Mark Berman

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.

In addition, the patients that had the rooms with the nature view, they used less pain medication than the patients that had the views of the brick wall.

Wow.

And, you know, people might be thinking, well, maybe patients who were healthier or younger or wealthier, maybe they got the views of nature and...

The other patients didn't, but that wasn't the case.

These patients were basically randomly assigned to these different hospital rooms.

They were just, whatever room was available, that's the room that they got, which is kind of like doing an experiment.