Hidden Brain - You 2.0: Our Better Nature

Episode Date: August 13, 2019

If you live in a big city, you may have noticed new buildings popping up — a high-rise here, a skyscraper there. The concrete jungles that we've built over the past century have allowed millions of us to live in close proximity, and modern economies to flourish. But what have we given up by moving away from the forest environments in which humans first evolved? This week, we revisit our 2018 conversation about the healing power of nature with psychologist Ming Kuo.

From NPR, this is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantan. If you're living in a city, you may have noticed new buildings popping up. A high rise here, a skyscraper there. These concrete jungles make urban living possible. They allow millions to live together in close proximity and allow modern economies to flourish. But is there something important missing in this picture? For most of the last two million years, humans lived in a natural world, relying on nature for food and shelter.

The amount of time we've spent in urban dwellings is a small sliver of the total time humans have spent on Earth. When you look at it this way, our shift from forest life to freeways and overflowing cities has been very recent and very dramatic. So how is this shift affecting our health, our mood, and our sense of calm?

This week on Hidden Brain, think deeply. We continue our annual summer series, YouTube.O. Authenticity is contagious. I have been dragged into this all the way kicking and screaming. Ideas and advice about how you can respond to life's chaos. Just do it, just check to my inbox. Just chaos. You do it just check to my inbox. Just check, just check, just check to my phone real quick. With wisdom. Ming-Kuo has been studying the effects of nature on humans for more than 30 years. She works at the University of Illinois or Banna-Champaign. Early in her career, Ming studied research looking at the well-being of animals in zoos. Researchers found that even when animals were provided all the basics of food,

safety, and shelter, they often failed to thrive. It turns out that zoo animals, first of all, are extremely expensive. They die at fairly alarming clips. And so, biologists have studied animals in the wild, and one of the ideas that they have is that there's this thing called habitat selection theory, which is that we are, we're wired for whatever habitat we evolved in. And so there seems to be this general kind of rule that animals who are in their quote unquote natural habitats will do much better. They thrive both in terms of physically will do much better they thrive both in terms of physically and psychologically and in terms of their social behaviors. So if zoo animals thrive in their natural habitat, some researchers have asked,

could this also be true for humans? Given that humans first evolved in the forest of Africa, could it be that depriving humans of this natural environment has effect similar to housing a zebra in a cage? We'll get to Ming's answer to that question in a moment, but first it's important to understand how she came to be studying this in the first place. She wasn't particularly interested in the benefits of greenery and nature. She was interested in the negative effects of noise and crowding. The way I got into the research on the effects of the natural environments on people was

I was interested in the dark side of the environment. I was interested in how violent or dangerous or bad urban environments had detrimental effects on people. And I only got into this by accident. And then I only came up with this view of the effects of nature through the data. So I have been kind of dragged. I have been dragged into this all the way, kicking and screaming. I did not have that view of people

that I set out to test. I came upon that view because I was trying to make sense of what the findings have been. I'm glad you said that because you know this idea that people need greenery or that greenery is essential to human satisfaction, well-being, thriving. When I first heard that, I sort of said that sounds like a really feel-good idea that I could hear in a new age magazine. And I find it appealing that in some ways you were a skeptic yourself that for a long time, you found this idea to be sort of squishy.

Yeah. I think like a lot of people, I thought of the environment as trees, grass, gardens, flowers. I thought of that as kind of a nice amenity, they're not functional, right? They're not what we need. And so it's only when you look at the patterns of what people are like with more and less access to nature that you start to see this pattern where, gosh, you know, we

see the same thing in humans that we see in zoo and lab animals, which is the wonderful quote from E.O. Wilson is that organisms, when housed in unfit habitats, undergo social, psychological, and physical breakdown. And we are seeing precisely that in people. So when you have people who have a certain amount of access to nature, and then you give them a bit more, you see better social functioning, you see better psychological functioning and better physical health. In some ways this argument is saying that humans today or many humans today are living in the kind of conditions that we used to keep zoo

animals in 50 years ago. I mean obviously we are doing better by a lot of humans than most zoo animals did in the old days but I think we are to some extent housing homo sapiens with that same functional view, that okay, well, as long as they have shelter, water, food, safety, you know, that's pretty good. That should do it, right? And then anything else beyond that is sort of a plus and it's nice. It's yummy, but it's not important. It's nice, it's yummy, but it's not important.

