Is it just the act of birdwatching that rewires the brain and slows cognitive decline, so I can enjoy the same effects by looking at tiktoks of birds, while sitting on my couch eating cheetos?
Or are the hiking, breathing in fresh air, the eyes seeing natural sunlight etc critical to the effects?
So if I swapped the birdwatching with watching horses run or pigs fornicate with everything else being the same (hiking, breathing in fresh air, the eyes seeing natural sunlight etc), I would enjoy the exact same benefits the article claims birdwatching results in?
I think it's obvious that what slows down their dementia is that they're bothering to remember things, socializing, expressing their expertise to peers and comparing notes. Normally a retiree doesn't have that much interpersonal connection, and if they do, it's not usually that intense.
The claims of the actual paper are much more nuanced and not anything near how the BBC headline frames it. I think this is more a case of bad science reporting than bad science.
I would maybe argue that the vast majority of science reporting especially in large news outlets is bad science reporting since the modern media ecosystem has strong preference for sensationalism.
It's why there's so much distrust of science globally. We've cured cancer! Except we haven't, it was mouse studies. Except we have! Except not really, that drug failed it's first clinical trial. Except we have! Except that's just mechanistic reasoning not proven by any observational studies.
So then people think, wow, these scientists have no idea what they're doing and just make stuff up all the time to get attention. Which they aren't - most peer-reviewed studies include a mountain of caveats and I've rarely seen, even in large meta-analyses and Cochrane Reviews, papers that make half as strong a claim as ad-revenue obsessed news editors do with their hyperbolic headlines.
> So if I swapped the birdwatching with watching horses run or pigs fornicate with everything else being the same (hiking, breathing in fresh air, the eyes seeing natural sunlight etc), I would enjoy the exact same benefits the article claims birdwatching results in?
Those activities typically don't require observation and inference. A big part of birdwatching is identifying small, fast-moving animals that exhibit specific combinations of behaviors at specific times of the year based on specific climatic conditions. That sort of rapidfire pattern matching from video and audio info is probably a big contributor to what keeps the brain sharp.
We just started doing meaningful bird photography (as opposed to true birdwatching) last year and I agree with you.
The couple of times we've gone with guides who are serious birdwatchers, it is impressive to watch their abilities in this area of multimodal species identification (and male/female/adult/juvenile) in challenging visual and audio environments (and recall of species names in Latin, English, and Spanish).
Meanwhile I'm out there with my camera like "Hey, look at that beautiful red+blue bird!" ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Valid criticism, but I recall the study showing cab drivers have the lowest incidence of dementia among all professions, and I thing perhaps there could be something about activating the visual system in 3d space that is uniquely good.
We don't go birdwatching because we read somewhere that birdwatching is good for you.
We want to know what it is in birdwatching that registers as beneficial because if the factor(s) are distinct and isolated then the same benefits can be scaled outside of birdwatching.
And if you just went birdwatching because they said so, you wouldn't know why it might be beneficial to you. Or maybe there's a factor that wasn't identified separately and birdwatching itself doesn't improve your cognitive capabilities while, for many others, it supposedly does.
You would want to know you're getting benefits from whatever you decide to do if you're doing it in order to gain those benefits.
If you find that sign up form, would you kindly post it here. I'd be interested too, but my googl-fu isn't very good apparently. The way the current administration is berating science funding, you'd think this would be something that is actually happening.
> so I can enjoy the same effects by looking at tiktoks of birds,
Birdwatching includes looking at top trees searching for birds. Looking at complex fractal-like accumulations of branches and leaves. Also following sounds and identifying their source. The brain was designed for this task.
A screen does not seem a substituted for such a incredible rich experience. Screens are a flat low-resolution, low fidelity view of reality. And no brain has evolved to watch at them. It can actually be quite tiresome to look at screens all day, as so many things about them go against how our eyes and brains work.
Isn't this counter to the idea that gaming can also slow cognitive decline for similar reasons?
The average CounterStrike player, for example, is scanning complex structures trying to identify an enemy, listening to sounds and trying to follow the source...etc. Why would the screen get in the way in one case but not the other?
Parent's point is IMHO that birdwatching involves a lot more attention, skill and experience than just plainly looking at a screen.
As sister comments point out, this could be reproduced with a lot more technology (VR with high precision controllers ?), which could bring it on par with playing Counter Strike in some ways perhaps ?
To expand on bird watching, people usually don't mindlessly choose a wood cabin and just sit there. They'll know which bird should be where depending on the season, where they tend to hide depending on the time of the day, their bird calls etc. and eventually trek to wherever the birds will be. It's also not so far from fishing.
Maybe I misunderstood, or took their argument too literally. I understood it to be damning screens specifically.
