Ep 158: Your Brain on Nature, with Amy McDonnell
Amy McDonnell is a backpacker and a neuroscientist at the University of Utah. Specifically, Amy studies the effects of time in nature on the brain. In this episode, we discuss how various time spans spent in nature affect the brain, the benefits people self-report after spending time outside, whether directly interacting with nature (for example, fishing) has a more pronounced effect than other kinds of time spent outdoors, and much more.
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Intro
You’re listening to the Fish Untamed Podcast, your home for fly fishing the backcountry. This is episode 158 with Amy McDonnell on your brain on nature.
Katie
All right, well, usually I start episodes by getting a background on how my guests got into fishing, but since we're not going to be talking about much fishing today, I would love to hear how you got started, A, in the outdoors, because I know you do do a bit in the outdoors, and maybe also how you got started in your research. So walk me through how you got introduced to those two things and maybe we'll merge them together at some point.
Amy
Yeah, of course. I grew up with my family, spent a lot of time outside. Family vacations were camping trips, backpacking trips, going to the beach. So I always had a deep appreciation for being in nature. And then when I was 15 years old, my grandma, who I was very close to, suffered from a severe hemorrhagic stroke. And I witnessed firsthand her ability to walk and talk one day and inability to do either the next. And I was immediately fascinated by the human brain. And so this led me to pursue studies in neuroscience in college and got to learn all the fascinating things about how the brain works, what happens to human behavior when the brain stops working. And then I found myself at this nexus when I graduated from college where I wanted to go spend all my time outside because that's where a lot of my free time passion went. But I had this very intellectual career drive to be a neuroscientist. And so I took a short walk on the Pacific Crest Trail for a few months to kind of reflect on what I wanted to do with my life. And during that time, I came across this research by David Strayer in the Applied Cognition Lab at the University of Utah that quite literally blended my two passions into one line of research, specifically studying the impacts of being in nature on the brain. So I had this really unique opportunity to blend my personal passion for being outside and being in nature with my intellectual passion for understanding how the brain works.
Katie
Yeah, you said that's kind of a unique situation. And I would agree just on the fact of you actually got to pursue what it was you wanted to do. And having gone through higher education myself and being around a lot of other people still, I'm still in the higher education space. A lot of people take what they can when it comes to a master's or a PhD. Did you get a PhD in it or just a master's degree?
Amy
Yeah, PhD in cognitive neuroscience.
Katie
OK. Yeah, I feel like a lot of people end up taking what's available. They have a general interest in mind, but they come in and they grab a project that happens to be funded and happens to be available, and that kind of steers where they go. So it's kind of awesome that you got to take exactly what you would want to take out of a graduate degree.
Amy
Totally. I know. I so recognize that my experience is a one in a million. I say it a lot to my students at the University of Utah who are trying to figure out what type of research they might want to pursue in graduate school. It's like sometimes it has to find you because I couldn't have even dreamed this research into existence if I had tried. I'm super lucky on that front.
Katie
Tell me what specifically you were looking at during your time in your graduate degree, prior to what you're working on now. What research did you start with?
Amy
I came into the lab at a point where there's a ton of research out there and people anecdotally report that being in nature makes them feel good. a lot of self-report research showing that being in nature brings down your stress levels, maybe helps you focus more. But at that point, we didn't really know what was happening in the brain or the body to explain those benefits that people report. So I entered the lab in 2018 at a point where we were trying to figure out how we can use methods from neuroscience and different ways that we can experiment with understanding how the brain works to apply it to this field of like nature and health. And so when I first entered graduate school, we really were just at a point of trying to build what we call the toolkit for studying the brain in nature, right? Like most of neuroscience, most of what we know about the brain comes from studies that are run in your very boring whitewalled laboratory. And so we were really trying to figure out ways that we could take the tools and the methods from the field of neuroscience and bring it outside and apply it to this nature, you know, interest in nature that we all had. So the start of graduate school was a lot of methods and a lot of trying to figure out to get different pieces of technology, working with other pieces of technology, how We can make all of it work on Bluetooth, since we might not have Wi-Fi in the wilderness. And so really a lot of my initial years were kind of that methodological effort, and specifically studying what a prolonged immersion in nature, the impact that a prolonged immersion in nature has on the brain and behavior.
Katie
And when you say these methods, what methods are you using in a lab? and what is it that you're measuring? I saw you send over a picture with somebody covered in some kind of like sticky wires and things like that, kind of like what someone would picture if they're like measuring brain waves. But what exactly are you like hooking up to somebody and what is that picking up from their brain?
