Another reminder to get some nature.
It’s not news that scenes of nature can lift the mood.
The Back Page has the de rigueur second work monitor, but it serves little purpose except to display a rotation of images from past travels to rest her eyes on from time to time.
A 1984 study found surgical patients with a window looking out on a natural scene “had shorter postoperative hospital stays … and took fewer potent analgesics than 23 matched patients in similar rooms with windows facing a brick building wall.
Whether exposure to natural settings can achieve genuine pain relief, and not just a general elevation in subjective wellbeing, is the subject of a study out of Vienna, published, appropriately enough, in Nature.
Previous research, the authors say, is marred by poor controls and self-reported measures in which it is hard to distinguish actual nociception from the more generally unpleasant effects of pain.
To cut through the noise they stuck 49 healthy people in an MRI machine and showed them carefully matched natural and urban scenes and an indoor scene as control, while – the fun part of any pain study – giving them electric shocks.
The subjects were also asked to report levels of pain intensity, specifically, and unpleasantness more generally.
Significantly lower pain was reported in the nature versus both urban and indoor conditions, with a greater difference in unpleasantness (medium effect size) than intensity (small).
While that could suggest the nature scene was playing on the affective-motivational side of things more than the sensory-discriminative components of pain, that wasn’t supported by the brain scans, which found hard evidence of “real” analgesia in a nociception-linked brain signature.
The team looked at this brain pattern, called the neurologic pain signature, and found a decrease in these neural processes while looking at nature.
The study demonstrates that natural settings “induce genuine analgesic effects, that the effects are likely positive consequences of the nature stimuli rather than being caused by the aversiveness of the standard ‘urban’ control stimuli, and that this effect can be primarily attributed to changes at sensory and nociception-related lower levels of the processing hierarchy”.
Subjects also reported a greater level of distraction from and tolerance of pain in the nature setting than in the other two, and had a slightly but significantly lower heart rate.
The benefit over other non-pharmacological interventions, “which usually involve complex deceptions through placebo induction procedures or week-long training of cognitive coping strategies”, is that natural imagery is cheap and accessible.
Here’s one more to tide you over until you can go for a walk in the park.
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