Seems like we're all generally in agreement, then. Probably nothing to do with the literal act of seeing birds, but all of the cognitive work that goes into it. Birdwatching is just an easy-to-digest hobby that demands the right sorts of cognitive activity. This can be akin to a 'Bird Spotting: the Video-game' with whatever flavor and skin, be it a shooter or racing sim or sports game.... but does not seem to cross over into 'TikTok' style less-cognitive activities behind a screen
I come from the world of live action VR and not 3D generated, so my mind instantly went to what it would take to make a VR live action experience of finding the actual birds in an actual location possible. The image collection required to allow for a zoomed in through binocs view enough detail would be something "fun" to assemble. Everything was designed around wide angle lenses a la GoPros because of form factor which means zooming would be atrocious. Designing something with long lenses would result in a camera rig that would be insanely impractical. Now, using a set of sensors like the Rubin Observatory might might make this feasible. Hmmm...
I'd also be interested to know what the speed of cognitive decline is OUTSDE the times that you are <birdwatching/hiking/whatever is claimed to cognitive decline>.
Like, if you have a baseline cognitive decline of 25% in 10 years, and you instead spend 2 of those 10 years (total time spent) watching birds to go from 25% to 20% reduction in cognitive decline, you haven't really slowed your cognitive decline, you've just effectively paused it during the time you were watching birds.
I won't argue it's a hacker mindset - it's about learning what matters and what's accidental.
If a article headlines saying "People who wake up early live 20 years longer than people who sleep in", and then it turns out it wasn't the act of waking up early at all, rather, early risers then went out for a run or a swim and people who slept in but did the same actually lived even longer than those early risers, it's important to know that.
Or for one of my favorites, 'a glass of wine a day is healthy' because of antioxidants... or something. Except it isn't, at all. But rather as people's health deteriorates to a sufficient degree they tend to stop drinking (even if not consciously because of their own health), and so when you study light drinkers versus non-drinkers, there was enough of an undetected bias in there to make it seem that drinkers were, on average, healthier. It's easy to see echoes of that possibility in near to any study, especially observational.
> 'a glass of wine a day is healthy' because of antioxidants... or something. Except it isn't, at all
Also, in America, the kind of people who have a glass of wine a day (but not more) strongly correlate with those who can afford healthcare.
Similar for mediterranean diets. Turns out it’s the universal healthcare available in all the mediterranean countries both on the european and the african sides.
> Or for one of my favorites, 'a glass of wine a day is healthy'
There are a few reasons why this is false, my favorite one is, they didn't control for alcoholics who stopped drinking and thus reported as non-drinkers. So the group of completely sober ones had people with liver damage etc. while those with only moderate drinkers had barely any heavy-drinkers in it.
Oh this is such a nice comment. It's like saying People who live on the 5th floor are healthier than those on the ground.
Of course, the root cause being people who are unfit, sick or elderly cannot literally make it up a flight of stairs.
but if people aren't paying attention, like the vast majority of population dont, you'll suddenly have an explosion of condos that start from the 5th floor with the first 4 floors turned into something else.
I believe that we'll see a lot of "x is good for your brain" news (with X just being any activity that doesn't involve a screen), now that attention spans are so short and everyone feels like their brain isn't the same anymore.
The same way we got gyms when people realized physical inactivity is super unhealthy.
What if we took the idea of two minutes of hate session from the dystopian 1984 and made it available all the time. Everyone could carry in their pocket their own personal two minutes of hate that they can have any time they want as often as they want. Orwell never dreamed so high
We all have that already, it's called smartphone sadly.
It works with whatever political direction you lean on, which stance you have on two or more genders, which religion you love or hate, which gaming platform you prefer, how old you are and many more "divide and conquer"-topics.
It'll be difficult to replace because it's so effective already...
What percentage of people are neither of the simple common XY nor XX chromosomes?
It's about as many people as there are with red hair. If you don't include chimerics it's about 0.25-1.7%, if you do include twin chimerics it's 8%, not including mothers micro-chimerism.
Probably shouldn't be having those Kenyans (Kalenjin) competing in marathons either. Completely unfair advantage.
That's great! I think anything that's not passively consuming a screen will be known as "good for your brain", the same way that regular food has become known as "health food".
Eschewing eating ultraprocessed, factory-made food is now seen as a deliberate health choice, even though it used to be the default. I think the same is happening with the brain.
Reading a book is now seen as some erudite choice. Having a hobby like knitting, birdwatching, etc. will be some kind of "good for your brain" activity. Things that used to be the only option are now "healthy choices".
Funnily enough, my bird watching does in fact involve a screen — the electronic viewfinder on my camera[0].
Jokes aside, there is a very definite difference in how my brain "feels" when I'm walking around, camera in hand, looking for things to photograph. It's like I'm in a different "cognitive mode", for the lack of a better term. It's not just about being present and in the moment, but about seeing the world around you from a different perspective.
multiple times in the last few months I've done a thing and then a week after having done it, felt like it was something I'd have to be crazy to attempt, even though I did it and it went fine and it wasn't even that wacky. Because you get in a different mindset when you're actually doing something than when you're sitting at home wasting time on RuneScape*
* probably one of the less bad things you can do on a screen, since it predates the everything-for-attention era
I think it is slightly different than that. I think it is more about active brain activity versus passive. Learning how to play Riichi Mahjong (e.g.) would likely show a similar effect. A lot of people push brain puzzles as a tool against dementia, etc. but it is only helpful when learning a new puzzle type. Once you over learn it, our innate pattern matching takes over and you start playing on auto-pilot, it stops "rewiring" your brain. Just sitting on the couch binging streaming or swiping through shorts is likely to atrophy your brain.