Amy
Yeah, that's a great question. And you're right, that picture I showed you was how we look at brain waves. So that's called electroencephalography or EEG. EEG measures the electrical activity of the brain. So your brain communicates with both chemicals and electricity. Chemicals being the neurotransmitters that most people are familiar with like dopamine or serotonin. That's the chemical transmission in your brain. But there's also electrical communication in the brain, which is just the movement of ions in and out of cells. So one brain cell talks to another brain cell through movement of ions and little chemicals. And so EEG allows us to measure the electrical communication of the brain. And why we use EEG is it can be used portably. So it's one of the neuroscience methods that can be taken out of the lab. And so that's the primary reason why we use it. I use it to record brain activity when people are driving cars. There are labs that use EEG to study the brain when people are exercising. So these like applied research questions that often take place outside of the lab, EEG is a really great tool for that. So that's why we use it in this nature in the brain space. It's not the only way to do things. There are other labs that use a method called fMRI or functional magnetic resonance imaging where you can get these really nice pictures of the brain and see what areas of the brain light up when you are asked to do certain tasks. But that's a method that can't be used outside the laboratory. So a participant has to lay very still in a scanner in a very controlled laboratory environment to get that type of brain data. So really the EEG doesn't maybe give us as pretty of brain pictures of the brain like some other methods do, but it's really awesome for this sort of research question have. We want to know what's happening in the brain when you're outside the lab and in real nature.
Katie
Now, when you said that the fMRI shows kind of like what region of the brain is lighting up, that's kind of what I assumed that you were seeing. So I must have just gotten, you know, the technique for getting that wrong. What is it that you're seeing with these little sticky pads that are going on a person's skull?
Amy
So with EEG, we are able to study how efficient different cognitive processes are. So specifically, my lab studies attention. And so attention is just another word for our ability to focus. And so we look at different brain waves that are related to attention, the names of which are probably not particularly of interest, but it allows us to basically look at how efficient we're processing information and how efficiently we're allocating our attention to what is important. And so EEG allows us to kind of look at that time processing in the brain and efficiency of cognitive processes. We can, in some ways, look at different kind of activity levels in different areas of like the top layer of the brain, the surface of the brain, from those electrodes that you see on the skull. But we can't tell any information about deeper brain regions that are further away from those scalp level electrodes. Every neuroscience method, there's so many different ways we can measure brain activity, each of them has their strengths and weaknesses, and you would just pick and choose based on your research question, essentially.
Katie
So does your research specifically look at the effect of time in nature on attention specifically, or are you able to infer other things, like based on what you're measuring about attention, you know, other effects on, I don't know, happiness or satisfaction or other things that might not be as directly measurable, but maybe relatable to attention?
Amy
Absolutely. Yeah, so we use a lot of different measures in addition to just looking at the brain because, you know, like happiness, you said, is a really great example of there's not like one thing we can point to in the brain and say, "This is how we measure happiness." But we can look at how the brain is performing at any given moment, and then we can also ask people how they're feeling. And then we can see if the brain data maps on to what we call the self-report data to understand how people are reporting their feelings are changing, and how that then looks in the brain metrics that we're looking at. And so we study often mood. So off this most often looks like giving people questionnaires where they rate their levels of positive and negative mood on different scales. We study stress in my lab. So we do that with electrocardiography, or ECG or EKG. If you've had an EKG done at the doctor's office, that measures the electrical activity of the heart, and can tell us about stress in the and then we look at attention in the brain. And so primarily these are the three, you know, constructs that we repeatedly look at, whether it's during a multi-day immersion in nature, whether it's associated with the 45-minute walk in nature, whether it's associated with being in virtual reality nature. And so we can, you know, look at ways that each of those constructs maybe relate to each other, but not every single one of them can be mapped in the brain and measured with EEG, at least with the method that we're using.
Katie
Okay, so maybe you're looking for patterns across things, like do things line up together and can you then use those patterns to infer something beyond that later down the road through a different measurement? Exactly. Now, are you recording people then after the fact too? I know you're talking about the benefit of this is that it is portable and it can go into nature, but are you also monitoring people when they get back from the field to see how long the effects last and things like that?
Amy
Yeah, that's an awesome question because that's actually a really big question of interest in our lab is how long do the benefits last, right? So in some work, we look at brain activity before, during, and after a five-day camping trip. So the before and after recordings happen about a week before and a week after the trip when people are in their typical urban environments. And then the during nature happens, we do our work down in the Southern Utah desert near Bluff, Utah or Monument Valley, Bears Ears area to look at brain activity in nature. So here we've primarily seen that the benefits related to attention and stress are specifically present during the immersion, but they dissipate by the one week later recording. That doesn't mean that all benefits of being in nature are lost by one week later, but it just means that the things that we specifically measured, the specific brain waves, the specific heart activity that we looked at did not show an effect one week later. But we don't know, Does it dissipate one day, two days, three days later? We only had that recording from a week later. And then in some other work that we do associated with just a walk in nature, that we're recording before and after the walk, and we're seeing the effects after the walk. And again, those recordings are taken about one to two hours after the walk and we're seeing the effects, But we don't yet know, does that fade after three hours, four hours, a day, two days? And so that's exactly your question is why we're really interested in trying to tease apart how long the benefits last. And does it differ by metric? Maybe the stress benefits stick around longer than the attentional benefits or the mood benefits. We do not know the answer to that.
Katie
Yeah, that's interesting, especially the things that are more like self-report. 'Cause I can picture myself, If I were doing a self-report after, let's say, a five-day immersion in nature like you described, I've got conflicting feelings about it. On one hand, I'm happy because I got to have some really cool experience. I'm maybe in a good mood because I have a good memory kind of fresh on the brain. On the other hand, I feel a sense of depression coming back from something like that, like the feeling of, oh, man, now I have to go back to work, back to the regular grind. And I almost feel conflicting emotions at the same time coming out of something like that. And it'd be hard for me to convey that on maybe a multiple choice, how do you feel sheet. So I feel like it's gotta be kind of a complicated thing to separate 'cause there's so many different things you're measuring and with people's emotions, which are kind of only self-reportable, teasing that out, I could see that being a challenge.
