How Nature Heals Us

The transcript below may be for an earlier version of this episode. Our transcripts are provided by various partners and may contain errors or deviate slightly from the audio.

Shankar Vedantam: Feeling a little frazzled as 2025 comes to a close? Put your to-do list on pause and join me for an evening of science, storytelling and connection. I'm bringing Hidden Brain's Perceptions Tour to the Orpheum Theatre in Los Angeles on November 22nd. I'll be sharing seven key psychological insights from the first decade of the show. To get your tickets, go to hiddenbrain.org/tour. I'm also excited to announce that we are adding more dates to the tour for 2026. I'll be in Philadelphia on March 21st and New York City on March 25th. Hidden Brain listeners get a first crack at tickets to those shows. The pre-sale begins at 3 p.m. Eastern on November 3rd and runs through November 5th. To get your tickets to our 2026 shows, go to hiddenbrain.org/tour and use the promo code BRAIN. No promo code is needed after November 5th. I hope to see you there. And here's today's show.



This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. When we are facing struggles with our thoughts or our emotions, many of us turn first to medication or therapy as solutions. The share of American adults reporting they took prescription drugs for mental health conditions stood at 19% in 2022. That's according to an analysis of government data by the Kaiser Family Foundation. That's millions of people taking drugs for anxiety, for depression, for attention deficit disorder. Millions more are in therapy, working through their challenges with a counselor. For many people, such measures are enormously helpful, even essential. At the same time, it may be the case that we are overlooking a potential source of relief that is literally right outside our door. This remedy costs nothing, has no known side effects, and is often delightfully pleasant. We are talking about spending time in nature. The capacity of the natural world to soothe and refresh our sensibilities has been known for centuries. But it's only recently that scientists have begun to identify exactly what it is about the outdoors that has such a powerful effect on our moods and our minds.



"Nature is filled with curved edges. And one thing that we found in our research is that people really like images that have more curved edges, even built images. So images of architectural scenes that don't have any nature in them. If the architecture has more curved edges, people tend to like that architecture more."



Shankar Vedantam: If you struggle with the ability to think clearly, to focus your attention, to control maladaptive behaviors, this episode and a companion story on Hidden Brain Plus are definitely for you. Why nature is good medicine, this week on Hidden Brain.



Many of us enjoy an occasional stroll in the park or a hike in the woods. It feels good to see beautiful trees, to hear birds sing, and to breathe fresh air. But might nature offer more than a fleeting respite from our time-pressured, harried lives? At the University of Chicago, psychologist Marc Berman studies how spending time in nature can help our minds. Marc Berman, welcome to Hidden Brain.



Marc Berman: Thank you for having me on the show.



Shankar Vedantam: I want to start with a few examples of the phenomenon you've been studying, Marc. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, the artist Jackson Pollock was living and working in New York City. What was his state of mind, especially after his father died in 1933?



Marc Berman: Well, it wasn't good. You know, Jackson Pollock moved from California to New York to be with his brothers. When his father died, he had, you know, extreme depression. And alcoholism and, you know, he was taking sculpting classes, but he was just not very happy, very mentally disturbed, having a lot of problems with depression and alcoholism.



Shankar Vedantam: I understand that Jackson Pollock's volatility, combined with this heavy drinking, led to some very public and private meltdowns?



Marc Berman: Yes. At an art gallery, he yelled that he was a much better artist than anyone that had their art being displayed in the art gallery. And subsequently he lost the ability to be in that art gallery. He got into an argument one time and was so angry that he turned over a whole table that had all of the food on the table and like 12 roast beef dinners were just flying all over the place that it was a huge mess, essentially ending the dinner party right then and there.



Shankar Vedantam: So at one point, he gets romantically involved with a painter, Lee Krasner, who wants to get him away from New York City. What was her plan, Marc?



Marc Berman: I think she wanted to get him out of the New York environment, where, you know, there were so many bars that he frequented, to remove him from that environment, maybe also removing him from some of the people that he was hanging around at the time, and to maybe sort of take him to a more natural, a quieter environment out in Long Island, that the fresh air might be good for him.



Shankar Vedantam: Do you know what this place was like that they ended up moving out to?



Marc Berman: I think it was like in Springs, Long Island, which is in East Hampton, and it was a pretty modest home, but it had like a barn and maybe an acre of land.



Marc Berman: There was a lot of sort of beautiful nature to look at, and it did seem to inspire some changes in Jackson.



Shankar Vedantam: What changes?



Marc Berman: He was no longer as volatile. He was no longer as depressed. And it seemed like being in that environment was also quite inspirational for his artwork. He would purchase these large yachting canvases, and he would spread them out in the barn, in the backyard of his home. And he started to do his famous paint splattering, where he would spill the paint and do different things with brush strokes that were more organic and matched the organic properties of nature. And I think people think that being out in nature inspired this new art form for him.