Obviously being out in nature has other mental health benefits. The key thing is to keep learning and stay curious. Drive to some new nearby town on a weekend and learn about its history. Learn a new hobby like full f-stop photography or learn how to bake or cook (learn all four base sauces). Take up board games and explore all the different kinds of experiences they provide today.
Oh please, this is Internet nonsense. Google tells me:
> Psychologists and neuroscientists find no structural decline in the human brain's ability to focus. Sustained attention limits remain largely unchanged.
I and pretty much everyone I know has repeatedly mentioned how difficult of a time they're having reading books, code (software eng. friends), or even watching the first half of a movie without feeling the need to open their phones and scrolling Instagram.
A lot of, "birdwatchers" I see travelling to remote parts of Scotland and other places in the UK are generally wealthy retirees, with nice kit (Rab clothing, telephoto lenses, VW campervans).
Cognitive decline is shown to impact disproportionately on less wealthy people. So is there a trend with economic wealth and outdoor hobbies like birdwatching? I'd hazard a yes.
On a side note, the Merlin bird ID app from Cornell University is great.
For what it’s worth, this article cites a longitudinal study done by German researchers.
They basically installed a bunch of bird feeders outside nursing homes to see if watching birds improves the health of the elderly people. The researchers concluded that it did:
Nursing home staff were the first to see the difference the birds made. "For weeks, they haven't seen a smile on [a resident's] face, and then they see the smile," Kals says.
Some of the memory and concentration improvements are evident after just three to four weeks, Kals says.
It seems that they used the following bird feeder in their study:
You have quite a biased sample because most people are not going to suffer going to remote parts of Scotland to look for birds, so you are only seeing the more devoted birdwatchers.
Birdwatching can still be enjoyed in most places without needing to travel far. Birds are less active in bad weather so you don’t need expensive outdoor gear, and in many places there will be freely accessible nature reserves with hides in which one can sit in shelter to watch birds.
The highest quality glass is going to get pretty expensive (camera lenses can get to the region of $20k; binoculars $4k or so) but there are also much cheaper options and often these can be quite reasonable: you don’t need to take photos of birds; a superzoom point-and-shoot can work great; more expensive binoculars make a bigger difference in low light and if you’re young (older people’s pupils won’t dilate as much so bigger objectives at a lower magnification won’t be a huge help).
I feel like mostly you’re observing that rich people spend lots of money on their hobbies and not that opening your eyes to look at birds is some expensive exclusionary activity.
Even better, older Nikon DSLRs are now cheap with many F-mount lenses being incredibly cheap versus buying new mirrorless gear and lenses.
M43 systems are also excellent for bird watching given the 2x crop factor, and diminutive size of lenses verses larger sensors. Older M43 camera bodies are incredibly cheap versus new equipment. M43 combined with modern LLM-based denoisers means that even low-light photos with higher ISO really can end up looking incredibly good.
I have a Nikon P1000 while it doesn't have the best image quality does make up for it in having a truly remarkable zoom: 24-3000mm. Just the thing for taking pictures of birds and then working out what they actually are at my leisure.
Birdwatching is truly one of the cheapest possible hobbies you can have. Yes, you can make it expensive if you're committed to photographing them and traveling to remote locations to find "life list" birds, but that's not the vast majority of hobbyists.
Pretty much agree. Binoculars are essential though, unless you really just want to watch geese and herons and things. And for binoculars you do want to spend a few hundred dollars at least if you can. It really transforms things when you can start watching/identifying the small birds.
> On a side note, the Merlin bird ID app from Cornell University is great.
Do you know how it compares to iNaturalist? I'm not a birdwatcher, but I have iNat on my phone and sometimes use it to identify birds, and it seems to do a great job.
I have tried both. Merlin is best for bird watching. It does not ask to upload any data. Just start the recording, it listens and let me know what is the bird is. Done. It only uploads, IF I want it upload.
I'd say a lot of activities like this can be done for cheap or free. Taking an elderly person to the park is free, it just costs time. Binoculars are ubiquitous, and bird books are a dime a dozen in your local charity shop.
The critical thing is that these people need a hand to get out of the house or do any kind of activity. And I think that's partially behind a lot of ailments that affect the elderly, they don't go out, don't get physically, mentally or sensorily stimulated enough so they atrophy in all those areas. On top of age related conditions like senility, parkinsons, altzheimer's, etc of course.
Not sure, but this is definitely a thing - the "a single glass of red wine a day is good for you" claim is pretty likely more about how people who can afford daily wine are probably wealthier people with better access to healthcare, not that any amount of daily ethanol intake has a therapeutic effect. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...
