Instant Genius - The healing power of nature

Episode Date: September 5, 2024

Do you ever feel a bit stressed and think that taking a walk in the woods is just the thing to calm your mind? Maybe you take a moment to listen to the birdsong around you to lift your mood during your lunch hour. Or maybe you feel a deep sensation of relaxation when you hear the sound of a gently flowing brook. Over the past decade or so new evidence on what is going on in our bodies when we interact with nature has emerged leading to some fascinating discoveries showing how forming a deeper relationship with nature can help our mental and physical health. In this episode, we catch up with Kathy Willis, professor of biodiversity at the University of Oxford to talk about her new book Good Nature: The New Science of How Nature Improves Our Health. She tells us how smelling pine trees can slow our heart rates, how keeping houseplants can make our gut microbiomes healthier and how touching wooden furniture can help us feel calmer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Hello and welcome to Instant Genius, a bite-sized master class in podcast form. Every Monday and Friday, you'll hear world-leading scientists and experts talking about the most fascinating ideas in science and technology today. I'm Jason Gojah, commissioning editor at BBC Science Focus.

Do you ever feel a bit stressed and think that taking a walk in the woods is just the thing to calm your mind? Maybe you take a moment to listen to the birdsong around you, to lift your mood during your lunch hour. Or maybe you feel a deep sensation of relaxation when you hear the sound of a gently flowing brook. Over the past decade or so,

new evidence on what's going on in our bodies when we interact with nature has emerged, leading to some fascinating discoveries showing how forming a deeper relationship with nature can help our mental and physical health. In this episode, we catch up with Kathy Willis, Professor of Biodiversity at the University of Oxford to talk about her new book,

Good Nature, the new science of how nature improves our health. She tells us how smelling pine trees can slow down our heart rates, how keeping houseplants can make our gut microbiomes healthier, and how touching wooden furniture can help us feel calmer. So welcome to the podcast. Thank you very much for joining us. Well, thanks for having me. So today we're talking about your book, Good Nature, the new science of how nature improves our health.

So this idea has been gathering momentum for quite a few years. years now. But I think the premise is maybe still unfamiliar to some people. So how would you sum that up? So I think I'd sum it up by going back to a study that really got me going on writing this book. And that was sort of in 1985, a paper was published in a top science journal, which showed that when people looked out of a hospital window, it was after gallbladder surgery. They recovered much faster and took less painkiller drugs if they looked onto greenery than if they looked onto brick wall. And what really got me interested in this was it normally we hear about, you know, vegetation, nature and cities that it basically provides space, more exercise or it cleans the air, and therefore that is the indirect benefit you get is health. Whereas this was a direct interaction that someone was looking out of a window and presumably there was clean air in the hospital.

So they're looking out of the window and it's mainly by seeing the green vegetation that this seemed to trigger some actions in the body that resulted in them having less pain. and also recovering faster. So my question or the sort of thesis I started it with was, well, what is the mechanism of action that happens in the body when our senses, sight, sound, touch, smell, interact with nature. And that set me off in a completely different pathway to one that I've previously worked on as an academic. And the more I looked at the evidence base, the more I realized that actually there's a whole swath of clinical studies that have been carried out in the last 10, 15 years, started to try and work out sort of blind testing, really good random controlled trials, trying to work out what does actually happen and does nature actually affect our health?

Or is it something that's sort of nice and healthy feely and bunnies and everything else? But actually it doesn't really have any effect. So I learned a whole new language in a sense. I had to learn the medical literature. I had many medics who kick the tires on this book. And I took all the studies in each chapter looks at a different sense. and that's where I've come to, and this good nature, is trying to share the knowledge base that's already there

in the process, have become a total convert to saying actually, yes, nature in our homes, outside our houses, in the parks, is really critical. So you mentioned the different senses there, so we can go through those sort of in turn. So the first one is this visual study that you mentioned. I mean, this is fascinating because it's not going out into the woods. It's just simply seeing the trees.

What do we know about that? So what it does, it seems to trigger these auto responses and both psychological and physiological. So, for example, they had studies where people have basically sat and looked out of a window and they've measured their responses using brainwave activity, heart rate, pulse, etc. And what they show is when you look out onto a green scene, you are physiologically and psychologically calmer.