I want to take you methodically through some of the empirical evidence that persuaded you that this was more than just a feel good theory. And I'm wondering if we could start with the studies that you and others have conducted in Chicago. Walk me through this research, starting with the study that you conducted

at the Robert Taylor Homes. Sure. So Robert Taylor Homes is a, or was, a series of 16, 10 story buildings, sort of along a particular corridor in Chicago. And they were originally designed with greenery all around them. But over time, as you can imagine, if you have a ton of kids running around in a courtyard space, you don't have much money for maintenance. If it rains, they get mud everywhere and the grass gets trampled and it very quickly tends to die. And so there are very few cases in which the building managers didn't end up just paving over what used to be grassy areas.

And so if you pavor those areas, take the trees out, then you just have asphalt. So we have this beautiful kind of experiment where people are randomly assigned to different buildings that are identical and some of those buildings have a bit of trees and grass around them and some of them don't. And we just went about studying what the outcomes were in those different buildings. And what did you find? Well, we looked at a bunch of things but I think the sort of short answer is we found we found social breakdown in buildings without trees and grass around them.

That is to say, when we asked people, did they know their neighbors, did they speak to their neighbors, do they know them on first name basis, could they rely on their neighbors for, you know, for a favor to take care of their kids if they had an emergency. Then the people in the buildings with a bit of greenery were much more likely to say yes. We also found that the folks who are in the less green buildings are reporting more aggressive behaviors. And of course, we had reasons to think this might be the case according to theories.

So there's this attention restoration theory, which says that when people don't have access to nature they're going to be more mentally fatigued. So when you're mentally fatigued you're also less good at handling difficult social situations. And so we thought, okay, if nature is helpful for rejuvenating people from mental fatigue then folks in buildings who don't have any access to nature are going to be that much more fatigued and that much more irritable and that much more difficulty handling conflict in a productive way. And what's, of course, when we got these findings, we're kind of like, whoa, you know, I mean,

I know the theory predicts this, but I didn't think we'd actually get it. And so I did a follow up when involving Chicago Police Department crime statistics. They were very good about giving us two years worth of crime statistics. From another development, we wanted to see if this general effect showed up in other Chicago public housing developments. So we looked at a low rise one instead of a high rise, and we see the same pattern in police records of crime. So it can't just be that people living in close proximity to trees maybe have rosier memories of their interactions with others. In fact, hypothetically, you're seeing maybe the same amount of disagreement and conflict, but people are just remembering it differently. You're saying

the police records in some ways provide an objective measure that there actually is less conflict in these buildings. Right, exactly. So, I'm wondering about other confounding things in the study. I mean, is it possible that apartment buildings with more green space had different numbers of people living in them? You know, the buildings themselves were identical, but is it possible there were fewer people for some reason living in the greener buildings? And what you're measuring is really related to crowding and not related to green space.

Good question. But as you remember, those were the variables I cared about. So I wanted about, is there more noise, or was there more crowding? What else is going on in these buildings? And so, because I was interested, I made sure to measure all of those things. And it turns out that those did not explain their relationship.

So let's just take crowding as an example. If there was crowding, then it didn't fit the pattern that the violence fit, or it didn't fit the pattern of the green space, or both. I understand there's been research done out of Columbia University in the University of Pennsylvania that has explored what happens when you green parts of a city add more trees and grass to parts of a city that this has measurable effects not just from the quality of life but even on the crime rate. Right, and the numbers are really pretty startling. So these researchers worked with the city to coordinate their vacant lot program. And basically what they did was they designated a bunch of vacant lots as eligible for cleaning

and greening. Quote unquote. So that involves taking out all the trash, bits of glass, cigarette butts, cleaning it up, putting in some turf grass, you know, nice panel of lawn, and then some trees. So fairly inexpensive intervention, and they randomly assigned which lots would get this intervention and which ones would not, and then they tracked what happened in those lots afterwards.