> "Her team's findings have prompted German health insurance companies – who, among others, initially funded the research project – to invest in setting up bird feeders and viewing areas in more than 400 nursing homes across Bavaria. "It was so effective, it just economised money," Kals says."
Perhaps we need to provide opportunities for less well off people to access nature? It might have a positive cost-benefit. And design care homes around gardens? 'forest bathing' is apparently often recommended in Japan based on studies of blood pressure and other physical indicators.
Munlochy: if you ever saw a geezer wearing an ex-army parka, builders safety boots with Opticron bins it might have been me. I don't get up there often enough to warrant the pricey stuff.
I'd really say the opposite - birdwatching cuts across socioeconomic classes surprisingly well in the UK. At least the subarea of bitding which is focused on rare birds.
This article just explained the behaviour I’ve been seeing in my grandfather. He has dementia and used to hunt wild boar (very common in central Italy), but he knew the local wildlife well. Since developing dementia, for obvious reasons, he unfortunately hasn’t been the same. But a group of doves has nested on the gazebo on his terrace, and every year they come back (either them or their offspring). He watches them all day, giving them food and water and following every stage of their growth. It’s beautiful to see nature indirectly helping humans who, let’s be honest, at least in his case, hadn’t done much good for nature.
I know this is absolutely not the point, but I wanted to touch on the "hunting = bad for nature" idea.
All animals die, and dying from a clean rifle shot is preferable to 99.9% of the ways animals will die in the wild.
Regulations like bag limits and license lotteries prevent over-hunting, and in many situations (like the wild boars in Italy) hunting is an ecologically positive activity, as it reduces populations that would otherwise explode and destroy its own ecosystem.
But you said it yourself, that's not the point. So why talk about it up at all?
Like, OP could have skipped that tidbit of backstory, but there's no harm done in including it. While you could have skipped this entire reply, which pushes (your/an) idea and a specific view of the world.
And yea, I could have skipped mine too. But... that's not the point, lol.
I’m an avid but amateur birdwatcher since some mental health struggles some years ago. I would go on long walks and eventually all these damn birds punctured my rumination and I tried making bird noises and they made bird noises back (I later learned these were Grackles, and they had arrived as a group to one of their preferred haunts). Once I started paying attention and interacting with more birds I got hooked.
It really is a very different cognitive mode. And when LLMs later came out I took my birdwatching-stance into it, which felt like a natural way to encounter some new entities.
I find it easy to believe that birdwatching is fairly distinctive in how it organizes the brain. Many sibling comments were wondering “is it the bird watching or is it an isolatable factor.” Bird watching is an extremely distinctive sensory integration, prediction, classification, etc task with lots of subproblems yes but also binding them in an irreducible way with agency detection (a vital part of cognition that modern environments are impoverished of) and attention.
I'm into ham radio which, as a hobby, skews to an older demographic. Does just having a stimulating hobby actually slow decline?
Most of the fun of ham radio is learning - it never stops, there's always something else to discover. I'd guess that it's the learning, searching, and connections you make that provide the benefits. Unless being in nature is a requirement, but then you have plenty of retirees that go RVing - do they experience the same benefits? I doubt that's as intellectually stimulating as birding or radio. Maybe.
I think going out into nature adds more physical factors (ham radio and video games are both physically pretty passive hobbies) and more sensory input, which gut feeling says are overall better.
But generally speaking, hobbies are good. That said, I wonder why video games don't seem to be more popular as post-retirement hobbies.
> I wonder why video games don't seem to be more popular as post-retirement hobbies.
I think it's a generational thing. Video games were fully entrenched as part of culture starting late gen x/early millennial. I expect to see elder gaming being a thing in the years to come.
You can also enjoy ham radio outdoors through SOTA (Summits On The Air). Going on a long hike while carrying 10 kg of radio equipment, setting up your station at the summit, and making contacts with other operators is a physically demanding but incredibly rewarding activity.
Ham radio does have a lot of outdoor activities. Parks on the Air, Summits on the Air, and to some extent, field day. Some people just operate from their car, others do full day hikes to the spot they setup at.
Yes of course, anything the requires skills you don't otherwise use. In particular continuous learning is very helpful.
The challenge however is, is it that those who engage in such hobbies have decline slowed. Or are they able to engage in those hobbies due to not declining.
It's not possible to answer clearly without some randomisation and control which is basically impossible.
Still, it's reasonable inference that hobbies and work maintain cognitive capabilities.
It seems also just enough to say supporting people to have a hobby if they're at risk of dementia and don't have one is important to meeting their social and health needs.
I might be being too cynical.
I wonder if there is some funding arguments, I.e. if it's for their health and insurer may fund it.
If it's for their social/cultural and general wellbeing it might be out of their remit somewhat.
> > The challenge however is, is it that those who engage in such hobbies have decline slowed. Or are they able to engage in those hobbies due to not declining.
> Maybe by comparing the comparative cognitive of twins, one of whom has a hobby and the other doesn’t?