Shankar Vedantam: Now, I understand that he continued to have trouble the rest of his life. So it's not like being out in nature was a panacea. It's not like he basically, you know, turned over a completely new leaf. But it did sound as if he got his life together, partly as a result by being out in nature.



Marc Berman: That's right. And, you know, we would never argue that depression or alcoholism are easy problems to solve. But it does seem to be the case that people's interactions with nature can be very beneficial for people who are suffering from depression and anxiety or ADHD, even things like PTSD. So while, yes, I wouldn't say that being in nature can solve all of these problems, it does seem to be the case that being and interacting with nature can help with many of these problems.



Shankar Vedantam: In more recent years, Marc, the Naval Health Research Center in San Diego, California, has run a program to treat members of the US military. What kinds of problems are these veterans struggling with?



Marc Berman: Often they have problems that involve maybe developing depression or post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD. Some of them have traumatic brain injury or TBI. There's a lot of physical and mental health conditions that unfortunately a lot of these service members develop from their time in the military.



Shankar Vedantam: So the psychologists who work with this population take an unusual approach to treatment. What do they do?



Marc Berman: Yeah, so they actually had about 20 or so of these military veterans engage in a six-week surf therapy, therapeutic session, where for three or four hours in a group setting in a southern California beach, they taught these veterans how to surf, thinking that this kind of program could actually be beneficial to them from a mental and physical health perspective.



Shankar Vedantam: I'm curious, why surfing?



Marc Berman: That's a good question. I think in part because they had some feeling that being in nature might be beneficial, so being out in the ocean, seeing the ocean waves, being on the beach, having the sights, smells, and even the textures of the ocean could be beneficial. It was also somewhat of a social activity because they were taking these veterans out in groups of about 20 people, and when you're trying to catch a wave, sometimes there's a lot of sitting on your board, waiting to catch your wave. And of course, too, there's also an exercise component to it. Surfing is challenging. It's a hard physical exercise, and I think they probably also thought that that would be helpful as well.



Shankar Vedantam: So the psychologists at the Naval Health Research Center wrote up the results of the surf therapy program in a journal article published in 2019.



Shankar Vedantam: What did they report?



Marc Berman: They found that PTSD symptoms and depression symptoms went down when these surfers were involved in the program, and they also had sort of improved moods, so more positive moods, less negative moods, and that the severity of their depression and anxiety symptoms tended to decrease amongst these surf therapy participants.



Shankar Vedantam: I understand that you yourself sought solace and comfort in nature when you were a stressed out graduate student at the University of Michigan. Where would you go when you were feeling at your wit's end, Marc?



Marc Berman: Yeah, the two main places that I would go to were Barton Park, that was kind of right on the Huron River in Ann Arbor, Michigan. And I would also often go to the Ann Arbor Botanical Gardens, which was a little bit farther away from campus, a little bit farther away from where I lived, but a very beautiful botanical garden that had a lot of nature trails that you could walk on.



Shankar Vedantam: I understand there was one particular tree at Barton Park that caught your eye?



Marc Berman: Yeah, there was this gigantic oak tree in the middle of the trail on Barton Park. It was almost off by itself, this singular oak tree that had a really, really giant trunk. And it always kind of caught my eye. You definitely could hear the wind kind of rustling through its leaves. And, you know, sometimes I even felt like I would kind of, you know, talk to this majestic tree that I kind of would anthropomorphize this tree that it could listen to me and maybe kind of help me sort out some of my problems.



Shankar Vedantam: I understand that toward the end of your time in graduate school, your longtime girlfriend broke up with you. Tell me what happened and the effect this had on you, Marc.



Marc Berman: Yeah, it was very difficult. And I'm sure a lot of people have experienced difficult breakups. But it was, you know, one of my more serious relationships. Maybe I thought this would be a very long term, you know, relationship, possibly somebody that I would get married to. So that was a big blow to me. And I was seeing friends of mine that were getting married or buying houses or, you know, having kids. They all seemed to be kind of passing me. So it was a very kind of hard time. A lot of things compounded where it did seem like, you know, a lot of my friends were passing me by. And I was kind of stuck still maybe being a kid, not really having grown up yet.



Shankar Vedantam: I'm wondering how you dealt with this breakup and whether nature played any role in you finding yourself.



Marc Berman: Well, it certainly did. I immediately went to Barton Park and looked for that big oak tree to share my sorrow and try to see if that oak tree could heal me a bit.



Shankar Vedantam: Standing beneath the majestic branches and the gently rustling leaves, Marc confided his sorrows to the tree.



Marc Berman: I basically said, you know, it's over with me and Heather. Now I've got to move out and find a new place to live. I'm single, I don't have much money, and I'm nearly 30. My friends are buying houses, they're getting married, they're having kids themselves. You know, I just felt like a loser, and kind of thinking, what am I doing wrong?