And it turns out that in the lots that receive this intervention, gun assaults go down by police records, 9.1%, which is really, like, boy, if we have anything that cost any amount of money that can reduce gun assaults by 9% in a city, any mayor in the US is going to trump at that. And we see similar patterns for burglaries and other complaints. So, it's a very exciting finding.

If I recall correctly, wasn't there a time maying when actually police had the opposite intuition? They actually thought that having trees and bushes could actually increase crime because it gave bad guys places to hide and in some ways it made surveillance easier if you actually eliminated all of that and that's just that open lots or just things paved over. Right, there was that belief and in fact there is something to that intuition but it's fairly limited. So if you have a lot of basically brush and undercover,

that can in certain circumstances, particularly in park settings, depending on lines of visibility, then yes, a large bush can provide a place to hide drugs or a gun or whatever. And at the same time, what we see is that if you have limbed up trees, trees that do not block visibility at eye level, the consistent finding is more trees less crime. What was your reaction being as a researcher in some ways who wasn't necessarily looking for this finding?

And in some ways, as I'm detecting, was sort of somewhat skeptical about sort of the overall relationship between nature and these positive things. What was your reaction when you got these results? I mean, to be a scientist, to be a good scientist is to be a skeptic, you know. So even when you have a theory that's your pet theory and this was by no means my pet theory. Your job is to try to figure out is there some way this we could have found this without my pet theory being true. And so I'll tell you a related story. My old advisor, Rachel Kaplan, who's one of the giants in this field, she did her work for decades

in a building at the University of Michigan that faces onto a brick interior courtyard, just bricks and gravel at the bottom. So she spends her career there 30, 40 years. I don't know how many years, right? And then over time, she does stpendous work and the university finally decides to give her a named chair, a professorship, sort of a very fancy position. And at the same time, they're renovating the building and they move Rachel into a third

floor corner office in the trees. It's right in the canopy. And her office is all windows. And she says to me, you know, I have been studying this for how many decades, and now I know it's really true. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. For years, Minkuo has studied how nature affects us and how the lack of access to nature can lead to crime and social breakdown. It turns out this is only part of the story. There's also a relationship between nature and our physical and mental health.

Ming says there seems to be a connection between greenery and health markers for obesity, hypertension, and diabetes. So I did a review of the scientific literature and I found every bit of evidence I could that tied greenery to long-term health outcomes. So for instance, one of the things we find is that when you look out at a green landscape even from indoors, your heart rate will go down and you'll change from sympathetic

nervous activity over to parasympathetic nervous activity, which is basically going from what we call fight or flight into tend and befriend mode. So it has these very systematic physiological impacts on us, which we also know have long-term health outcomes associated with them. And I found dozens of health outcomes where long-term health outcomes had been tied to contact with nature, and all of those studies, I threw out anything that didn't take into account

socioeconomic status. It is no surprise that we would find rich people tend to have greener neighborhoods and better health outcomes. I was interested in let's take two people, same income, same life circumstances, except for the greenery. And what do we see in terms of health outcomes there? Let's talk a little bit about the socio-economic surface. As you and others have pointed out, there is an enormous disparity in many countries, not just between the rich and the poor, but in neighborhoods that are green and neighborhoods that are not green. And in many ways, this lines up with disparities between the rich and the poor.

Rich neighborhoods tend to be greener, poor neighborhoods tend to be less green. How much of what you are seeing is it possible that some of this is actually just related to differences in wealth that then produce all kinds of other health consequences, or do you think this is actually connected just to the greenery itself? Well, that's exactly the concern, right? We already knew that wealthier people have better health outcomes and more greenery, so then how do you compare? And basically, what you do is you look for people who have the exact same person A in the screen neighborhood and person B in the snacking neighborhood, you want to make sure persons A and B have the same income. So all of these comparisons in

this review I did were taking that into account. One of my favorite studies in this area comes from an analysis of pharmacies in London and the medications they dispense. And there's a connection between this and the amount of greenery in different neighborhoods in London. What are the study fine? So pharmacies in London are neighborhood-based. So pretty much people go to the pharmacy that's in their neighborhood.