I think some hobbies tap into innate abilities more than others. And those tend to show more perceptible and immediate progress and so are more likely to become a regular habit. As a human you already have a facility for recognising things in nature, it is how humans can find food and detect threats. Where as other abilities (like playing a violin) are far less innate.
For someone that knows nothing about ham radios can you give me a taste for what you mean by requires continuous learning from a naive perspective? It seems like any other radio technology that has not changed in decades.
If you haven’t seen it, Listers (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zl-wAqplQAo) provides a great glimpse into what competitive birdwatching looks like. It’s nothing like casual birdwatching.
I watched this is and it's such a great documentary. I really want to take a year now and try to get at least in the top 25% of birders for the year. I was into casual birding before (it's my favorite thing to do when traveling to a new place, just wander around the area and spot local birds). But now I'm loving the idea of these monthly or annual "competitions"
I can’t recommend this documentary enough. The algorithm dropped it onto my YouTube homepage one day and I wasn’t expecting to watch more than a few minutes but I was drawn in immediately.
I don’t consider myself a birder but I’ve got into nature photography in recent years and it’s such a joy to get out for sunrise or sunset and to come home with a special shot.
While I don't have scientific or medical studies to back this up, I feel the same about people with aquariums or bird feeders who spend time watching them.
I have always had an aquarium in the house and bird feeders in the backyard. I'll stop and watch them while I eat or just need to disconnect. Better than staring at a screen.
I feel way better studying the fish in my little microcosm in my 120-gallon freshwater planted tank or looking out into my backyard at the menagerie of birds, chipmunks, and squirrels around the bird feeders.
There's the "always on" type of birdwatching as well, that allows you to recognize the birds you see and hear in the course of ordinary life. No patience required, just practising staying aware of peripheral vision and sounds, but equally rewarding when you are lucky enough to have a chance encounter.
Erik Wing, who led this research at Baycrest Academy for Research and Education in Toronto, Canada, compared MRI brain scans from bird experts to those of novices while they identified birds. He found that expert brains were wired differently in regions important for functions like attention, visual perception and visual recognition.
The study only (?) looked at the brains of birdwatchers, the paper extrapolates the study to make assertions about the brains of active subject experts in general.
This feels if nothing else quite analogous with default mode network, i.e. brain regions which are task-negative (or task-neutral).
It seems that the literature supports the intuition that to meaningfully relax (i.e. exercise the brain with fewer pressures of time, success or similar, and with a relatively low information bandwidth) is really good for cognitive health. And it's very good to destress, which we can all benefit from!
So even if there are more cars than birds outside my own window... I'll make sure to spend a few more moments each day by it :)
Many hobbies do that for you. It’s important to engage with something that you like and use your brain. Also, part of the equation is to keep on moving. If you take daily walks and engage in a desk bound hobby it’ll likely provide similar benefits discussed here.
More likely socialising and long walks in nature slows cognitive decline - how do you control for this from the results to make the birdwatching part relevant?
This "passive consumption" needs disambiguation, though.
What separates "I see colorful moving things" [watching birds] from "I see colorful moving things" [social media reels] is not the perceived passiveness but passiveness in the psychological sense.
Watching birds is active attention: you scan, predict, analyze. You get random, sparse rewards for it. Importantly, birdwatching is mostly nothing happening, which leaves room for your mind to wander - and wandering is the thing that's apparently really good for the brain.[1]
[1] - Moshe Bar, Mindwandering (2022), Michael Corballis, The Wandering Mind: What the Brain Does When You’re Not Looking (2015) and different related research papers
Hmm I don't do bird watching so I'm assuming it's not entirely passive, as in you need to sneak up on the birds to watch them. Even if sneaking is only coming in binoculars range.
If you sit on a chair on your porch and watch whatever birds happen to come by, it's still bird watching?
doing anything slows cognitive decline. Using your pbrain is what slows it down. Not the specific thing you're doing. So does knitting, playing an instrument, and a lot of other things.
I imagine any similar hobby that is generally practiced outdoors, is not repetitive (knitting as an example), and requires acute use of your senses would be the same.
Sounds to me that nature (and the animals) is the thing that slows cognitive decline and so on and so forth. Not birdwatching per se. (I didn't read the article, but having studied psychology, I am assuming with confidence that there is a confounding factor that makes it look like birdwatching is the _thing_ that slows cognitive decline.)
I knew it! Those 30 and 40 somethings are always up to something. You never see them, never hear them, but here they are slowing their cognitive decline. They are clever little rascals. They're just like the species they're watching.
But I created a set of amazing binoculars with automatic AI age detection via radar for the small friendly price of 39.49$. Looking for a bird watcher? Get the SilentBirdWatchDectector 3000 and slow your cognitive decline at double the rate.
Don't watch the birds, watch the bird watchers instead. They may do something interesting.
look, look! A millenial father observing bird species in an effort to stave off cognitive decline, rarely seen away from his burrow and demanding offspring, we can see from its markings that this one was once a hipster, note the foliage pattern about it's left radiocarpal.
"The findings don't prove whether structural brain differences are the cause or effect of birdwatching expertise."