Amy
Absolutely, yeah. Yeah, you hit the nail on the head. That's totally true. And if I'm being completely honest, this is one of my, you brought up a point that makes me think of, like one of my big hesitations just about the work is that idea of, is this subjective experience even measurable? Do we even have the tools to tap into these like complex emotions that being in nature might elicit? And then the next question is also maybe like, why? Does it, why do I need to know what's happening in the brain, right? If people are self-reporting that it's making them feel better and that it's helping with their symptoms of depression or anxiety, even if it's just a placebo effect, then isn't that working? Right.
Katie
Have you noticed-- or I don't know if you've separated people out by the lifestyle that they typically live and how close or far that is from nature? I'm picturing that there could be a difference in somebody coming from inner city Chicago, who's never spent any time in nature, versus somebody who maybe works on a farm and is kind of outside all day, kind of away from screens away from maybe the rat race. Have you kind of separated people out by their kind of daily connection to nature or were you just looking at kind of a random assortment of people as a whole?
Amy
Yeah, that's another like really great question because that's a big open question in the field is we call it the role of individual differences in this field. How might differences between individuals differentially influence these results? We haven't tested that. to be able to answer that question, you have to have really, really, really big sample sizes. You need a ton of participants to understand that sort of nuance in data. And when we're collecting brain data, it's just really hard to get participant samples big enough to be able to answer that question. And then the other logistical difficulty of that is that we're running this data and the data collection efforts in Salt Lake City, where you have a disproportionate appreciation for nature, I would say, compared to maybe a lot of other places that you could do this work. So that exact question comes up a lot in terms of like, well, is this almost a biased participant sample? Because people here tend to like being in nature. A lot of the people like move to Salt Lake City because of the access to nature. How would these results translate if we were in New York City doing this type of work, right? But, you know, I have a gut reaction almost to that question. I guess I'm curious your thoughts from your experience of, I could almost see it going both ways. People like you and me that have a lot of experience in nature and have a deep appreciation for nature, I could see us more likely to gain the benefits from being in nature and at the same time, given you and I have a lot of experience in nature, I could almost also see a world in which we maybe experience habituation to nature. Maybe like a 40 minute walk in the Arboretum at the University of Utah doesn't do it for you and me as it might for somebody that never spends time in nature, that acute exposure might be transformative to them. So I think it's an interesting question 'cause I really don't even know what I would suspect. Do you have thoughts?
Katie
Yeah, everything you said there kind of made sense to me despite it being like almost contradictory. Like I see exactly what you're saying. On one hand, I know you said that maybe we're kind of habituated to it and so we wouldn't necessarily get the same benefits from like a walk in the park as somebody might get if they are from middle of New York City. At the same time, I could almost wonder if that's a baseline where if that's taken away, we would still experience the negative effects of not having it. You know, I take my dog for a walk every day and it's one of my favorite parts of my day. I wouldn't say it's a transformative experience for me to go outside and walk around, but if I didn't get to do it for a week, I feel like I'd be cranky about that. So it's almost like I, maybe I'm habituated to the benefits I'm getting, not that I'm not getting the benefits.
Amy
Totally, that's interesting.
Katie
Yeah, I could see, you know, I'm very used to being out for five, seven days and I feel like I have an effect from that, But I could see that being very overwhelming to somebody else who maybe is just getting outside for the first time. Like that, that might be so triggering to them that they don't want to do it again. So I wonder if it's it's kind of like a habituation thing, but you know, in a way that you are getting used to your own baseline, but you still kind of need that baseline to remain in a kind of a happy or satisfied or, you know, a very attuned to your attention state.
Amy
Absolutely. Yeah, that makes me think of a couple things. One of which is, I was chatting with somebody recently that made this amazing, almost philosophical point that we view this work in our field as, we live in urban environments, let's test the effects of being in nature and the benefits of being in nature on the brain and the body and mood and stress and attention. But we evolved in nature, so why aren't we, and that's like our most natural form, so why aren't we studying this through the lens of just the detriments of being in urban environments, right? And so your your point about like the absence of nature is maybe this effect in and of itself of inducing stress and negative mood, I think is fascinating way to think about it as well. And then we also definitely in our work, especially our multi day immersion studies, we absolutely find people have some people come that it's a very uncomfortable experience for them. And we've even on some trips found negative stress effects of the multi day immersion in nature because you're not in your typical environment, we intentionally go somewhere that doesn't have cell service, which might cause stress like being disconnected in that way might cause stress for some people, we're going on some hikes and people that aren't used to that level of physical activity might be experiencing physiological stress associated with the exercise for the first time. There's so much nuance in this field and there's so many questions that I'm sure that people have that you'll have that are just like, "This is a new field. That's fair game question." In a sense, I guess that means it's job security for me.