You feel happier your anxiety levels go down compared to when you don't look onto a green scene. But the other really interesting study, and there was a study done on 2,500 school children in Spain, which showed, and it was published in a top science journal, which showed that those children that looked out onto green, not only did they have these sort of lower physiological and psychological stress markers, but also, once they looked out onto that green scene,

they had better working memory and cognitive function. So staring out of a window for a few minutes is actually, a good thing to do, because when you come back to the task that you're doing, what they showed was that you perform that task better. And the same has been shown many times now, and particularly the one I love, because I work in a university night, often have students staring out the lecture window, was that actually if they're looking out onto green, when they come back, their focus attention is much better. And this is what this study showed. They showed students that looked for 90 seconds onto a green roof or alternatively onto a northern.

or brick roof, that those that looked onto the green roof, the test scores of the test they did when they came back after looking was better, much higher. And these results are statistically significant. It's not just one person doing one test. And so the body of knowledge that's building up is really quite strong to start to say that looking onto green vegetation brings about these reactions. So that's really nice to hear for me personally, as I have a lifelong habit of staring out of windows. We all do. But you mentioned green. So there seems to be something key about the colour itself. So that's a really interesting thing as well. First of all, most of the studies that have been done on colour are done actually on single colours, like green, red, the colours of colour spectrum.

Originally, there's been some really good studies showing that green is much more coming. That's why you find lots of hospitals are painted in this really horrible green. They're sort of slightly, you know, maybe people like it, but I think it was pretty pasty to me. But When people do experiments where they, for example, do creative experiments with different shapes of card, which are in different colours, what they have shown is those people that play with sort of green squares versus yellow, white and actually blue is closer to green. What they find is people are much, much more creative if they've been playing with the green before they play with the other. So there's sort of these cognitive links in here. But also, then, the studies that have been done on plant colour have shown that when they measure brainwaves, activity and the parts of the brain that are basically sort of, that you get all the neural

activity occurring. When you're looking at green, that's where they find that people who are looking at green tend to have a sort of higher activity in areas that are known for cognition, but also for calming and being less anxious. All of these parameters all come together when you start to look at them to realise that green leaves and also looking at vegetation can bring about this physiological and psychological calming. Sort of sticking with that for a minute, it also works if we see them on screens. I found that really interesting.

What do we know about that? So there was a lovely study done with some Japanese students who looked at just 90 seconds of looking at a screen where they had the gizzi forests versus a screen where they saw sort of urban, like New York skyline, for example, sort of big, blocky things. And what they found was that those that looked at the green

compared to those that looked at the urban setting, very much had sort of lower blood pressure, all sorts of other metrics showing physiological calming. And also they said they felt less stressed and happier. But a follow up from that is, of course, these students are not that stressed in the first place. So I think another really nice study that was done was people were stressed.

They were stressed intentionally by making them do this sort of recite numbers backwards. And every time they made a mistake, they'd hit the buzzer. and of course they hit the buzzer even if they hadn't made a mistake, which would make me deeply stressed, and I'm sure anyone. So they got elevated stress levels in these two groups, and then they looked at the recovery rates from those elevated stress levels in heart rate and other metrics over a couple of minutes. And again, they found that those people that looked onto green forests and these pictures on the computer screen, their stress levels came down

much, much quicker and they recovered much quicker from stress than those people who looked at the urban scene. So the sort of take-home message from that, of course, is if we're stressed at work, or we've had a stressful encounter, let's say, the first thing you should do is look out the window or look onto something pleasant on your computer screen. So let's stick with the visual system at the moment. Let's move on to flowers. So personally, I love having a bunch of flowers in my home, even if it's, you know, a bunch of daffodils or something, sounds a bit middle class, but I've always liked it. Yeah.

But all the different species have many different colours. They're not just green. Yeah. It's amazing that people have worked on this, but there's been some really nice clinical studies where they've had participants sitting at a desk, and they just measured their heartbeat and blood pressure, and found that compared to having no vase of flowers on your desk, those that had vars of flowers, even just for one minute, had a lower blood pressure. pressure and lower heartbeat rate. Now, it also, it's affected by the colour. So these were non-scented

roses. But other studies that looked at the colour of flowers finds that actually, whilst green and white and yellow all have this effect, red in particular can have the opposite effect. It makes people feel stressed and annoyed. And that this is one of the sort of psychological metrics. That keeps being shown. So it's a really interesting question about, you know, what colour of flowers you should have on your desk. You certainly have flowers, but pick the right colour. And it comes back to the idea you have poncettia with those big red sort of leaves and branches and bracts on the Christmas table. Maybe poncettias should be ditched. Although, I mean, the other thing that's been shown is that we're quite fickle with our sort of responses to colour. Because this is something that

really got to me when I was doing this, I think, well, why does everyone flock to see the autumn colours in New England, for example, if red is not a colour that makes us feel calm and happy. And a very nice set that it's carried out in the States looked at people's preferences for colour. And it was very much green, green, green, green, till you hit the autumn months. And then for the sort of two months where you have the colours changing or the leaves changing, then it went to red. And then it goes back to green again. We do shift and our psychological responses to colours shifts according to season as well. So sort of sticking with this a little bit more, how about artificial flowers?