Not a big surprise that this observation proves exactly nothing as there are thousands of other factors they could not control for (and apparently didn't want).
"Her team's findings have prompted German health insurance companies – who, among others, initially funded the research project – to invest in setting up bird feeders and viewing areas in more than 400 nursing homes across Bavaria. "
This is kind of hilarious and I would not believe that if it weren't Germany, a country that intentionally destroyed its nuclear plants capabilities in order to burn Russian gas and emit CO2. Obviously in the name of reducing CO2 emission.
In some ways they do, but actually going out into nature, smell different air, get aun on your skin, wind through your hair, see all around and not just a flickering screen and interface with reality with your whole body, not just eyes staring to a square and hands moving mouse and keyboard .. seems even more beneficial in activating the neurological system in the body.
They probably are, but only if you try new games, new maps, new strategies constantly - anything to get your brain plasticity working. Killing monsters in Diablo for 10 years in a row probably hastens the decline if anything.
Or are the hiking, breathing in fresh air, the eyes seeing natural sunlight etc critical to the effects?
So if I swapped the birdwatching with watching horses run or pigs fornicate with everything else being the same (hiking, breathing in fresh air, the eyes seeing natural sunlight etc), I would enjoy the exact same benefits the article claims birdwatching results in?
https://www.jneurosci.org/content/46/12/e1307252026
It's why there's so much distrust of science globally. We've cured cancer! Except we haven't, it was mouse studies. Except we have! Except not really, that drug failed it's first clinical trial. Except we have! Except that's just mechanistic reasoning not proven by any observational studies.
So then people think, wow, these scientists have no idea what they're doing and just make stuff up all the time to get attention. Which they aren't - most peer-reviewed studies include a mountain of caveats and I've rarely seen, even in large meta-analyses and Cochrane Reviews, papers that make half as strong a claim as ad-revenue obsessed news editors do with their hyperbolic headlines.
Those activities typically don't require observation and inference. A big part of birdwatching is identifying small, fast-moving animals that exhibit specific combinations of behaviors at specific times of the year based on specific climatic conditions. That sort of rapidfire pattern matching from video and audio info is probably a big contributor to what keeps the brain sharp.
The couple of times we've gone with guides who are serious birdwatchers, it is impressive to watch their abilities in this area of multimodal species identification (and male/female/adult/juvenile) in challenging visual and audio environments (and recall of species names in Latin, English, and Spanish).
Meanwhile I'm out there with my camera like "Hey, look at that beautiful red+blue bird!" ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
We want to know what it is in birdwatching that registers as beneficial because if the factor(s) are distinct and isolated then the same benefits can be scaled outside of birdwatching.
And if you just went birdwatching because they said so, you wouldn't know why it might be beneficial to you. Or maybe there's a factor that wasn't identified separately and birdwatching itself doesn't improve your cognitive capabilities while, for many others, it supposedly does.
You would want to know you're getting benefits from whatever you decide to do if you're doing it in order to gain those benefits.
Birdwatching includes looking at top trees searching for birds. Looking at complex fractal-like accumulations of branches and leaves. Also following sounds and identifying their source. The brain was designed for this task.
A screen does not seem a substituted for such a incredible rich experience. Screens are a flat low-resolution, low fidelity view of reality. And no brain has evolved to watch at them. It can actually be quite tiresome to look at screens all day, as so many things about them go against how our eyes and brains work.
The average CounterStrike player, for example, is scanning complex structures trying to identify an enemy, listening to sounds and trying to follow the source...etc. Why would the screen get in the way in one case but not the other?
As sister comments point out, this could be reproduced with a lot more technology (VR with high precision controllers ?), which could bring it on par with playing Counter Strike in some ways perhaps ?
To expand on bird watching, people usually don't mindlessly choose a wood cabin and just sit there. They'll know which bird should be where depending on the season, where they tend to hide depending on the time of the day, their bird calls etc. and eventually trek to wherever the birds will be. It's also not so far from fishing.
Seems like we're all generally in agreement, then. Probably nothing to do with the literal act of seeing birds, but all of the cognitive work that goes into it. Birdwatching is just an easy-to-digest hobby that demands the right sorts of cognitive activity. This can be akin to a 'Bird Spotting: the Video-game' with whatever flavor and skin, be it a shooter or racing sim or sports game.... but does not seem to cross over into 'TikTok' style less-cognitive activities behind a screen
Like, if you have a baseline cognitive decline of 25% in 10 years, and you instead spend 2 of those 10 years (total time spent) watching birds to go from 25% to 20% reduction in cognitive decline, you haven't really slowed your cognitive decline, you've just effectively paused it during the time you were watching birds.
Meanwhile most people just do the traditional thing
If a article headlines saying "People who wake up early live 20 years longer than people who sleep in", and then it turns out it wasn't the act of waking up early at all, rather, early risers then went out for a run or a swim and people who slept in but did the same actually lived even longer than those early risers, it's important to know that.