Katie
Something you mentioned there, it ties into something I was wondering, but I didn't really know how to ask this, because I was thinking of what I wanted to ask you about. And I was thinking, what evolutionary reason would there be for us to benefit from being in nature? And I was like, well, that's a silly question. We did evolve in nature. So what evolutionary advantage would there be to something that we were designed for, that it's illogical? But maybe that's the point, is if we were evolved to be in that environment, maybe what we are looking at is not the effects of being in nature, the effects of coming back to what we were supposed to be in the first place. And therefore kind of assuming that, you know, the are what we consider our baseline is actually kind of the, the stressed version of ourselves, the not ideal version of ourselves.
Amy
Totally. Yeah, I would wholeheartedly agree. And that's, like a lot of this work, the field more broadly, not just the nature and brain stuff, which is a much more niche field, but kind of the whole nature and human health relationship field, there is this grounding hypothesis that this is all grounded in what they call the biophilia hypothesis, which is that exact idea that we evolved in nature, so we're genetically, physiologically, and perhaps psychologically predisposed to be in natural environments. And therefore, when we are out in nature, it's almost this idea of coming home. And that's where we reach our homeostasis almost of lower stress, ability to let go of the need to really focus our attention on a lot of different things. And so that's absolutely the driving philosophy in the field. And then from that biophilia hypothesis came different formalized theories proposed by by researchers as to what are the exact mechanisms that can explain the benefits of being in nature?
Katie
Yeah, that's interesting because it makes sense that obviously if we were designed to be in nature and have, like you said, the biophilia, the attraction to that, what is it that makes us drawn to it more than just we do well when we're in it? I feel like most people would say that they feel something when they're outside. like the self-reporting. It's not just, you know, something's happening in my brain because I'm in an environment that, you know, the sun, my eyes were designed to have sunlight in them and sunlight's coming in, so therefore my brain is doing something. But, you know, you actually have like a mental and emotional reaction to that. And I wonder what the mechanism behind that is.
Amy
Yeah, I'd say the three primary perspectives on that. One is, came from a theory called attention restoration theory proposed by Stephen and Rachel Kaplan in the 80s, 90s. And their argument is that our urban environments place really high demand on our attentional resources, right? We're forced to attend to a lot of different things at once. There's a ton of information and stimuli coming at us at any given moment. We have the added demands of technology at our fingertips at any given moment. And so all of these factors place high demand on our attentional resources, which are limited. So we don't have an unlimited ability to attend to all this information at once, we have to almost filter out what is not important. And so this process of like constant filtering through different stimuli is really draining on our mental resources. And we feel this, this level of mental fatigue. And so they propose in attention restoration theory that natural environments don't place this kind of high demand on our attentional resources. Therefore, nature allows those resources to really rest and recover, which then leads to these attentional benefits of time in nature. So we've basically, we've allowed our brain to rest, recover from the demands of urban environments, which then leads to improved attentional performance after exposure to nature. So that's like one primary mechanism people think is happening in nature. The other one is grounded in a theory called stress recovery theory, proposed by Roger Ulrich in the early 90s. And he proposed that this isn't necessarily an attention-focused thing. Maybe there are attentional benefits for those reasons, but this is really grounded in stress. Our urban environments, work, personal life, the demands of all of the above, place high demands of stress on us. There's an adaptive purpose to stress. We should feel stress to certain stimuli, but our modern environments are causing us to be in this elevated state of stress for longer periods of time, which we know has downstream health detriments. And so Roger Ulrich proposes that natural environments don't place this high level of stress on us that our modern urban environments do. So that allows us, so nature allows us to recover from that stress more efficiently than we would say in in an urban environment. And so he says that's what's leading to the benefits of being in nature. And then the last one that's newer on the scene, I'd say in the last 10 to 15 years is something called perceptual fluency account. And these are the people that think all of these benefits, attention, stress, mood, are coming from the visual properties of nature, i.e. the colors, the green, the view of water, or the fractal patterns, like the very repetitive designs that are just present in nature, allow for the benefits of being in nature. So if you ask me, all of them are true. All of that's playing out in nature. Like we're seeing our cognitive resources able to rest and recover. We're seeing decreases in stress. That very well might be because of the fractal patterns the color green and the flow of water in nature. But really, scientists are truly trying to figure out what that mechanism is that's leading to these subjective benefits of being in nature.
Katie
I know this isn't necessarily something you would pursue in your research, but as you're saying, the first two there, I wonder if anyone has or wants to look at somebody on vacation, maybe on vacation in an urban environment versus somebody at work in a natural environment. I'm picturing somebody's relaxing poolside, they've got a drink, they've got their favorite book, but they're off work for a week and they have no demands. They're still in an urban environment, but all of the attention-seeking parts of their life are gone, all the stressful parts of their life are gone, versus maybe somebody on a search and rescue team who is in nature, maybe for an extended period of time, but maybe they're multitasking. Maybe they've got to do a whole bunch of things to prepare for a rescue. Their stress level is obviously high because somebody's safety depends on them. And I wonder if you'd be able to tease out any of those differences or proposed mechanisms by switching the environment but keeping the stresses the same, but in their opposite environments.