Shankar Vedantam: What was the effect of saying this to the tree?



Marc Berman: Well, initially, it didn't help too much, but I think it felt good to get it out. When you're in front of majestic nature, and, you know, to me, this tree was fairly awe-inspiring, it does sort of make your problems feel a little bit smaller that we're part of something larger, and the vastness of nature 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.



Shankar Vedantam: You know, sometimes when I'm out in the woods and I see one of these trees that's been around for 50, 60, 70, 80 years, I can't help but think about all the things that this tree has seen, and all of the historical events that it's witnessed. I mean, there are trees around that are 200 years old, and you realize that they have seen and been around so much. And in some ways, as you talk to the tree about your breakup, you're putting things in perspective, not just spatially, but also in a question of time.



Marc Berman: 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.



Shankar Vedantam: An artist finds relief from his roiling emotions and destructive drinking alongside a creek in rural Long Island. Military veterans recover from trauma as they surf the waves of the Pacific. And a scientist finds that in the midst of stress and heartbreak, a tree can provide the soothing support he needs. What is it about being outdoors that soothes and heals us, allowing us to become focused and productive? When we come back, the science behind the power of nature to restore our minds. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.



Shankar Vedantam: This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. Have you had experiences in nature that have proved restorative or cleansing? If you have a story about a time in your life when the great outdoors proved helpful to your inner state of mind, please find a quiet room and record a short voice memo. Email it to us at ideas at hiddenbrain.org. Two or three minutes is plenty. Please use the subject line, nature. Marc Berman is a psychologist at the University of Chicago. For many years now, he's been interested in the science of why nature seems to help our minds. Marc, one of the leading lights in your field is a man named Roger Ulrich. When he was a teenager, he was often sick. How did he turn to nature to help him?



Marc Berman: 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.



Shankar Vedantam: So he went on to become a researcher, and in the early 1980s, he conducted a remarkable study at a hospital in Philadelphia. What did he study and what did he find?



Marc Berman: 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. 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. And it's just amazing that being randomly assigned to the room that had the modest nature view could speed recovery and also cause people to use less pain medication. Roger was really interested also in stress and stress responses. So he believed that interactions with nature could remediate stress responses. And he thought that was the mechanism behind why interacting with nature was having different beneficial effects.



Shankar Vedantam: Over time, many other theories have been advanced about why nature could have positive effects on our minds. One came from the evolutionary biologist EO. Wilson. He called it the Biophilia Hypothesis.



Marc Berman: So the Biophilia Hypothesis, in a nutshell, is this idea that humans have an inherent love of nature and the natural world and other living organisms. And these tend to be places that we would say would be very good habitats for humans to live in. And there was actually a researcher, J. Appleton, who proposed this other theory called Prospect Refuge Theory, that environments that had high prospect, meaning places where you could draw food and water, but also that had high refuge, places where you could kind of hide and be safe, would be the most kind of preferred environments. And that also kind of matches this idea of humans kind of liking natural environments that have a lot of plants and trees, but also water.



Shankar Vedantam: As you began to conduct your own research in this field, Marc, you were working with a mentor named Stephen Kaplan. Steve believed that the benefits of exposure to nature had much to do with attention. And he would often talk about how humans have two distinct types of attention. What are these two forms of attention?



Marc Berman: Yeah, so Steve coined or developed this hypothesis called the attention restoration theory, and he did this in partnership with his wife, Rachel Kaplan. And one of the main tenets of attention restoration theory is that humans have two main kinds of attention. And one kind of attention is called directed attention. And that's the kind of attention where you as the individual person are deciding what to pay attention to. So presumably, anybody listening to the show is deciding to pay attention to what we're talking about. And this directed attention is the kind of attention that we use a lot in schools and at work. It's thought to be fatigable or depletable that you can only sort of direct your attention for so long before you become mentally fatigued and you can't really focus anymore. And we've all had that sensation kind of at the end of a long workday where you might be just staring at the computer screen and nothing's really happening and you just can't focus or concentrate to get your work done. We would call that a directed attention fatigue state. And that's a good time to take a break.



Shankar Vedantam: So Steve argued that there was a second form of attention as well. What is the second form?



Marc Berman: Right, in the second form of attention, Steve called involuntary attention. And that's the kind of attention that's automatically captured by interesting stimulation in the environment. So bright lights, loud noises, they automatically capture our attention, and we don't really have any control over it. And it's thought that involuntary attention is less susceptible to fatigue or depletion. And you don't often hear people say, oh, I can't look at that beautiful waterfall anymore. It's just too beautiful. It's too tiring to look at. I have to stop looking at it. So the idea behind attention restoration theory is that if you can find environments that don't place a lot of demands on directed attention, while simultaneously having interesting stimulation that activates the involuntary attention, you could restore or replenish this precious directed attention resource. And we think that a lot of natural environments sort of meet these criteria.