Also, in America, the kind of people who have a glass of wine a day (but not more) strongly correlate with those who can afford healthcare.
Similar for mediterranean diets. Turns out it’s the universal healthcare available in all the mediterranean countries both on the european and the african sides.
There are a few reasons why this is false, my favorite one is, they didn't control for alcoholics who stopped drinking and thus reported as non-drinkers. So the group of completely sober ones had people with liver damage etc. while those with only moderate drinkers had barely any heavy-drinkers in it.
Of course, the root cause being people who are unfit, sick or elderly cannot literally make it up a flight of stairs.
but if people aren't paying attention, like the vast majority of population dont, you'll suddenly have an explosion of condos that start from the 5th floor with the first 4 floors turned into something else.
and all of them have lifts!
The same way we got gyms when people realized physical inactivity is super unhealthy.
The corvids looking back wondering what you're doing and they'll communicate back too.
I think becoming a person who would stop and do that, or go birdwatch in general, is probably the important part.
It works with whatever political direction you lean on, which stance you have on two or more genders, which religion you love or hate, which gaming platform you prefer, how old you are and many more "divide and conquer"-topics.
It'll be difficult to replace because it's so effective already...
That's what the person you responded to was saying.
Probably shouldn't be having those Kenyans (Kalenjin) competing in marathons either. Completely unfair advantage.
All models are wrong, some are useful.
NB I'm 61 and recently started developing something almost entirely for the mental workout if provides
Edit: I also wanted to use HTMX so I could become CEO one day
Eschewing eating ultraprocessed, factory-made food is now seen as a deliberate health choice, even though it used to be the default. I think the same is happening with the brain.
Reading a book is now seen as some erudite choice. Having a hobby like knitting, birdwatching, etc. will be some kind of "good for your brain" activity. Things that used to be the only option are now "healthy choices".
Jokes aside, there is a very definite difference in how my brain "feels" when I'm walking around, camera in hand, looking for things to photograph. It's like I'm in a different "cognitive mode", for the lack of a better term. It's not just about being present and in the moment, but about seeing the world around you from a different perspective.
0. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tnMlazV0g1syoRPLALJ6576YSYQ...
* probably one of the less bad things you can do on a screen, since it predates the everything-for-attention era
Obviously being out in nature has other mental health benefits. The key thing is to keep learning and stay curious. Drive to some new nearby town on a weekend and learn about its history. Learn a new hobby like full f-stop photography or learn how to bake or cook (learn all four base sauces). Take up board games and explore all the different kinds of experiences they provide today.
and done by top 1 percent of the world
my spouse and I (30s) had no problem sitting through the new Spider-Man movie without opening up our phones.
A lot of, "birdwatchers" I see travelling to remote parts of Scotland and other places in the UK are generally wealthy retirees, with nice kit (Rab clothing, telephoto lenses, VW campervans).
Cognitive decline is shown to impact disproportionately on less wealthy people. So is there a trend with economic wealth and outdoor hobbies like birdwatching? I'd hazard a yes.
On a side note, the Merlin bird ID app from Cornell University is great.
They basically installed a bunch of bird feeders outside nursing homes to see if watching birds improves the health of the elderly people. The researchers concluded that it did:
It seems that they used the following bird feeder in their study:https://www.lbv.de/umweltbildung/fuer-seniorenheime/ausstatt...
Birdwatching can still be enjoyed in most places without needing to travel far. Birds are less active in bad weather so you don’t need expensive outdoor gear, and in many places there will be freely accessible nature reserves with hides in which one can sit in shelter to watch birds.
The highest quality glass is going to get pretty expensive (camera lenses can get to the region of $20k; binoculars $4k or so) but there are also much cheaper options and often these can be quite reasonable: you don’t need to take photos of birds; a superzoom point-and-shoot can work great; more expensive binoculars make a bigger difference in low light and if you’re young (older people’s pupils won’t dilate as much so bigger objectives at a lower magnification won’t be a huge help).
I feel like mostly you’re observing that rich people spend lots of money on their hobbies and not that opening your eyes to look at birds is some expensive exclusionary activity.
M43 systems are also excellent for bird watching given the 2x crop factor, and diminutive size of lenses verses larger sensors. Older M43 camera bodies are incredibly cheap versus new equipment. M43 combined with modern LLM-based denoisers means that even low-light photos with higher ISO really can end up looking incredibly good.
No need to go far or spend a lot of money.
Do you know how it compares to iNaturalist? I'm not a birdwatcher, but I have iNat on my phone and sometimes use it to identify birds, and it seems to do a great job.
The critical thing is that these people need a hand to get out of the house or do any kind of activity. And I think that's partially behind a lot of ailments that affect the elderly, they don't go out, don't get physically, mentally or sensorily stimulated enough so they atrophy in all those areas. On top of age related conditions like senility, parkinsons, altzheimer's, etc of course.
Perhaps we need to provide opportunities for less well off people to access nature? It might have a positive cost-benefit. And design care homes around gardens? 'forest bathing' is apparently often recommended in Japan based on studies of blood pressure and other physical indicators.
