modeled as a linear time-invariant system? The second thing is, I will never have an answer to any of those questions. Because no matter how simply a question might look, in the way how research works it takes long years to answer it. But that doesn’t keep me back from wondering and experimenting. Over the course of last semester, I kept running into this guy who would always study in the most obnoxious and isolated places at the most random times of the day. One time I asked him what he was doing and he simply answered he couldn’t recall as many things from studying in the library as from studying on the roof of a physics building. What an interesting hypothesis, I thought. A couple of weeks ago, I happened to have two exams in two days so I decided to test the guy’s strategy.

Methods
On a Saturday morning, I woke up at 6 am. I brushed my teeth, ate some granola, put on my flannel pants, a shirt, and a soft-shell jacket. In my leather backpack, I packed:
Italian bread
Swiss cheese
A bottle of SmartWater
A mason jar with almond milk
German candy
A camera
Signals and Systems textbook
Biology notebook
I also brought my pocket watch, phone for emergency and some cash. I rode my bike to the Commuter Rail train station in Ruggles. I got on a Franklin line train and got off at a random station that turned out to be in the small town of Islington. Then I biked for approximately an hour and half in whatever direction had the most colorful trees. On the way I stopped a couple of times to take photos. Around 10 am I found myself in a woodlands area where I chained my bicycle to a tree and climbed a small mountain. From the top I could see the Boston skyline in the distance which I estimated was around 30 miles away. There I sat on a log, drank my almond milk and started reading notes about molecular biology of a neuron. The material was mostly about all different sorts of sodium and potassium channels. After a couple of hours I got tired so I ate some bread and cheese, lay in the grass and napped for a bit. Upon waking up, I found chalk so I used the rock instead of a black board to compute Fourier transforms of waveforms that I made up. Everything was looking good, I was confident about my knowledge and I was connected to nature. But later in the afternoon it started to rain. I hid under a tree and drew a picture of a fellow snake who was minding his own business about five feet away from me. The rain wasn’t getting any better but it was getting late anyway so I went back to my bike. The ride to the train station was pretty uncomfortable and cold and when I got there, I found out there were no more trains that day. It took me two more hours to ride back to Boston, I got home late after dark and exhausted. The morning after, I wasn’t feeling like going somewhere crazy so I just stayed in and reviewed the material. And then my biology exam came. Describe the G296S mutation of KCNQ4 channel...

Results and discussion
I did well on both of my tests. As mentioned above, it is difficult to say whether studying in nature had a profound impact on the result as there is no control sample and it is also based on one trial in one person. However, I believe in its possibility based on previous studies showing that forming new memories can be associated with sensations such as taste. For example chewing the same flavored chewing gum when studying and being examined may improve performance. This is caused by neural wiring but there might also be a psychological component of association with the unusual – unusual studying experience (tasting the gum), unusual exam taking experience (same flavor). From the same perspective, a trip to nature in a busy school year is a strong experience that gets embeded deep into the memory so it in fact might enhance learning ability. To sound fancy, let’s say being in an unusual place might enhance long term potentiation in the hippocampal area. Regardless of whether this hypothesis is correct or not, one thing is absolutely certain. That day in the woods was a delightful getaway from daily routine. I left all my worries behind, got some exercise and found peace in my sould that stayed with me for about a week or so. Therefore, I conclude that trips to nature are good for the body, for the spirit, and may help with your exams.