Shankar Vedantam: Not all forms of involuntary attention are restorative. Compare the experience of watching ocean waves at a beach, for example, to the experience of walking through Times Square in New York City.



Marc Berman: When you're looking at those waves at the ocean, it captures your involuntary attention, but it doesn't really capture all of your attentional resources. You can kind of mind wander and think about other things while you're looking at those waves. When you're walking through Times Square, it's also very interesting. There's a lot of really interesting stimulation in Times Square that automatically captures involuntary attention, but it sort of captures all of your attentional resources. You can't really mind wander or think about other things when you're in Times Square. And Steve and Rachel thought that that kind of stimulation is not really going to be able to rest our directed attention abilities, that it might actually fatigue us even further.



Shankar Vedantam: This is a crucial point, and I want to take a second to underline it. Watching a waterfall, or the waves, or the clouds drifting across the sky allows our minds to relax, to wander. These softly fascinating scenes are very different than the harsh demands of being in a hyper stimulating environment like Times Square. You cannot let your attention wander. You might get bumped into by hordes of tourists, or run over by a cab. Scientists have also theorized that natural landscapes and soundscapes are just more easily absorbed by our brains.



Marc Berman: There are certain simulation in the environment that our brains process more fluently, that it's just easier to process certain stimulation. And that's also kind of related to soft fascination, that softly fascinating stimulation might also be sort of easier to process. But what does that really mean? And so we've started to try to quantify what it means for different stimulation to be processed more fluently or more easily. And it seems like that seems to be occurring more for natural images versus urban images.



Shankar Vedantam: You know, it's interesting, as I'm sitting here talking to you, I'm able to look out at a window and I'm seeing a tree, and the tree has, you know, probably 5,000 leaves that I can see right now through the window. But of course, I'm just taking in all of those leaves in one big bite. I'm not actually noticing that each of those leaves has a different vein structure and the light is hitting that leaf differently. I'm just taking it in as a tree. And that's what you're talking about here.



Marc Berman: That's right. That's right. Versus in the urban environment, you might actually be cataloging all the different objects, you know, that there's a Volkswagen Beetle, a bicycle, you know, Gothic architecture. And, you know, we're just labeling and quantifying all of that information, which is taking up more room. Whereas what you're saying, when you're looking at that tree, you're compressing that representation to just be a tree and not to, you know, something that's got 5,000 little extra parts for every single leaf.



Shankar Vedantam: One particular aspect of natural settings that might affect us is the prevalence of curved edges. Talk about this idea, Marc, why would this matter?



Marc Berman: Well, it's interesting that natural settings tend to have more curved edges. You know, if you imagine a tree, a tree's got curvy branches, tend to have curvy leaves. An ocean, the waves are curvy, the coastline is curvy. So nature is filled with curved edges, and one thing that we found in our research is that people really like images that have more curved edges, even built images. So images of architectural scenes that don't have any nature in them, if the architecture has more curved edges, people tend to like that architecture more.



Shankar Vedantam: Another aspect of natural settings that might affect our minds is the presence of what mathematicians and physicists call fractals. What are fractals, Marc, and how do they show up in nature?



Marc Berman: Yeah, so if we imagine a snowflake, the snowflake has a characteristic shape. If we put that snowflake under a microscope and zoom in, you'll also see some of the same shape. And if you zoom in some more, you also see the same shape. So that it doesn't really matter what spatial scale you look at the snowflake, it's got the same characteristic shape. So we would say then that the snowflake is scale-free. It doesn't matter what spatial scale you look at the snowflake, it's got the same characteristic shape. Or mathematicians would say that that snowflake is more fractal. It's got more of a fractal aspect to it. And you can imagine the same thing with a tree. A tree has a trunk, which then branches out into other branches, that branches out into smaller branches, that might branch out to even smaller branches, that branches out into leaves. And then there's a big vein in the leaf that might branch out into other veins of the leaf. And so it might not matter as much at what spatial scale you look at the tree, it's kind of got this same branching structure. And it turns out nature is filled with this scale-free or fractal stimulation.



Shankar Vedantam: What do you think the role is of these curved edges and fractals in the effects that nature is having on our minds?



Marc Berman: It could be that curved edges and in particular fractalness might be easier to process. So in particular, if we think about the fractals again, because it's the same shape that's kind of repeating at different scales, you may not have to process or remember every single detail because it's repeated. But I also think, too, and we don't have all the answers to this, it might have to do with an aesthetic preference that people kind of like symmetry and this fractalness also has some symmetrical properties. People tend not to like sharp edges or straight lines as much. You can imagine some buildings that people don't enjoy very much tend to be brutalist architecture that's very rectilinear. People tend to prefer more gothic architecture that has more intricacy or you could imagine a building designed by Gaudi in Barcelona that's very curvy, that's mimicking the patterns of nature. People really seem to enjoy having curved structure in the environment.



