Marc Berman

speaker

637 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 6 Jul

Marc Berman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas · 360 | Marc Berman on the Science of Touching Grass · 6 Jul 2026 podcast

So everybody was their own control.

It was a within subject design.

And what we found is that when people walked in the natural environment, they showed about a 20% improvement on this backwards digit span test.

So they improved by like a digit and a half.

compared to the urban walk where they really didn't show any significant improvement.

And again, a lot of listeners might be saying, well, you know, Mark, because people probably enjoyed the nature walk more, maybe they were more motivated.

And it was certainly the case that people liked the nature walk more than the urban walk.

We did have mood measurements too, and we saw that yes, mood tended to improve after walking in nature, but we didn't see a strong correlation between the improvements in mood and the improvements in this backwards digispan task.

So that's okay.

So it wasn't like the people that were just getting happier were the ones that were showing the most improvement in the backwards digispan task.

But what I thought was a little bit more interesting is that we had participants walk at different times of the year.

Some participants walked in June when it was like 80 degrees Fahrenheit.

People loved the walk.

They said, Mark, I can't believe you're paying me to go for a walk in nature.

Healthy mood benefits, healthy backwards digit span benefits.

But we also had people walk in January when it was like 25 degrees Fahrenheit.

People said, Mark, I was freezing out there.

That was not enjoyable.

But the people that walked in January showed the same cognitive benefit, the same improvement on the backwards digital span task as the people that walked in June.

So sort of the takeaway message was you don't even have to enjoy the nature walk to get these cognitive benefits.

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