Amy
You need to maybe just join our lab Because this is exactly, that is again, like exactly what we've talked about is, are we just testing a vacation effect, right? Like, is this just a change of environment that allows us to have less stress, doesn't demand our attention as much? And that very well might be the case. Like we've kind of made the joke in our lab about, well, let's compare a nature trip to a trip to Vegas, because both to some people might be equally as fun, but they're two very different types of environments. So that's a really great question, has not been directly tested. And I think it'd actually be really interesting to almost, yeah, just take that one step further almost of you could do like a double dissociation type study where you have a group that goes into nature and relax, you have relaxes, you have a group that goes into nature and works, you have a group that goes to an urban environment to relax, and then your group that's in their urban environment working, and then you could tease apart what here is just work demands, what here is environmental differences, I think would be really interesting, but an extremely resource intensive study to run.
Katie
Of course, yeah. One more question on the methodological part of this before I ask what you found in the different lengths of time in nature is, what were you counting as being in nature? Because I know you've talked about going for a walk versus a big immersion. But nature might mean different things to different people. So I'm curious what you guys counted as nature.
Amy
Yeah, absolutely. And that's a really important thing that when researchers are doing this work and publishing their work to define what exactly they mean. because to your point, different people have different definitions, different cultures have very different definitions of what constitutes nature. So in our work, we primarily vaguely describe nature as an environment free of manmade structures. This I say vaguely because, you know, in a lot of our nature walk studies, there might be a bridge that's a manmade structure, or at our wilderness on our camping trips, there might be like a vault toilet, that's a manmade structure. but we really just want it to be separate from your very built environments. So in different studies, it's looked like different things, but our multi-day immersion studies, we always toy with the idea of like a backpacking trip. I'm thinking more of what you do in your work being more wilderness, removed environments. We have to take into consideration comfort and safety because we don't require that people have backcountry experience to be involved in our research. And so our multi-day trips are often BLM land like group campsite settings on a river on the San Juan River in southern Utah. And then our nature walk studies primarily have been at Red Butte Garden and Arboretum which is the Arboretum affiliated with the University of Utah, which is a beautiful botanical garden that's, you know, separate, protected from the urban campus nearby, but has natural trails that go up into the mountains behind the garden. So, and that's just what we logistically have access to, right? You could do all sorts of different nature walk studies that are more remote or like your experience, more remote backpacking trips. love to do that, but just logistically it's super difficult.
Katie
Yeah, to your point earlier of already being maybe slightly biased by being in Salt Lake City, I could see if you did a longer backpacking trip and by necessity required people to have some level of skill in the backcountry, so for everyone's safety, that you'd be potentially biasing yourself even more by bringing along people who are like, "Yeah, I want to do this study because that sounds like a lot of fun and I have the experience and skills to do so I'm obviously one who is drawn to this type of trip.
Amy
Totally. And we do face that, right? Even getting people... We do not pay a lot. This is research at the end of the day. We don't pay a lot. Sometimes people have to take days off work to come on our research trips for little to no pay. And so there is an innate bias in who signs up to participate in this type of trip or this type of research. We, and you know, that's unavoidable in a sense. And there are certain things that we do to try to combat that. One of which is we never, you know, tell participants what we are exactly testing and researching. There's an obvious piece here where, well, they know that they're on a camping trip. So they know to some degree, you're probably testing something about nature. So we just try to keep the research questions and the exact biomarkers that we're measuring to ourselves. And then of course we debrief them after and tell them all about it. But the other thing that we do is one of the main reasons we use neuroscience methods is to combat some of the participant bias of this type of research. Because 10 out of 10 people are to report that being in nature is good for them, makes them feel better. Whether they actually experience that or not, they're going to report that. We very reliably find positive effects in our self-report research, but we use neuroscience methods to try to combat that and make it a little bit more objective. Because even after I have this conversation with you all about our research, I could hook you up to electrodes and send you on a walk and you probably can't change the amplitude of your error-related negativity in your brain or whatever arbitrary brainwave we're looking at, you can't control that in line with your bias, right? So we try to get some of that bias out by using brain-based measures, but it's always something you have to consider when you think about what participants you're recruiting, what type of environment you're bringing them to.
Katie
Yeah, that makes sense 'cause I had originally had written down to ask you about the perceived versus the measured benefits, like self -reporting. And we've kind of touched on it, so we don't need to cover it in more detail. But that's kind of what I was thinking, is people know that nature is supposed to be good for them. Even if they haven't seen your research, everyone kind of has this feeling inside them that, oh, I should go outside. I've been inside too long. I know I'm happier when I go outside. And so I could see somebody, even if they came back from a trip and maybe it rained on them the whole time, and they were actually miserable, they're going to come back and be like, that was great.
Amy
Totally.
Katie
Yeah, I could totally see that happening and see the benefit of actually measuring something that people don't know how to control. You can't control if you're secretly miserable inside.
Amy
Totally. Yep, absolutely.
Katie
Moving on a little bit to what you found and maybe the implications for what can we do with this information, tell me what specific lengths of trips and what kind of level of immersion you've looked at and what you've found, the differences you've found between different time spans spent in nature?
