Natural Sounds and Your Health with Rachel Buxton, Conservation Scientist at Carleton University

Professor Rachel Buxton is  a conservation scientist at Carleton University.
 Website: https://rachelbuxton.wordpress.com
Twitter: @buxton_rachel

Verla Fortier's transcript of this episode visit   treesmendus.com.
Verla Fortier's  book and workbook: Take Back Your Outside Mindset: Live Longer, Prevent Dementia, and Control Your Chronic Illness

Rachel Buxton:  For me what was the most striking was the level of benefit that we get. So we found overall an over 180% improvement in groups that listened to natural sounds – we also found large decreases in stress and annoyance in groups that were listening to natural sounds.

And then just the breath of different health outcomes, so everything from improving our mood, improving our cognitive abilities – so our ability to do complex tasks, decrease in our pain, and decrease in our levels of stress. So really a remarkable set of benefits just from listening to the  sounds  of nature.

You’ve talked about the benefits, what can you say about what sound does to our body?

Sound is such an important sense. It is one of the first senses that form in humans. Babies can hear from 20 weeks in the womb. It’s a very primal sense.

It is very under appreciated. There is no such thing as ear lids. We can’t close out ears, so we are constantly taking in information through our ears. Even when you are sleeping you are still hearing and you have reflective capacity for sound. It is such an important sense, and one that often gets ignored because are these visual creatures.

So when you go out into nature you think about these beautiful vistas that you see – looking over from a mountain top – yes that is very important, but the sounds that you are experiencing in nature are also really fundamental.

You can think of the impact  of sound from  an evolutionary perspective. So humans  are really good at  paying attention to signals of danger and signals of safety. A sound environment that is full  of sounds of nature, birds, water is a pretty good indicator of a safe environment. So what that allows us to do is let down our guard,  it allows for mental recuperation, and relaxation. Whereas an acoustic environment that is empty --  so either it has no natural sounds – the birds have stopped singing – or it has very few  natural sounds, that’s a  pretty good indicator that something has gone wrong. It might be an indicator of danger. And so what happens is we become vigilant. We are on the look out for what might be wrong. That does  not allow for mental recuperation and can actually lead to stress.