HN

Comments (148)

• Menu

  RemoteIsHeaven
  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?
• Menu

  FinnLobsien
  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.
• Menu

  tomaytotomato
  Just a bit of anecdata (observer bias).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.
• Menu

  ML0037
  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.
• cmrx64
  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.
• Menu

  grendelt
  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.
• Menu

  bob778
  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.
• 1-6
  I'd rather play golf instead of watching birds all day. I think the fundamentals of why it slows cognitive decline are similar.
• Menu

  ourmandave
  Does it count if I have a bird feeder with a movement detection camera that saves to the cloud 100's of terrible blurry images I look at once a never?
• nntwozz
  Great, what about watching porn?
• wateralien
  Bird interest will find you once you cross 40 whether you were into birds or not. It just happens.
• speckx
  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.
• Menu

  Havoc
  I guess in some ways its the opposite of doomscrolling - outdoors & requires patience for the dopamine payoff
• Menu

  gnabgib
  > Together, these results suggest convergent structural remodeling and functional tuning in service of expert performance across the lifespanIs a long leap from this article's title. Paper:https://www.jneurosci.org/content/46/12/e1307252026
• a34729t
  Birdwatching as in chilling with your buddies nursing a scotch and getting away from the family and enjoying the outdoors?
• notorandit
  Any activity that makes your brain working actively helps fighting that decline: crosswords, sudoku, you name it.As opposed to watching tv series or just doing nothing.
• yunruse
  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 :)
• Menu

  haunter
  Then you watch The Birds (1963) and you wonder if are we birdwatching or are the birds watching?
• onemoresoop
  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.
• andy_ppp
  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?
• IHLayman
  Does playing Wingspan count?
• Menu

  nottorp
  Anything that forces you to use your brain rewires the brain and slows cognitive decline, i'd think.Anything that's not passive "content consumption" perhaps.
• Menu

  johndear223
  Erik Wing done the research. Love that. I think theirs a name for that kind of coincidence.
• vrighter
  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.
• jackb4040
  How do we know this isn't just propaganda to force people to learn about the natural world, go outside, and make new friends?
• speedping
  That explains why Raymond Holt was so sharp
• Menu

  kokkis
  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.)
• sleepybrett
  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.
• dudeinjapan
  Who watches the birdwatchers?
• dyauspitr
  Is this relative to doing nothing and just watching TV during your retirement or do the controls include other active senior folk?
• Menu

  melvinroest
  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.(I'll see myself out...)
• Menu

  fortran77
  My cats do a lot of birdwatching. I wonder if it helps them?
• Menu

  piokoch
  Key finding is:"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.
• Razengan
  Birds are awesome, make the world more pleasant, are the best wakeup alarm, but they can be cruel motherfuckers.Don't watch YouTube videos of birds eating their babies, baby birds killing their siblings, or just eating random animals including other birds.
• Menu

  shadowtree
  By that logic, video/computer games should be great for prevention of cognitive decline too.
• modo_
  [dead]
• anon
  undefined
• anon
  undefined
• aaron695
  [dead]
• Rodmine
  You have to be a total imbecile to think that we are capable of collecting enough data to make such conclusions.