Amy
Yeah, I'll start maybe the smallest scale nature with we have looked at the effects of pictures of nature. So this work, I'd say our lab's more interested in the immersion in nature piece, but there are plenty of labs that have shown just looking at pictures of nature, people report that to make them feel better. This is important because hospitals will put pictures of nature in the hospital room based on this evolving literature. We looked at the response in the brain during looking, like when you're actually looking at pictures of nature versus urban environments, and we see differences in the brain primarily housed in the visual cortex. We know that there is some visual property of nature that's different than the visual properties of urban environments that even just looking at pictures, we see differences in how the visual areas of the brain are processing information. However, when we then give people tasks, so like a simple cognitive task on a computer after looking at pictures of nature for 10 minutes, we don't see differences in performance on those tasks from just looking at pictures of nature. So this kind of tells us, yes, the brain processes these scenes from a purely visual standpoint differently, but maybe just looking at pictures of nature for 10 minutes isn't going to benefit your performance on some attention-related tasks. That was pretty in line with what we hypothesized and maybe you or your listeners would hypothesize to. So we then move into more immersive nature. We're doing some work now with virtual reality. I don't have results to share, but I'd be happy to talk about why we're looking at that after but we have done a bulk of our work looking at a 40 minute walk in nature. So this this has been my focus for the last few years because a 40 minute walk theoretically is accessible to most people, more so than say a multi-day immersion in nature might be. So at least for people that have the physical ability to go for a walk, a 40-minute walk maybe at your nearby park or arboretum is what we're kind of testing here. And we have found differences in how the brain, how efficient the brain is at allocating attention after a 40-minute walk in nature that that we did not find after a 40 minute walk in an urban environment. So this is like a pre post brain recording before and after participants are randomized to either walk in nature or an urban environment. And we see that when recorded immediately after the 40 minute walk, the brain performs more efficiently on attention related tasks. So very similar tasks to the ones that we did not find effects after just looking at pictures of nature. So this tells us, okay, maybe like a walk, some short walk in nature is the minimum possible dose almost to get these brain-based benefits in how efficient you are at allocating your attention. And then we have done a series of multi-day immersion in nature studies, looking at different aspects of attention during immersion in nature, compared to immersion in your typical urban environment. And in this work, we haven't done these studies since 2019 because the pandemic kind of put some strain on the resources we had available to do these like group wilderness trips. But in those studies, we found that your brain more efficiently allocates attention. So very similar to what we found after just a 40 minute walk in nature, We validate that also on a multi-day immersion in nature, we see those benefits. And then we also have a cool new finding looking at how we process reward when we're immersed in nature. So we gave participants a simple monetary gambling task during immersion in an urban environment and immersion in nature, in which they win and lose like 5 cents based on their performance on each trial. And so this is extrinsic reward, they're winning and losing money, and they actually get paid based on their performance on the tasks. And what we found was that participants were way less sensitive to winning or losing money when they were immersed in nature compared to when they were immersed in the urban environments. In the urban environments, we saw their brains very responsive to winning and losing money, that we just did not see that when people were immersed in nature. And so what we think is happening here is that when you're in nature, perhaps you're more in tuned with like intrinsic motivations rather than extrinsic rewards and motivations like money, these very modern urban environment rewards, right? And so this work has been, was published recently and has received a lot of positive attention because there's a group of researchers that propose that time in nature should be used as a supplemental treatment for substance use disorders. And so what our work shows is that your brain's reward system is actually truly less sensitive to extrinsic motivations when you're immersed in nature. So those are the primary findings I'd say in our lab that we've repeatedly shown over multiple studies, which gives us more confidence that they're real results when we can replicate them across the different studies. So that's kind of where we're at with things right now.
Katie
That's really interesting. I do want to come back to the, not specifically the substance abuse, but I was curious about like, could this be prescribed in the future? But before we touch on that, I wanted to know how long the longer immersion was. Maybe you said it and I missed it, but was it-- did you say five days?
Amy
Five day trips with the first and the last day being travel days. So it's like three full days.
Katie
Yeah, because I've heard anecdotally that three days is kind of like a turning point for a lot of people. And I've experienced this myself, where there's a difference between going for a walk and going for a one or two day camping trip for sure. I do feel like my stress levels go down. But there's something that has happened to me, and I feel like I've heard a lot of other people say the same thing, where once you get past day three, like something shifts again. And it's like three days without a phone, three days without responsibilities. Something on day three, it's almost like I enter a new level of low stress and the ability to focus and kind of all the things you've talked about, where no challenge seems very overwhelming to me. I feel like I can just go through my day. I get things done that I need to get done around camp. I'm not worried about what's going on at home so much. And that seems to happen after a slightly longer period of time. Have you been able to tease that out? Or have you only compared kind of three plus days to a simple walk in the park?
Amy
Yeah, the latter. So you're correct. That is absolutely an anecdotal thing that's out there. And I believe it personally and anecdotally to be true. I totally agree with what you said. We have not compared day one to day two to day three to day four and shown that in our data, mostly for logistical reasons, because it takes a couple hours to set up the electrodes to record brain activity. So it's nearly impossible for us to record participants every single day of the trip. But yeah, we're talking in the work I presented is like a conceptual comparison between a multi-day trip and a walk in nature or looking at pictures in nature. But there's plenty of self-report and behavioral research out there that validates your point exactly that there is a sweet spot of like the more days the better, but then there's a chance that a lot of days you might plateau or in potentially even, I haven't tested this, but I could also see stress increasing over too many days in nature for some people.
