Mark Berman

Thank you again for having me.

Yeah, and a lot of the research that we've done and other people have done has looked at how interacting with nature can improve your attention or your ability to focus.

And people also find that interacting with nature just makes people feel better, that it can improve your mood, that it can kind of even make you feel more connected to the rest of the world.

And so many researchers, including researchers in my lab, have found that interactions with

more connected to other people, more connected to the physical environment, and also kind of helps to make you more reflective in your thoughts.

So there's just a multitude of benefits to interacting with nature.

Yes, these were some really seminal studies done by Roger Ulrich, where Roger was really interested to see if interacting with nature could buffer people against stress.

And what Roger did was he would show people some imagery that would cause people to feel kind of stressed, like looking at a picture of a knife that's about to cut somebody's finger.

And Roger was then interested to see, okay, if after presenting people with these stressful images, if he then showed people pictures of nature or movies of nature versus pictures of a more of an urban environment or urban movies, he found that people returned more to baseline stress levels faster after seeing the nature stimulation compared to the urban stimulation, suggesting that

The natural stimulation could sort of de-stress people or even buffer them against stress.

Yeah, absolutely.

So we had done a study where we had participants and we had them walk in nature one week or walk in an urban environment a second week.

And what we found was interesting that when participants walked in nature, they showed about a 20% improvement in their ability to concentrate compared to a 50-minute walk in a more urban environment.

And another interesting element to that study too was that participants didn't even need to like the nature interaction to get the benefits.

So when we had people walk in June, when it was about 80 degrees Fahrenheit in Ann Arbor, Michigan,

participants really enjoyed the walk and they showed really large attention benefits.

But we also had some participants walk in January when it was about 25 degrees Fahrenheit and people did not like the walk in nature, but they showed the same attention improvement as the people that walked in June.

So that was very interesting that you didn't have to necessarily like the nature walk to get the benefit.

Yes, and that's a very powerful story from Betsy.

And again, too, I'm very happy that her daughter is in remission, too.