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

You do obviously have to enjoy the nature walk to get the mood benefits, but you don't have to enjoy the nature walk to get the cognitive benefits.

And I think...

That's interesting because that's somewhat counterintuitive that this isn't some kind of hedonic kind of response like, oh, I like eating chocolate and, you know, I eat some chocolate.

I feel good that there's something deeper going on there in terms of why or how nature might be improving people's cognitive performance.

Absolutely.

And, you know, we try to tell people before again, this isn't an IQ test, but it's, yeah, it is anxiety provoking.

And then, you know, that could also be part of the phenomenon too, that if nature is sort of relaxing us a little bit more, maybe you can do, perform better.

And somewhat related to that, Sean, we repeated this same experiment, but this time with participants who were diagnosed with clinical depression.

And clinical depression often is characterized by what's called negative rumination, that people kind of repetitively think about negative thoughts and feelings over and over again.

And we kind of wondered, we actually had an NIH grant at that time to study people with depression and look for kind of working memory deficits for people with depression.

And we thought, oh, we had this interesting result with nature.

what's this gonna look like for people who are suffering from depression?

It might be that if you go for a walk alone, maybe that's going to increase rumination.

It's gonna give you more opportunity to ruminate.

So actually there, we took these participants who had been diagnosed with clinical depression, we did the whole same walk in the park procedure that I outlined before, but this time we had people think about a negative thought or memory that was bothering them,

before they went on the walk.

So we were sort of inducing them to ruminate beforehand and we found even stronger results here.

So again, the procedure was all within subject, you know, participants walked in both nature and urban, but this time we had them ruminate about a negative thought or memory before the walk and they showed even stronger results

improvements in backwards digi-span performance after the nature walk relative to the to the urban walk and you know um i know this isn't really a self-help kind of podcast but now there's actually you know in the uk and in canada um physicians are prescribing walks in nature as sort of a supplemental therapy for people suffering from depression and anxiety so yeah

Again, we're going to dig in, I think, a little more about what mechanisms are going on here, but I think many of your listeners will have this idea that being in nature is sort of calming.

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