You know, we mentioned the screens. Can we get benefits from those? Yes, so there's not much evidence. There's been a couple of studies done on this. And given how huge the market is in artificial flowers now, you don't need to go to, you know, any of the big supermarkets or home stores have, you know, racks and racks of these. But I presume you do get some benefit from them being green. when you're looking at the flowers, there was a lovely study which they did. Again, it was on school-age participants. They had a tray of pansies, yellow pansies, and the first tray they saw were the real things. And then the second tray, they didn't know that they changed them over.

The second tray was those polyester panses that look very much like the real thing. You have to touch them to realise they're not the real thing. And they had no reaction to the polyester, but they did have a calming reaction. action to the real things, which suggests it's much more than just the colour, that there are other factors that are influenced in this, including probably the smell. Yeah, so that was going to be my next question then to go into smells. So I don't know if I'm painting a weird picture of myself now, but I love burning essential oils. I love my home to smell. Flower Lang Lang, I really like. I know people find it a bit sweet or whatever. This is also a huge benefit to us,

isn't it? Well, that's the other thing. So for far too long, I think, we've always been very dismissive of essential oils, and scientists are very sniffing. And the really interesting about smell is the smells that you get from plants are due to the volatile organic compounds that the plants give off and various reasons why they do that, attracting pollinators, etc, etc. But when you breathe in a plant smell, you don't just breathe it in and breathe it out again. those compounds, or some of those compounds, pass across into your blood, which is really interesting because once in your blood, they have been shown to interact those compounds with the same biochemical pathways, or some of the same biochemical pathways, that we have prescription

drugs to cause those reactions, for example, anti-anxiety drugs. And how do we know this? Well, there's a lovely study where people walked in a pine forest for two hours, and they measured their bloods before and then after they'd been in Py Forest. And they looked at the compounds in the blood. Before they went into the forest, very, very low levels of pine-in, which is the compound, the volatile organic compound, that makes that very pine-like scent in forests. And then they looked at the bloods after they had walked to the forest to us,

hugely elevated levels of pining in their blood. So effectively, those compounds become part of our whole sort of internal chemistry. and it's those interactions and the people are really working at this now that seem to trigger a whole host of health benefits. So if you look at lavender, for example, it's not an old wife's tail to spray lavender on your pillow because what they showed was when you put people in sleep chambers and you basically on the one night they puffed their lavender

and the next night, no lavender, those people that had lavender puffed out when they measured their brainwave activity, they not only had longer intervals of uninterrupted sleep, but they also had deeper sleep, i.e. the sleep that's really good for your health. Rosemary has been found to keep you more awake, more alert. And probably some of the most interesting in terms of smell is related to the smell given off by cypress and cedar, which is a really big sequituripine, which is a very big molecule. And what they've found with that is that people who smell that scent, for some reason, they end up with elevated natural killer cells in their bloods. Now, these are the

cells that attack cancer and virus cells. These are the ones we want lots of in our blood to provide us with enhanced sort of resilience to these horrible non-communical diseases. To me, that's a huge area where, you know, we're going to, we should. If you can't go and walk in a Cyprus forest and in the UK, you'd be quite hard pushed to find a nice Cyprus forest. The thing we can do, though, and what you're doing is bring them into your home, diffuse them. And I have diffusers now all over my house. You know, lavender in the bedroom, rosemary in the study, and Hinokee oil I diffuse in various rooms. Not all the time, but enough to basically give a boost to your immune system. Because what they showed with the Cyprus Forest, which I thought was really

interesting, that when a group of participants walked in the Cyprus Forest, after, they walked for three hours, four hours, I think it was, and afterwards they had these significantly enhanced natural killer cells in their blood. And they remained for seven days. after they walked in the forest. So it's almost like you've got this sort of pulse of sort of good nature, affecting your body, affecting your immune system, affecting all sorts of things. So you don't need to do it every day,

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Visit focal powered by name.com for more information. So I think when most people mention the kind of psychological effects of fragrances, they're going to mention Marcel Proust and how fragrances can trigger memories. Yes, yes. So what role does that play? I'm sure it does, but the problem with that is then people say it's all cultural, it's all sort of in the mind, it's triggered because you, you know, you went to your grandmother's garden and picked lavender. So that's why I like the scientific experiments showing completely independently.

