Your Brain on Birdsongs (Transcript - up to 14:01)

Alicia: Welcome to the Bird Who Made Me Happy. This is Alicia Bridge and I am your host. We're going to dive into the topic of what is it about birdsongs that makes us so happy. When I think about why I first became intrigued about birdsongs, I can honestly say it might have been the stress of motherhood and the need to find some calm amongst everything. It could have also been my worry about the pandemic. Either way, I was on the search for answers for how to cope with the stress I was experiencing. And then one day on a drive, I heard a bird song and it changed me.

My next guest is Avik Basu, an environmental psychologist at the University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability. Avik is the co-author of Fostering Reasonableness: Supportive Environments for Bringing Out Our Best. And his research explores the questions of why it is that our attention fatigues after overuse, and how natural environments, understanding the ancestry of our brain development, and listening to birdsongs, can replenish our resources for better productivity and happiness.

Avik, thank you so much. I am just so grateful for learning about your knowledge, what you've gained around this subject and for the time that you're taking to do this with me, so very appreciative.

Avik: Glad to be here.

Alicia: I want to start out, I'm always curious about the roots of our motivation in life, one of the things I always wonder is, are there moments or are there experiences in our early childhood that have moved us or have given us motivation towards the work we're doing in the world now?

Avik: My early childhood was characterized by an Indian immigrant upbringing. I grew up in southeastern Michigan, in the suburbs of Detroit, being a son of Indian immigrants, also traveled to India quite a bit. My parents both came from places that can be characterized as villages. Being in those places and seeing the contrast between that and the US made an impression on me. It struck me that we are capable of adapting to environments that we might perceive to be a lot less comfortable, or have the amenities that we're used to here and what was then called the developed world. So I had those images in my mind as a young person and always felt we could do more with less and less, to me meant less urban, less technological, less of that kind of stuff. That said, I actually did my degree in engineering, worked on software and lots of tech stuff for a lot of my life. Until I switched over to psychology. I worked with the Kaplan's who developed the Attention Restoration Theory that you are curious about. It was in that transition that I was able to bring together that sense of frugality and economy, simplicity, that I had sensed in my childhood, to a more psychological understanding of how people are influenced by the environments that they engage with.

Alicia: Amazing. And before we kind of dive into the Kaplan's theory, I'm curious, what was it about their work that led you into a deeper dive with them and into it?

Avik: The attention restoration theory is only a small part of their work. It's probably the most popular, well-known part of their work. But they go much beyond that. And the part that spoke deeply to me was about understanding how the brain works in relation to the environment that the brain grows up in. And so they look specifically at the way that the kinds of environments that you are in can influence the way you learn, influence your attitudes, influence your behaviors. Understanding that linkage was very captivating to me. That was really my first deep dive into understanding evolutionary psychology. Think about what kinds of universal behaviors do humans have that may have been adaptive in different kinds of environments. We now live in very different environments than our brains evolved in. 

So, what are the consequences of having a 10,000-year-old brain in a modern society and trying to understand some of the challenges that are faced, let's say things like information overload, being stressed all the time, thinking about why do we need these birds, you know, our ancestors that long ago didn't have nearly the amount of input to their systems that we now face. And for them, bird songs weren't a respite, they were more commonplace sorts of things.

Alicia: Amazing. So, I'm hoping that we're gonna dive into the Kaplan's Attention Restoration Theory. And you can give us a bit of an overview.

Avik: One of the most basic components of Attention Restoration Theory is the idea that attention is a limited resource. It can fatigue when it's overused. People who have drained their attentional resource might feel stressed, they might feel burned out. And this is where it is helpful to understand that there are different kinds of attention. So attention restoration theory draws on the work of William James, a psychologist in the early 1900s.

He suggested that there are two types of attention, one kind of attention is directed attention. That is, you're intentionally paying attention to me, or when you're reading a book, you're intentionally focusing on something and you're directing your attention towards something with your effort. That effort leads to a fatigue of that directed attention capacity.

There's another attentional system that James described using an example of being at a cocktail party, and you're talking to someone, you hear some noise that sort of sounds like your name, and your attention is drawn to that. That kind of attention is involuntary. In attention restoration theory, we call that fascination. Most of what we look at on our phones has sort of been designed to involuntarily get our attention like we can't help a lot of people feel that way about getting on their phones and they can't quite get off, and they call it an addiction, but the way those informational systems are designed is to take advantage of our involuntary attentional systems. We want to recharge our directed attention capacity, which we know fatigues, and the way to do it is to utilize the fascination system. So you can kind of think of it easy. So when the fascination system is engaged, the directed attention system can restore itself.

Alicia: Got it— okay. When you think about that fascination, do you think about it like a distraction, that it takes that attention, and it distracts you away from it? Would that be another way of describing it?

Avik: It can. Think about it from an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense that we would be distracted by something like our name being called. Or if there was a growl in the corner, right? You probably want to pay attention to that and not have to consciously attend to that but rather have your systems respond automatically to something like that. 