Shankar Vedantam: Now, of course, all of us have been out on a beautiful day in the woods or by a beach or in a mountainside and the weather is great and everything looks beautiful. But you found that even when nature is unpleasant, if you go out in the middle of a snowstorm and the roads are slick and the sidewalks are icy, even then nature can have benefits for us.



Marc Berman: That's right. One of our major studies where we tested directed attention theory involved bringing people into the laboratory and giving them some objective cognitive task to measure their directed attention abilities. And one of these tasks was called the backwards digit span task. So participants would hear digits out loud at a pace of about one digit per second. So four, seven, three. And the participants would need to repeat those digits back in backwards order. So three, seven, four. And we kept increasing the number of digits up to nine digits.



Three, one, five, one, six. So at around five digits, the task gets very difficult. So participants came to the laboratory. We gave them this difficult backwards digit span task. And then we gave them a map that either had them walk through the Ann Arbor Arboretum. That was our nature walk. Or we had them walk through busy downtown Ann Arbor, through busy Washtenaw Avenue. And then participants returned back to the lab to repeat this backwards digit span task again. The main effect was we found that participants improved their ability on this backwards digit span task by about 20% after the walk in nature. But not after the walk in the urban environment. So they improved by about a digit and a half just after a 50-minute walk. And many people might be thinking, well, maybe it's just because walking in nature is pleasant and people really like the walk in nature. And it's true. Participants did enjoy the walk in nature for the most part. But we didn't see a strong correlation between how much people liked the walk or how much their mood improved on the walk in nature, being correlated with their improvements on this working memory task, this backwards digit span task. So it wasn't the case that just the people who loved the nature walk so much were the ones who showed the biggest improvement. And an even stronger demonstration of this is that we had participants walk at different times of the year. So some people walked in June when it was about 80 degrees Fahrenheit in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and participants said, Oh, Marc, I loved the walk. I can't believe you're paying me to go for a walk in nature. They showed really healthy mood improvements, and they also showed really healthy improvements to direct the tension as measured with this backwards digit span task. But we also had people walk in January when it was 25 degrees Fahrenheit, and participants said, Marc, I was freezing out there. I did not like that walk in nature, but those participants that walked in January showed the same cognitive improvement as the people that walked in June. So sort of the short answer is to get these cognitive benefits, you don't even need to enjoy the nature walk to get the benefit.



Shankar Vedantam: I mean, that's striking, because I think most of us assume that the subjective experience of the walk, the fact that we like the beach, we like the water, we like the sunshine. But I think the study might be arguing that in fact, the effects that nature is having on our mind are in some ways independent of our enjoyment of it.



Marc Berman: I think that's right to some extent. So I definitely don't think all of these effects are driven by preference. And you even have people that say, you know, I'm a city lover. I don't like being in nature. And we don't think that really matters. However, I think if we would have sent those participants in January on the walk in nature without a coat and they were so uncomfortable, I think that would have used a lot of directed attention and they wouldn't have seen the nature effects. Or if you're walking, you know, in June, and there's so many mosquitoes that you're getting eaten alive and it's so uncomfortable, I don't think we would see the effects. But I think as long as basic safety and comfort needs are met, you don't have to really love the nature interaction to get these cognitive benefits. So you can go on a cloudy day. You could go on a rainy day. You can go on a cold day. As long as your basic safety and comfort needs are met, we think you can get these benefits.



Shankar Vedantam: Being in nature boosts our mood, reduces our stress and restores our attention. When we come back, how we can intentionally harness the power of nature to make our own minds work better. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.



Shankar Vedantam: This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. Have you had experiences in nature that have proved restorative or cleansing? If you have a story about a time in your life where the great outdoors proved helpful to your inner state of mind, please find a quiet room and record a short voice memo. Email it to us at ideas at hiddenbrain.org. Two or three minutes is plenty. Please use the subject line, nature. Marc Berman is a psychologist at the University of Chicago. He's the author of Nature and the Mind, the Science of How Nature Improves Cognitive, Physical and Social Well-Being. Marc, when you've been working hard, you like to take a break by watching sports. You once assumed that this activity was relaxing and refreshing, but you don't believe this anymore?



Marc Berman: No, unfortunately. I think it actually watching sports is not really softly fascinating. That's a bit harshly fascinating. And even when my team won, sometimes I would feel a bit irritated after watching. Now, I still love to watch some of my favorite teams, but I don't do that as a rest. That's not a rest. And I think, unfortunately, there are many other things that we do in the modern world, maybe scrolling social media, looking at our news feed, surfing the internet that might feel like restful activities, but that actually may be depleting activities.



Shankar Vedantam: You know, I was talking with some friends just a couple of weeks ago, and they were telling me about watching a sports match that was very thrilling and had a very, very dramatic conclusion. And at the end of it, you know, they were describing almost what felt like watching a horror movie, because they said, you know, they were literally crouching behind a couch, you know, watching the TV, afraid of what it was gonna show them, or covering their faces and looking at the TV through a small gap in their fingers. And I think that speaks to the idea that this is not, you know, calmly restorative TV watching.