Katie
Sure. If I'm asking Amy the backpacker instead of Amy the researcher, do you have any kind of just hypotheses yourself that you think of as to why there might be a tipping point after the two or three day mark?
Amy
I think, I don't know, but my hunch is the more time and distance you have from the demands of the urban environment, almost the less intrusive they feel. And that distance from those sorts of demands allows us to really settle into that place of attention restoration and stress recovery. But yeah, that's anecdotal for me. I'm like a more days the better type person. Like sometimes even an overnight camping trip feels like more work than it feels beneficial to me.
Katie
Sure.
Amy
You know, by the time you get camp set up, it's time to leave. But yeah, I'm super interested in that question.
Katie
Because I have in my mind unlimited money to throw toward your research project and we'll just suggest things over and over again that I'm sure would be way more work than they're worth. I'm also curious if anyone has looked at the effect of what you're doing in nature. Because I've heard, again, anecdotally, people who fish-- and I also hunt, and I've heard this from the hunting community as well-- that they feel a sense of participating in nature beyond just existing in nature. And they feel like they're a part of something, whereas somebody just walking through the woods who's maybe distracted and thinking about other things might not be as actively engaged. And I could see this spilling out into other things, too, like maybe bird watching, foraging, where you're going out with kind of a purpose and you are actively engaged with a part of nature beyond just existing in it. Have you heard of any research kind of looking at participation versus just the presence of nature?
Amy
Yes. Absolutely. Not my own research, but people have shown exactly that, that the more engaged you are with the environment, the more you'll glean the benefits, the stress and mood and attention-related benefits of being in nature. And that might be different for different people, like the comfort of fishing for you or the comfort of mountain biking for somebody else. But definitely, because when you're engaging with nature in that way, your brain and your body are more present in the environment, that I think that's what's driving the benefits. I can speak very confidently about the brain, the neuroscience literature out there from both my lab and others, that's definitely not been tested on a neural level of are there differences in the brain-based benefits of nature depending on the way you're engaging, except a study that I just completed about two months ago where we randomized people to walk in nature undistracted versus walk in nature while talking on their cell phone. I haven't analyzed the brain data yet, but we did find that while both groups showed benefits to mood and stress, probably just associated with being in nature and getting a little bit of exercise, the participants that were talking on their cell phone, which theoretically took them out of engagement with nature, did not report their walk to be as restorative, and they performed worse on a visual memory test where they were tested for different scenes that they could have seen on their walk. And the group that was talking on their cell phone did not remember what they had seen on their walk as well as the people that were not on their cell phone. So this was our lab's way of kind of trying to test that question you're having of like, does the level of engagement matter? We had people disengage from nature by talking on the phone and see some detriments associated with that. So it'll be interesting to see if the brain data mirror that pattern of results, or it would be interesting to manipulate the activity that they're engaging in. We could have a group of people walk in nature or sit in nature and then the other group fish in nature, and see if there's some sort of difference there would be super cool and is definitely of interest to a lot of people in the field.
Katie
Yeah, that's really interesting. Everything you bring up, I feel like it just adds one more layer over and over again, because you're right. I could see maybe the argument of not being distracted is just if you're focused on nature, regardless of how much you're interacting with it, if you're not distracted, you're at least present in nature. And maybe the effect of doing something like fishing is not that you're necessarily interacting directly with the nature, but just that your mind is occupied by something right in front of you. So you are, by default, not thinking about the stress of work or what you have to do later today or any of that. And you'd have to, I guess, tease that out even more by having somebody who is maybe in nature observing it versus in nature doing something physical with it, like fishing versus sitting on a rock and observing the trees for 10 minutes or something like that. And it's just, I guess, the hard part about research is all the different factors that you have to play with to get to the bottom of what it is that's actually causing the effect here.
Amy
Absolutely. Yeah, every question we have leads to a million more questions. And it's the fun part, but it's, I think, gonna be nearly impossible to tease apart what the exact variables are that play into the benefits of being in nature, right? 'Cause then you could ask, is it just an air quality thing? Is it a vitamin D thing? So there's, and our perspective is it's all of it, right? nature is a multi-sensory experience. It's all of your senses engaging in new ways. And that has got to be more impactful than engaging one sense at a time. But yeah, there's endless questions there. And a big thing in our lab, 'cause we in a different line of research, we study how humans interact with technology. And so, we hold the belief, strong belief that cell phone, having your cell phone does play such a pivotal role in your attachment to stress and attention, like where you're directing your attention, how you're trying to multitask your attention. Social media has its own set of stressors that come along with it. Often our work email is on our phone. So we think a really key aspect of the nature experience is disconnecting from technology in that way. So that's why this recent study we ran was really trying to test that exactly. But different technology is different. If you're a photographer, you might have technology in nature, but that's your way of engaging with nature in the way that you fish. There's not even a blanket term of technology is bad in nature because there are ways that it helps us engage with nature.
Katie
Yeah, speaking of technology, I know you wanted to touch a little bit on virtual reality and the potential for it to maybe benefit people who can't physically get out into nature. It sounded like that was still kind of in its infancy, but I'd love to have you talk about that for however much you can.