However, you could still say maybe there's something deep in our sort of subconscious. There was a lovely study that's carried out on babies. I have no background knowledge and they, in this case, they puffed out pineine and limerine, which are two that are known to. to have been shown to induce physiological calming. And sure enough, in these babies, limine in particular, resulted in lower heart rate. The babies were much calmer. And so, you know, you can't then say,

well, it's all cultural, it's all related to, because it absolutely is occurring in children or tiny babies that really, this was six to eight week old babies, who really have no knowledge based to be referring back to. So let's move on to another of our senses then hearing, So I think this is interesting. Another thing, I mean, I think you might have noticed by now this is very much up my street. So I really love being in the forest listening to the sounds, the rustling leaves, the streams, the birdsong, be insects and things. Why do I like that so much? Well, again, it triggers these three pathways, an endocrine pathway. So effectively, if it triggers your hormones, it triggers your neurological pathway. So things like heart rate variability, your nervous system, all these other. things we've been talking about. And it seems to also trigger your psychological pathways

to make you feel better, reduced anxiety. But the really interesting thing with the work on, particularly on Birdsong, is it's not all Birdsong. And this is true on all of the examples I give, its specific aspects. And what lovely studies have been carried out, particularly by scientists at the University of Surrey and elsewhere, who've shown that, you know, the tuneful bird song, things like the Robin or the Wren, you know, that repeated pattern, up and down. You'll have a different path, but it's tuneful. These trigger these calming reactions, whereas the loud squawk of something like a parakeet or a parrot or a crow absolutely have the opposite effect. People don't like them. It makes you feel stressed. It puts you on edge.

And so that comes back to then when you're planning to enhance birdsong, then you ought to be thinking about what are the sorts of environments that you manage to attract those sort of birds. Then the other really interesting studies that have been then done related to knowing that this brings about these different physiological and psychological reactions is looking at pain management in hospitals. And what they've done, they've looked particularly, this has worked to be carried out in a number of universities and a number of hospitals associated universities in Iran. And when they looked at people who are undergoing sort of surgery where they were basically still awake, like an epidural for a cesarean section, for example, they measured. the saliva amylase, so that's a good indicator of hormone, it's an enzyme that you have in your saliva that is an indicator of stress. And they measure their saliva amylase before the operation and then after the operation for sort of every 10 minutes or so. And what they showed is those people,

so they had three groups, one with no sound, one where they could hear the sound of the hospital, and one where they heard bird sound and rustling leaves, all the things that you were saying, actually you love to hear. And what they showed from the pain scores and from the saliva Amelais, that the people who heard the bird song, they were a lot less stressed. So the stress hormone levels came down much faster than those who heard nothing or just heard the open surgery in the hospital. And so that, in its sense, it's a bit like hearing music when you're having a sort of an operation. It would seem that birdsong and the sounds of nature or particular sounds of nature can also be used as a very sort of non-invasive way of bringing about calming and

reducing those stress levels. So let's move on to the sense of touch then. So I think this is really interesting because obviously we know if we've got a pet cat or a pet dog, stroking them calms us down. But we can get a similar effect by touching plants and trees. Yes, amazing. I mean, I just, when I first saw these studies, I thought, oh, come on. And the more I looked, the evidence, the more I realize that there is actually some good quantitative evidence, which is statistically significant, showing, for example, that if you stroke wood, that actually is a bit like stroking a dog, that it can lower your blood pressure compared to if you stroke, I don't know, marble or steel, even if they're all at the same

temperature. And particularly with the wood, it's the finish. So actually what they showed is the unfinished wood, where you're closest to the real thing, that is when you get the greatest effect. And funny enough, when you think about it, you think about a lot of this work has been done not by scientists, originally not done by scientists, but kitchen designers and furniture makers. And if you think about it, I'm now become sort of slightly intrigued by this. If you ever go to a home store and you look at people in kitchen areas looking at the kitchens, they always stroke the bench. And then you think, actually, I will stroke a desk or our stroked surface.

