A new study has revealed that a simple walk in the park a day, keeps your mental fatigue away and can improve your memory. The 'Psychological Science' journal reported that researchers from the University of Michigan have found that spending time in nature may be more beneficial for mental processes than being in the urban areas. The findings of the study were based on two experiments in which researchers test how interactions with nature and urban environments would affect the attention and memory processes of people.

For the first experiment, a group of volunteers completed a task designed to challenge the memory and attention, they then took a walk, either in a park or downtown. After the walk they returned to the lab and were retested again. In another experiment, volunteers did not go for a walk after they completed the task, they simply viewed the photographs of urban environment or nature and then repeated the task.

The results of the first experiment showed that the performance on the memory and attention task was greatly improved following the walk in the park, but didn't improve for those who walked downtown. And the group who viewed the photographs of nature performed much better in the retest than the group which looked at the city scenes.

Lead author Marc G. Berman suggests that the urban environments provide a relatively complex and often confusing pattern of stimulation that requires effort to sort out and interpret. On the other hand, natural environments offer a coherent pattern of stimulation, are often perceived as restful. The study was published in a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.