Amy
Yeah, we call it the great irony in our lab right now because we study human technology interactions and a lot of the findings of that work shows these negative associations with how the brain works when it interacts with technology. But there is this piece, all the work that we've done makes a huge assumption of access to nature, that people have the physical ability to go for a 40-minute walk or a multi-day immersion in nature comes with its own set of privilege. So you think about like individuals that are incarcerated or bedridden in a hospital or have a physical disability that limits their ability to get outside or even just individuals in low resourced communities that don't have access to nature in their own way. Like how can we get them the health and wellbeing benefits of nature? And so we're toying with this idea of virtual reality, which I don't know if you've been in VR before, but it very often looks just like computer generated versions of an environment. But we're trying to make super, super high quality VR environment. So we're working with a production house based in South Africa that records 360 environments with like 11K resolution. So you get in the VR headset and it feels like you are standing next to a waterfall, you hear the sounds. And so we're doing this work right now on patients in the hospital at the University of Utah that just underwent brain surgery. So these patients all have treatment resistant epilepsy, where they have spent majority of their lifetime trying out different medications to help limit their seizures to no avail. And they're at the point now where they're undergoing brain surgery to have electrodes drilled deep into their brain so that the neurologist can monitor where in their brain these seizures are coming from. And so these patients have electrodes deep in their brain, which is incredibly invasive, and we would never get ethical approval to do that on our research participants. But we have these patients that are bedridden for two weeks at the University of Utah Hospital are willing to participate in our research, where we immerse them in virtual reality nature environments for 15 minutes, and virtual reality urban environments for 15 minutes. And we're going to measure self-reported mood and stress physiology through the electrodes on the torso. So looking at heart, the electrical activity of the heart. And then we're going to look deep into the brain with those, we call them intracranial EEG electrodes to look at brain activity during immersion in VR. And so we have funding for this work, both through the hospital system and through REI's Cooperative Action Fund is interested, right, in extending the health benefits of nature to more people. And so this is kind of our potential solution for people that don't have access to nature. We'll see if VR can do the trick.
Katie
This kind of ties into the last thing I wanted to ask you about, which is, and maybe this doesn't come in writing from your lab, maybe this is just your thoughts and your opinions on what you've noticed through all this research, but what would you recommend or what is recommended based on the findings of this? If there's a prescription for somebody to use nature in a way to help them. Has there been any sort of quantification of how often someone should go into nature to reap the benefits, or if there hasn't, do you have any thoughts on that?
Amy
Yeah, it's a great question. There has been work in this area. It's a question of interest to a lot of people with the development of these parks prescription programs around the country, if not world. Then I also have my own gut response. I'll share the published research. I wish I could remember the authors off the top of my head, but there's a recommendation out there that 120 minutes per week is almost the tipping point where benefits are more reliably seen. Whether that's self-reported mood benefits or stress benefits, researchers have done a meta-analysis and found that 120 minutes or two hours a week is what you should aim for to reach that tipping point of the benefits of nature. My answer to that is that it probably depends on the individual. And so my recommendation to myself is as often as I can, the more the better. And that depends on the week, right? So sometimes if all you can do is get out for an hour or two, I think that's great. And we know that that's better than nothing. And then if you have the opportunity for a multi-day fly fishing trip, that's just going to benefit health and well-being to a greater degree.
Katie
Okay. So I guess the general recommendation would be whenever you can, go ahead and do it because you're going to continue to reap the benefits from it. Well, if anyone wants to find your research, is there a good place they can find any of your papers? Do you have any, like one or two that you recommend as kind of a great introduction to this for somebody who wants to learn more?
Amy
An easy way to find any research related to this topic, I'd say, is Google Scholar, which if you just type in GoogleScholar.com, you can search nature and the brain, and any published research will pop up easily there, including my own research. We're in a bit of a lab transition, so I don't have a good lab website that I could point you to. But a quick Google search should really find you some of the popular media that's been written about our work and the actual peer reviewed scientific research. Another thing I would recommend just if there's interest on the topic as a whole, there's a really great book called The Nature Fix written by Florence Williams, who's a really great science writer that it was published in 2017. So some of the research, you know, there's been a a lot more research that's come out since. But The Nature Fix does a really great job of giving an overview of all of the research been done related to the relationship between human health and well-being and natural environments.
Katie
That's great. Well, thank you, Amy, for doing this. This is, I know, pretty far outside the normal wheelhouse of what I would cover, but this is just really fascinating. And I feel like it's cool to hear a quantified, in a way, a measured version of what I feel like I and you and probably all the listeners have experienced themselves. It's something that you feel it and you kind of know it and you know it when you feel it but you don't... there hasn't been like a name put to it or a measured effect put to it for me in the past. So it's just really interesting to hear that somebody is looking into this and it's not just you know in our imaginations.
Amy
Yeah absolutely I appreciate your interest and I hope your your listeners learn something from it.
Katie
Awesome well thank you for coming on. Alright, that's a wrap. Thank you all for listening. If you want to find all the other episodes as well as show notes, you can find those on fishuntamed.com. You'll also find the contact link there if you want to reach out to me. And you can also find me on Instagram @fishuntamed. If you want to support the show, you can give it a follow on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcasting app. And if you'd like to leave a review, it would be greatly appreciated. But otherwise, thank you all again for listening. I'll be back here in two weeks with another episode. Take care, everybody.
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