And they know how green it is around each pharmacy. And they also know how many people live there, how many people the pharmacy serves. And they know prescriptions for mood related, you know, anxiety disorder medications and depression medications. And they just compared for pharmacies that compare the same number of people with the same rough income. How many more mood medications are they prescribing? And it's substantially larger.

The less greenery is around the neighborhood. There also appears to be a relationship between greenery and the strength of our immune systems. After people spend several days in nature, researchers find measurable increases in what are known as natural killer cells. After a three-day weekend in a forest preserve, that boosts natural killer cells on average by 50%. And a three-day weekend in a nice urban area turns out doesn't do anything for your natural killer cells. And then if I come, come knock on your door 30 days later after your three-day weekend, and I say, can I have another sample of your blood please?

And you give it to me. It will show that you are still roughly 24, 25 percent above your baseline number of natural killer cells. So it's a big effect and it lasts for a really long time. What do you think is going on here, Ming? I mean, is it just the things we see when we're out in nature, is the things we smell, is it just the things we see when we're out in nature, is it things we smell, is it just the experience of being out in nature, is it the perception, is that what's driving these effects, do you think? Well, the answer is yes.

So it turns out that if we take people and put them in a lab, and we just show them pictures of nature, and we watch what happens to their blood pressure and their nervous system activity. We can see them become more calm. So just the visual is enough. Similarly, if I take you into a lab and I spritz what we call fight insides, which are these essential aromatic compounds that you associate with woods. So if I spritz you with fight insides,

you don't have to be in a pine forest. I can see changes in your natural killer cells and in your bloodstream. So of course, if you're a mad scientist, you would say, well, really all you have to do is make sure that people's green savers are set to pictures of forests. And you sort of pipe in some, you know,

sounds of the forest over the public address system, and you spritz the air with some eucalyptus, and you're done. Well, you will have a measurable positive effect. If I give you vitamin D, and I give you vitamin A, then that takes care of your D and A deficiency, but it doesn't take care of your B and C deficiencies. So nature seems to be like a multivitamin. You can get different benefits from different kinds of exposure, you know, right, the spritzing versus the visual versus the smell or whatever. But to get all of them, you have kind of have to be there.

So I'm wondering how do you take this multivitamin everyday, Ming? You've started out as a skeptic and you've gradually come to be persuaded by the evidence. Have you found ways to actually apply these insights to your own life? I live about a 10 minute walk from the university from the campus and I do something which probably looks completely ridiculous to the average person driving by me. I walk two and from school with my eyes in the canopy. I fly through the trees on the way to school and I fly through the trees on the way back from campus. And I have, so my head is up, I probably at danger of tripping, I look ridiculous, but

it makes a real difference for me. And once I started adopting that, I have become hooked. Ming-Ko's studies the effects that nature has on human beings. come hooked. Ming Co. studies the effects that nature has on human beings. She's a researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Ming, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain. Thank you so much. This week's show was produced by Thomas Liu and edited by Tara Boyle.

Artimian Clude Zrena Cohen, Jenny Schmidt, Parth Shah and Laura Correll. Our unsung hero is Emily Blackman, who oversees events at the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. We had a staff retreat at the Foundation's headquarters some time ago, and Emily made sure that everything ran smoothly. Her work gave us a chance to take a breath and connect with nature and with each other. It was a wonderful day and we're truly grateful. For more Hidden Brain, you can follow us on Facebook and Twitter. If you like this episode, please be sure to share it with someone you know. We're always looking for new listeners

to Hidden Brain. We're always looking for new listeners to hit and brain. Next week, authenticity is contagious. We continue our YouTube.O series with an episode about rebelling against norms. Once we see people making themselves vulnerable rather than judging them negatively, we actually respect them and we ask ourselves questions about why is it that we're covering up. I'm Shankar Vedantam and this is NPR. you