Mark Berman

And then they asked them after the walk, how much did you enjoy the walk in nature?

And it turns out people really, really underestimated how much they would enjoy the walk in nature.

So their forecasts were wrong.

You know, people enjoyed the walk much more than they forecasted it to be.

And that's just about liking the walk.

I'm guessing that we also are sort of off in our forecast in terms of how helpful or restorative the walk in nature might be.

Right.

I think that could be part of it, definitely, that softly fascinating stimulation might be sort of less enjoyable or less exciting than this more harshly fascinating stimulation.

But that's also part of the phenomenon of why it might work, that it is more restful to go for the walk in nature, even if it's not as enjoyable as doing something else that might be more harshly fascinating.

So we found that just listening to nature sounds versus urban sounds, you can get some of these same benefits as walking in nature.

So you can get these improvements on tasks like the backwards digit span task and other cognitive tasks that involve directed attention, that just listening to about 10 minutes of nature sounds can improve performance on these tasks.

I would mention that, you know, we find you get the strongest benefits typically when going out in real nature, likely because real nature is more softly fascinating.

It's got the sights, the sounds, maybe even the smells or the textures that might be beneficial to us.

But it's interesting because a lot of us don't have access to real nature.

It's interesting that you can get some of these same improvements with simulated nature, like nature sounds or nature pictures or nature videos.

Well, in some countries they already are.

In the UK, they're prescribing nature walks as a therapy for depression and anxiety.

In Canada, they're also prescribing nature walks as a therapy for depression and anxiety.

I don't think anyone yet would say that interacting with nature

would be a replacement therapy for psychotherapy or pharmacological therapies for depression and anxiety, but it certainly could be a supplemental therapy.