Marc Berman: That's right. I can sympathize with those feelings. I know what that feels like. And again, I'm not saying that it's bad or that you want to avoid that at all costs. Just don't think of that as being a restful activity, because it probably isn't.



Shankar Vedantam: So Marc, we know from lots of lines of psychological research that people misjudge what will make them happy. You say that this is the case when it comes to spending time in nature. How so?



Marc Berman: Yeah, there was an interesting study done by some researchers where they asked participants, how much do you think you would enjoy going for a walk in nature? So they sort of had a forecast, how much would they like the walk in nature? And then they had another group of participants walk in nature, 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. 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.



Shankar Vedantam: I'm wondering if this is connected to the fact that nature is softly fascinating, Marc. Because for example, if you asked my friends who watched that very exciting match, was the match exciting, they would have no problem telling you the match was very exciting and was absolutely and absolutely had to be watched. On the other hand, when someone goes for a nice walk, precisely because it's softly fascinating, it hasn't captured our attention. If you ask someone to forecast how exciting the next walk is going to be, how fun it's going to be, we underestimate it.



Marc Berman: 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.



Shankar Vedantam: We've been talking a lot about how we're affected by what we see outdoors, but your research has looked at the sounds of nature and how they can make a difference. What do you find, Marc?



Marc Berman: 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, and that just listening to about 10 minutes of nature sounds can improve performance on these tasks. And 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.



Shankar Vedantam: Do you think doctors should be prescribing nature the way they now prescribe medications, Marc?



Marc Berman: 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. And people have also found that interacting with nature can be really helpful for kids with ADHD, that brief interactions with nature, like 20 minutes walk in nature, can be as beneficial as a dose of Ritalin. So I think the research is definitely not there yet in terms of having interactions with nature be a replacement for any validated forms of therapy for depression and anxiety. But I do think there's already becoming evidence, and doctors are already starting to take this work seriously, that interactions with nature could be a supplement to existing therapies for like depression and anxiety.



Shankar Vedantam: You know, I remember once taking the elevator to the top of the Washington Monument here in Washington, DC. And from that height in my home city looking north, I could see that one quadrant of my city was very green and leafy, while the other quadrant that I could see was really barren. Now the leafy quadrant happened to also be one of the richest parts of Washington, DC, and the barren portion happened to be one of the poorer parts of Washington, DC. Can you talk a moment about how our access to nature is often connected to our socio-economic status that access to nature is becoming one more way in which social inequality can manifest itself?



Marc Berman: Right. Unfortunately, there is a correlation between socio-economics and access to green space, and you see that in a lot of cities in the US, for example. And there's a lot of different reasons why that might be the case. And even people have found that redlined neighborhoods have less green space and less biodiversity than non-redlined neighborhoods. So there's deep historical reasons for a lot of this. The air might be cleaner in wealthier neighborhoods. There's likely less pollutants in wealthier neighborhoods than poor neighborhoods. And I think it's sort of an environmental justice issue that this isn't just a nice amenity that wealthy people have. This is something fundamental to all humans that we need to have access to these natural spaces and if we don't have it, people are going to suffer.



Shankar Vedantam: I understand that you and your wife Katie had a difficult decision to make a number of years ago when the two of you were living in Michigan. What was this decision and how did nature end up playing a role in helping you make this decision, Marc?



Marc Berman: I had a job offer in New Jersey of a professorship. They're very hard to come by. I really wanted to take the job, but my wife Katie and I, we were pregnant at the time too, and Katie just felt uncomfortable kind of going to a new place where we didn't have a family to have our child there, so she wanted to go back and be near a family in Toronto. It was a very difficult decision. We were arguing a lot about it. It was a very challenging time, but we did often talk about this difficult decision in nature. I remember walking through the botanical gardens a number of times with Katie talking about all the pros and cons of it. I don't think these were necessarily restorative walks in nature. But again, I think being in nature afforded us some directed attention benefits. And we did decide that I would give up this job and that I would try to get a postdoc job in Toronto. And we would have our first child in Toronto. I do remember one time too, on one of these walks as we were in the Botanical Gardens, we did see a turtle like burying her eggs on the path. And I think, you know, it just kind of made me think, you know, while this is very hard to give up this job and these jobs are very difficult to come by, focusing more on the family and what would make the family most comfortable, what would be the best environment for the family was probably the best decision.



Shankar Vedantam: Swimming in the ocean, tromping through a field, or wandering through a forest can do wonders for our mental clarity and our attention span. But most of us spend the bulk of our time inside buildings. When we come back, bringing the benefits of nature indoors. You're listening to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam.