And so we sort of subconsciously do it to see how it feels. Now, why on earth would you stroke kitchen top? So therefore, I think there is something very, very interesting. And it's the same also about having wood and your feet being on wood versus your feet being on steel or marble. But the other thing about wood and wood paneling they've shown is that wood paneling in offices and school rooms and things and even homes, Those woods that give out pineine, for example, so many of the conifers, the soft woods, give out this smell. That scent carries on being given out for a number of years, many years, 30 years, after the woods up there. They showed sort of two groups of people who worked on a test in a concrete room versus a test in a pining room.

And again, they found that there was a really quite a significant difference in terms of test schools after they sat in these rooms. and they suggested it could be to do with the send. But this is one of those areas where a lot more work needs to be done. And I'd say that's true of quite a few of these studies. When you look at it, they have really brilliant studies independently, but you often need much bigger sample sizes to really start to turn that round, make it into a prescription for reducing X, Y, or Z. Yeah, so sort of talking about that, by way of summary then,

we've covered an awful lot there. Do you have any sort of top tips that? people can do to get these benefits in their daily lives? The one thing we haven't talked about, and probably for me, the most extraordinary thing that I came across when I was doing this book, was about a sense that we don't see touch smell here and yet very much part of us, which is the environmental microbiome. And so in a biodiverse environment, even from individual plants,

these plants have their own bacterial communities, and they have good bacteria on them. The majority of them seed the air, effectively, with good bacteria. And when we're close to those plants or that biodiverse area, our skin takes this on and so does our gut. And like drinking a probiotic, the studies have shown people who spend time in a biodiverse environment have much more diverse gut microbiome as well. And I'll just give you one last study, which is a lovely study, because this probably is my favourite and where I think where the science is going. And that was a study carried out in Finland,

published a couple of years ago, where they looked at kindergarten children, and they looked at kindergarten children in three different playgrounds. So one, they had normal rubber matting, the second they had concrete, and the third, they bought in soil from the borough of forest, so organic soil, nothing added to it. And the children played in these different environments for 28 days. And before and after, they measured their bloods, and they also measured their gut microbiome through their stools, and also on their hands. And they showed that, those children that played in the soil had significantly higher good bacteria on their hands and in their guts. But even more interesting than that, they also had elevated levels of good markers

indicating reduced inflammatory processes going on in their body. They had effectively reduced inflammatory markers of the sort that you want to be reduced. And the same was then demonstrated with adults, but particularly they're just having a green wall in their office. So for me, this is something where, you know, we should be interacting with soil, we should be interacting with the environment, we shouldn't be scared about soil, for example, gardening with your gloves off. In fact, that's going to do as a whole healthy benefits. But even in your own home, plants in your office, plants in your bedroom, plants in your sitch room, will create a healthy microbiome. And so that to me is sort of one of the things. I think all the benefits,

stacked benefits and the other things, you know, the more you can have, the better. But also, diffusing out those scents that we've got in our homes. And then when you think about outside, we've got so much policy coming through that's both pro and against nature. So there's pro, which is we need more urban green spaces and everyone's saying, well, there's all these policies now saying everyone should be 15 minutes away from urban green space. That's great. But what do you put in that urban green space? Because urban green space is not all equal. A flat football pitch will not provide you with the same swath of health benefits that you'll have

with a community garden, for example, with lots of diversity and everything else. And then we also have to be really careful with our drive to build more houses, which I'm completely up for, and we must do that. But it shouldn't be an either-or. It shouldn't be, yeah,

we're going to absolutely swamp this area with houses, and by the way, nature isn't, you know, we can't afford that, we'll put that elsewhere 30 miles away. Now, nature needs to be near people. And if we want to really get the health benefits and create healthy communities going forward, that's where we need to be focusing our policies. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius.

Brought to you from the team behind BBC Science Focus. That was Professor Cathy Willis. To discover more about the topics we've just discussed, check out her book, Good Nature, the new science for how nature improves her health. The current issue of BBC Science Focus magazine is out now. Pick up a copy wherever you buy your favourite magazines or downloaders on your preferred app store. You can also find us online at sciencefocus.com. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal.

The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name Audio believes you can have digital precision with analogue warmth. Alongside French acoustic specialist focal, Name creates high-end audio systems combining innovation with craftsmanship so you can listen to music just as the artist intended. Discover more at nameaio.com.

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