Alicia: Don't want to delay the growl response (laughs)

Avik: Exactly. And yes, it can be distractions. And certainly, these days, like the stuff we see on our phones and whatnot can be a distraction. To explain that, it's kind of useful to think about two different kinds of fascination.

Alicia: Okay.

Avik: And the two types of fascination, the Kaplan’s describes as hard fascination and soft fascination.

So, when you're looking at, let's say, a social media feed, the ones that are liked most are the ones that are capturing people's attention easily, they just grab you. So that is a pretty good example of hard fascination. And the reason it's hard fascination is that it's mind-filling. It takes up everything. Or you can think of a Netflix binge as hard fascination, meaning there's no space left in your head to consider anything else.

Alicia: Even a rational decision, like I should stop…

Avik: That's right. I mean, you're not thinking about that. And you have very little control, very little capacity to overpower. The very willpower you need is in fact, your direct attention resource, right?

Alicia: Right.

Avik: You need to pay attention to that signal that maybe I want to stop, but because you don't have that, you continue watching so it has this devolving vicious cycle. Unfortunately, knowing it doesn't help. I binge on Netflix as much as anyone, saying that in just a little bit of jest. 

The other kind of fascination is called soft fascination. A good example is nature. Nature is kind of the sweet spot for restoring your directed attention. Because unlike watching Netflix or your social media feeds in nature, what's happening is that you’re lightly attending to things like bird songs, to things like wind rustling through the leaves, or this morning, I was out for a swim and I saw some birds going through the sky. But those stimuli, whether visual or auditory or otherwise, are not completely filling the mind. And because it's not completely filling the mind, the mind can then go into what I like to call garbage collection mode.

Alicia: Okay.

Avik: So, you have very likely lots and lots of things on your mind,

Alicia: Thank you for noticing! (Laughs)

Avik: Stresses . . . like we all do. And they are unresolved threads, and the more unresolved threads that you have— it's sort of like having lots of tabs open— more tabs you have open, the more divided your attention becomes and it gets hard to use your directed attention capacity, again, this negative vicious cycle that can occur. What we want to do is have those tabs closed off. And a lot of this is not happening consciously necessarily.

A lot of this is just part of our system, we hypothesize that garbage collection happens or that tab closing happens when you're in situations that allow for soft fascination, those tabs will close themselves out. 

Alicia: It's making me think a little bit about playing light background music, or, you know, even with my kid I kind of put on birdsongs but I wonder, do you have understanding of what soundscapes are beneficial to instill that soft fascination?

Avik: I played around just as a layperson looking at brainwave kinds of music, looking at bilateral stimulation music, ambient music. There are lots of ways in which soundscapes can potentially impact us. But I think an important distinction to make is that those things are manufactured and bird sounds, natural sounds, wind, water on the shore, all that kind of stuff, we probably have an evolutionary link to natural sounds much more so than we have to a manufactured sound that supposedly can hack our brains to make us function better.

Now I'm not saying that's not possible, but one interesting difference is the time course of these things. So, if you listen to it soundscape kind of thing, usually goes on for minutes or hours even, right? And probably our brains acclimate to those kinds of things and the effects are lessened with time. Whereas birdsongs have kind of an ephemeral quality, they are very different, their random, sometimes I mean, there's a much more organic quality to natural soundscapes than to manufactured sound. Now, there are recordings of bird sounds that are quite interesting, I think. That could have a positive effect. I think some of the papers out there do look at the effect of that. And I also think that virtual reality is an interesting space to explore. 

I also have to say that there's probably something about being in the space completely, you're outside, you're hearing the birds, you’re seeing the trees, you're engaged in that space. And I suspect that there's a whole lot more going on than we can scientifically, reductively provide an answer for. So, if I had to put my money on it, just sit go outside. Probably more happening there than we know.

Alicia: Yeah, I'm so curious how learning about these things has changed your behavior. And I'm glad to hear that you still binge on Netflix every once in a while. But I wonder what you have observed for yourself about being able to kind of capitalize on this knowledge of getting into those soft destination stages?

Avik: I think one thing I've learned is that what you like isn't necessarily good for you. We know that from many circumstances around, let's say food or diet and things like that. But when it comes to addressing our stress levels, and kind of dealing with our psychology, I hadn't really considered that as much. So when you're stressed or mentally fatigued, you might not want to go outside for a walk, because it takes that extra little effort to do it. And often people talk about its like oh yeah, the moment I put my foot out the door, I felt great.

But getting that foot out the door is the hard part. But once you start seeing some benefits to that, and that's what the science helps you do. You may not feel better immediately, in some cases, sometimes it takes a day or two. Or you realize you went on a camping trip, and then the following week, you're all productive. And so, making the link between the activity you did outside and the good feelings, maybe you had sometime afterwards, science helps you, this theory in particular helps you, make the attribution.