This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. We're talking today to psychologist Marc Berman about nature's effect on the mind. If you have follow up questions, comments, or stories about your experience of nature that you would be comfortable sharing with the Hidden Brain audience, please record a voice memo on your phone and email it to us at ideas at hiddenbrain.org. Use the subject line, nature. Marc Berman has spent years studying how outdoor spaces influence us. But the fact is that many of us spend most of our time indoors. Is it possible to reap the rewards of nature from within a building or even inside a car? Marc, you say that we can intentionally natureize our interior spaces, bring elements of nature indoors. Before we talk about the how, let's talk about the why. Why would we do this?



Marc Berman: Well, we would do this because we find that even having plants, even if they're artificial plants in our homes, in our offices, can also lead to some benefits. So, and oftentimes it's hard to bring real nature into indoor spaces. Maybe we don't have enough natural light or it's difficult to water plants on a regular schedule. But it's interesting to note that other researchers have found that bringing nature indoors, even if it's fake nature, can have some of these similar benefits.



Shankar Vedantam: Talk about how you yourself have tried to natureize the spaces in which you live and work.



Marc Berman: Well, right now, I'm in my home office. I actually have two plants behind me. They're actually artificial plants. Those aren't real plants. They look fairly real, which I think is good. But I don't have enough natural light here to actually get real plants in the office. In other portions of our house, we do actually have real plants. So we get some nice light through one of our bay windows. We have a few different plants there. So we try to bring in real nature where we can into our home and where we can't. We usually utilize some fake nature. It also so happens that my mother-in-law is a little bit of an artist. My sister is a little bit of an artist. We've commissioned them to make some nature paintings that we have hanging in our home. So there are many different kinds of things that we can do. Some of my kids actually like to sleep with a sound machine. Often we use nature sounds for them to be playing in the background to help them sleep. So I think there's a number of different things that we can do to nature our spaces.



Shankar Vedantam: I understand that one time you were visiting your parents in Detroit, and you found that an airport hotel had found a way to nature its indoor spaces. Tell me about this experience.



Marc Berman: Yeah, it was pretty cool. So in Detroit Metro Airport, kind of like off to the side, there's the Westin Hotel. And I remember my dad telling me that it's an interesting spot to check out. So I remember taking the escalator down, and it was incredible. They had these fake bamboo trees that were out in the lobby of the Westin Hotel and also some water features. And even though it was fake, it almost felt like you were in a different world. And you could feel almost the restorative power of these natural elements, even though a lot of them were fake. And so every time that I would go to the Detroit Airport, I would often try to go to the Westin Hotel. And there was a little actually TSA security gate there. So you could go through security there. And I would try to do that on a regular basis so I could get exposed to that kind of very interesting natural environment that they had created in the lobby of the Westin Hotel.



Shankar Vedantam: I've noticed that as I go through airports nowadays, that some of them are making a deliberate attempt to bring the outdoors indoors. And sometimes, as you say, this is fake nature. I've sometimes flown through the airport in Doha, in Qatar, and they have reimagined an entire section of the airport to make it look like almost like a wildlife habitat. Now, there are some actual trees, but the grass is really just green carpeting. But I find that it's very restorative to stop in this area during stopovers on a long flight.



Marc Berman: Yes, and I've seen it too. Even airports now are starting to have kind of green walls. Oftentimes, it's also kind of near security, and I'm wondering if they have it in there to kind of calm people down as they're waiting in line to go through these security checks. So I think a lot of these airport designers are having the intuition that incorporating some nature into the airport is going to be beneficial. And people have tried to do similar things in hospitals where, again, oftentimes in hospitals, the environment requires to be sterile, but it has to be sterile. But people have brought in fake nature into hospitals, and they found that it can reduce pain for people that are getting painful operations. They can make people feel like their stay in the hospitals more enjoyable. And this is even when they know, the patients know, that the plants are fake. And it can also have benefits to the people working in the hospital, that it can maybe help to give them these, as Rachel Kaplan would say, these micro doses of nature. They could give them these little boosts of directed attention.



Shankar Vedantam: Very often, when we're trying to get somewhere, we focus on getting from point A to point B as quickly and efficiently as possible. Marc, you say that we should be asking how green our route can be, and in fact, you're exploring the development of an app to help people identify the most nature-filled way to walk somewhere?



Marc Berman: Right, and this is work that I've done in collaboration with one of my former students, Kate Shirts, where we developed this app called Retune. And so, restoring through urban nature experiences. And, you know, if you go on Google Maps, it's going to route you on the shortest or most efficient path between point A to point B. But what we try to do with Retune is try to map people on the walking route that will increase their nature exposure, so that would increase the number of trees that they would be exposed to, to reduce the amount of noise that they would be exposed to. And so what happens with this app is that the path that it might suggest for you might be a little bit longer, but you would be exposed to, you know, more of this softly fascinating natural stimulation that we think would boost cognitive abilities.