Munlochy: if you ever saw a geezer wearing an ex-army parka, builders safety boots with Opticron bins it might have been me. I don't get up there often enough to warrant the pricey stuff.
All animals die, and dying from a clean rifle shot is preferable to 99.9% of the ways animals will die in the wild.
Regulations like bag limits and license lotteries prevent over-hunting, and in many situations (like the wild boars in Italy) hunting is an ecologically positive activity, as it reduces populations that would otherwise explode and destroy its own ecosystem.
But you said it yourself, that's not the point. So why talk about it up at all?
Like, OP could have skipped that tidbit of backstory, but there's no harm done in including it. While you could have skipped this entire reply, which pushes (your/an) idea and a specific view of the world.
And yea, I could have skipped mine too. But... that's not the point, lol.
It really is a very different cognitive mode. And when LLMs later came out I took my birdwatching-stance into it, which felt like a natural way to encounter some new entities.
I find it easy to believe that birdwatching is fairly distinctive in how it organizes the brain. Many sibling comments were wondering “is it the bird watching or is it an isolatable factor.” Bird watching is an extremely distinctive sensory integration, prediction, classification, etc task with lots of subproblems yes but also binding them in an irreducible way with agency detection (a vital part of cognition that modern environments are impoverished of) and attention.
But generally speaking, hobbies are good. That said, I wonder why video games don't seem to be more popular as post-retirement hobbies.
I think it's a generational thing. Video games were fully entrenched as part of culture starting late gen x/early millennial. I expect to see elder gaming being a thing in the years to come.
The challenge however is, is it that those who engage in such hobbies have decline slowed. Or are they able to engage in those hobbies due to not declining.
It's not possible to answer clearly without some randomisation and control which is basically impossible.
Still, it's reasonable inference that hobbies and work maintain cognitive capabilities.
It seems also just enough to say supporting people to have a hobby if they're at risk of dementia and don't have one is important to meeting their social and health needs.
I might be being too cynical. I wonder if there is some funding arguments, I.e. if it's for their health and insurer may fund it.
If it's for their social/cultural and general wellbeing it might be out of their remit somewhat.
> Maybe by comparing the comparative cognitive of twins, one of whom has a hobby and the other doesn’t?
I don't see how that would help in this case?
I don’t consider myself a birder but I’ve got into nature photography in recent years and it’s such a joy to get out for sunrise or sunset and to come home with a special shot.
I have always had an aquarium in the house and bird feeders in the backyard. I'll stop and watch them while I eat or just need to disconnect. Better than staring at a screen.
I feel way better studying the fish in my little microcosm in my 120-gallon freshwater planted tank or looking out into my backyard at the menagerie of birds, chipmunks, and squirrels around the bird feeders.
Is a long leap from this article's title. Paper:
https://www.jneurosci.org/content/46/12/e1307252026
Can we be sure that happened because of the bird watching, or did they reach expert level because their brain is wired differently?
As opposed to watching tv series or just doing nothing.
It seems that the literature supports the intuition that to meaningfully relax (i.e. exercise the brain with fewer pressures of time, success or similar, and with a relatively low information bandwidth) is really good for cognitive health. And it's very good to destress, which we can all benefit from!
So even if there are more cars than birds outside my own window... I'll make sure to spend a few more moments each day by it :)
Anything that's not passive "content consumption" perhaps.
What separates "I see colorful moving things" [watching birds] from "I see colorful moving things" [social media reels] is not the perceived passiveness but passiveness in the psychological sense.
Watching birds is active attention: you scan, predict, analyze. You get random, sparse rewards for it. Importantly, birdwatching is mostly nothing happening, which leaves room for your mind to wander - and wandering is the thing that's apparently really good for the brain.[1]
[1] - Moshe Bar, Mindwandering (2022), Michael Corballis, The Wandering Mind: What the Brain Does When You’re Not Looking (2015) and different related research papers
If you sit on a chair on your porch and watch whatever birds happen to come by, it's still bird watching?
But I created a set of amazing binoculars with automatic AI age detection via radar for the small friendly price of 39.49$. Looking for a bird watcher? Get the SilentBirdWatchDectector 3000 and slow your cognitive decline at double the rate.
Don't watch the birds, watch the bird watchers instead. They may do something interesting.
(I'll see myself out...)
Don't watch YouTube videos of birds eating their babies, baby birds killing their siblings, or just eating random animals including other birds.
"The findings don't prove whether structural brain differences are the cause or effect of birdwatching expertise."
Not a big surprise that this observation proves exactly nothing as there are thousands of other factors they could not control for (and apparently didn't want).
"Her team's findings have prompted German health insurance companies – who, among others, initially funded the research project – to invest in setting up bird feeders and viewing areas in more than 400 nursing homes across Bavaria. "
This is kind of hilarious and I would not believe that if it weren't Germany, a country that intentionally destroyed its nuclear plants capabilities in order to burn Russian gas and emit CO2. Obviously in the name of reducing CO2 emission.
Wow.