Mark Berman

can make us feel small, but I think in a good way, where we realize, you know, we're part of something bigger.

And, you know, while I certainly was not feeling good at the time that it would pass and I would get back to being myself again.

Yeah, I think that's a really, really good point.

And also, too, that you're describing these trees that can be so old.

They do kind of have sort of the wisdom of a grandparent.

It seems like, you know, they have deep roots.

They have a long history.

It seems like there is some wisdom that's contained in these trees.

Yeah, he actually told me that when he was a kid or a teenager, he suffered from staph infections and some kidney disease.

And he would spend a lot of times, you know, sitting in clinics or hospitals.

But he much more enjoyed recuperating at home where he would

kind of lie down and out of the window there was a giant pine tree outside his window that he would look at quite often when he was recovering from these illnesses.

Yeah, it's a really incredible study and I would say one of the most seminal works in kind of environmental psychology.

And what Roger did was he studied patient recovery from gallbladder surgery

on a single corridor in a hospital in Philadelphia.

And what Roger was interested in looking at were the views out of the windows of these hospital rooms.

So some of the hospital rooms had some modest views of nature out of the window, like some trees or some shrubs or some grass.

But other rooms on this hospital corridor had views of like a brick wall of the other side of the hospital.

And Roger was interested in seeing, does the room that people are in and the view that they have out the window have any impact on recovery from gallbladder surgery?

And incredibly, he found that patients that had the views of modest nature out of their window recovered about a day earlier from gallbladder surgery compared to the patients who had rooms of a brick wall.