Shankar Vedantam: Marc you found yourself inspired by certain buildings that incorporate elements of nature. Talk about this, how architecture in some ways can itself be a way of bringing nature indoors.



Marc Berman: Yeah, it's really interesting to think about how some of these nature results also might relate to architecture. And, you know, one thing, I don't know if you've ever been to the campus of the University of Chicago, but it's a very beautiful campus, in part because the buildings are just beautiful. There's these beautiful gothic architecture buildings that actually mimic a lot of the patterns in nature. There's a lot of intricacy to the buildings. They have some of the same fractal or scale-free components that real nature has. They have a lot of the curved edge structure that real nature has. And it just feels like it's possible that it might be having some cognitive benefits to us. And I had an architecture student, Alex Coburn, contact me, where he was interested in seeing if buildings, building facades or building interiors, if they mimic patterns in nature, did they also yield some benefits? So he and I and a few other people designed some studies where we had people look at different architectural facades. You know, these would be buildings for hospitals or religious buildings or government buildings. And in those buildings, we also quantified how fractal the buildings were, how much curved structure the buildings had. And basically, what we found was that the buildings had more curved edge structure, had more fractalness. People said they liked the buildings more, and that they actually thought that the buildings were more natural than buildings that were sort of more rectilinear, that had just straight lines. And the same was also true of building interiors. So just like not all nature is created equal, not all of the built environment is created equal, and it does have me thinking or wondering whether even without actually using any real nature, if we designed the built environment with a lot of these natural patterns, could that yield some of these cognitive benefits? And the architect Christopher Alexander, you know, wrote many books about this, encouraging architects to try to mimic patterns of nature in their architecture, that that would lead to more vibrant buildings that would make people feel more connected to the environment, but might also induce some different psychological benefits. And I do remember one time my colleague Candice Vogler, who's a philosopher, she joked with me one time that the Durham Chapel at Duke is so beautiful that it does the praying for you. And, you know, I kind of wonder, you know, is the architecture, you know, at the University of Chicago, you know, so grand, does it do the studying, you know, for you? And, you know, and I remember being a student at the University of Michigan, and I would often try to study in the law library that had this really grand and intricate reading room versus studying in the undergraduate library that was called The Ugly. Because the law library just, it just felt so much better to be in there with all of that beautiful architecture.



Shankar Vedantam: In our companion story to this episode, available exclusively to subscribers to Hidden Brain+, we explore the ways in which nature can help us curb our impulsive and aggressive urges. If you're a subscriber, that episode is available right now. It's titled, Into the Woods. If you're not yet a subscriber, please visit support.hiddenbrain.org or apple.co/hiddenbrain. You can get a free 7-day trial in both places. You'll instantly have access to all our subscriber-only content, including past episodes. Again, that's support.hiddenbrain.org or apple.co/hiddenbrain. Marc Berman is a psychologist at the University of Chicago. He's the author of Nature and the Mind, the Science of How Nature Improves Cognitive, Physical and Social Well-being. Marc, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.



Marc Berman: Thank you so much for having me on the show. I really enjoyed it.



Shankar Vedantam: If you like this episode, please share it with one or two people. Many of our listeners discovered the show because someone else told them about it. Please think of a few people who would benefit from hearing the episode and tell them to search for Hidden Brain on Apple, Spotify, or their favorite podcast app. Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Laura Correll, Kristen Wong, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. Before we go today, we wanted to say thank you to Loom by Atlassian for sponsoring the Hidden Brain 2025 Perceptions Tour. With Loom, teams move work forward faster, replacing endless meetings and slow approvals with quick, clear video messages. Today, we'll hear from Dr. Molly Sands, head of the Teamwork Lab at Atlassian, about how Loom is transforming the way teams work.



Molly Sands: I'm Dr. Molly Sands, and I lead the Teamwork Lab at Atlassian, which is our future of work research and innovation group. If I could wave the magic wand and change something about teamwork, I would stop teams from using meetings for every single thing. I wish teams would embrace asynchronous communication, so sharing updates or feedback in ways that don't require everyone to drop what they're doing at the same time. Loom is a video messaging platform that lets you quickly record and share updates, walkthroughs or feedback without scheduling another meeting. The magic of Loom is that it feels really personal, like someone tapping you on the shoulder, but it's actually asynchronous. Loom makes it very easy for teams to share and get the information they need in last time. And the more that teams use Loom to communicate and to capture conversations, the smarter their AI-enabled knowledge bases get. It lets people design their day around their energy and around their priorities instead of being trapped by their meeting schedule.



Shankar Vedantam: Loom is AI-powered video communication that moves teams forward. Whether you're sharing feedback, obtaining approvals, or setting context, Loom makes it easy for teams to share and collaborate on work. Save time and stay focused on what matters without another meeting. Try Loom today at loom.com. That's loom.com. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.