Becky Mathers is the post-doc researcher for the USTRIVE project at Arcadia University in Glenside, PA. The USTRIVE project (Understanding STEM Teaching Through Integrated Contexts in Everyday Life) offers professional development on creating lessons grounded in relevant social and scientific problems in the local community for STEM educators in the Philadelphia area. Becky earned her doctorate from Antioch University New England where she studied the effects of what she termed "a profound experience with nature," an experience that shifts an individual's view of or relationship with the natural world. Becky lives in central NJ, serving on her town's environmental commission and the school's wellness and sustainability council. She enjoys spending time outdoors with her two favorite little people.
Becky Mathers is the post-doc researcher for the USTRIVE project at Arcadia University in Glenside, PA. The USTRIVE project (Understanding STEM Teaching Through Integrated Contexts in Everyday Life) offers professional development on creating lessons grounded in relevant social and scientific problems in the local community for STEM educators in the Philadelphia area.
Becky earned her doctorate from Antioch University New England where she studied the effects of what she termed "a profound experience with nature," an experience that shifts an individual's view of or relationship with the natural world.
Becky lives in central NJ, serving on her town's environmental commission and the school's wellness and sustainability council. She enjoys spending time outdoors with her two favorite little people.
Resources shared by Becky:
Study that found that creek sounds (water) can induce changes in blood flow in the brain indicative of a relaxed state
https://environhealthprevmed.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1007/s12199-009-0091-z
Study on postoperative coronary bypass graft patients listening to ocean sounds at night in the recover ward—better sleep depth, quality of sleep
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1307884/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1617138121001576
Human-nature connection and soundscape perception: Insights from Tierra del Fuego, Argentina
Conducted surveys on nature relatedness and soundscape perception in Argentina and found hearing was of secondary importance to vision in experiences of nature and nature relatedness was positively correlated with the valuation of soundscapes.
https://www.takingcharge.csh.umn.edu/how-does-nature-impact-our-wellbeing
https://mymodernmet.com/nature-sounds-health-study/
https://www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10.1073/pnas.2013097118
https://positivepsychology.com/positive-effects-of-nature/
https://positivepsychology.com/positive-effects-of-nature/#positive-effects
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.764224/full?&utm_source=Email_to_authors_&utm_medium=Email&utm_content=T1_11.5e1_author&utm_campaign=Email_publication&field=&journalName=Frontiers_in_Psychology&id=764224
Intro/Outro Music:
Half Moon Island
https://halfmoonisland.bandcamp.com/
Jeff 0:03
Welcome to the interdisciplinary investigations podcast. I'm your host, Jeffrey Perrin, and we're recording from the WSCA podcast lab in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The first season of this podcast will focus on the subjective and phenomenological experience of listening. The foundation of our investigation focuses on making sense of the world through the sounds and lack of sounds that we encounter in our daily interactions. How do we hear these sounds? And how do we create meaning from these sounds? And how does listening help us understand the world and our place in it? During this inaugural season, we're joined by educators, artists, musicians, scientists, contemplative practitioners, scholars, activists who have all tracked the importance of careful and engaged listening in a world that seems to enabled scattered attention, disengagement, and displacement. Their insights revealed great lessons in the stories of sound. Today we're joined by Becky Mathers. Becky is a postdoc researcher for the use UStrive project at Arcadia University in Glenside. Pennsylvania. The use UStrive project, understanding STEM teaching through integrated contexts in everyday life offers professional development on creating lessons grounded in relevant social and scientific problems in the local community for STEM Educators in the Philadelphia area Becky earned a doctorate from Antioch University New England, where she studied the effects of what she termed a profound experience with nature, an experience that shifts an individual's view of or relationship with the natural world. Becky lives in central New Jersey serving on our towns environmental Commission and the school's wellness and Sustainability Council. She enjoys spending time outdoors with her two favorite little people. And Becky is joining us today via the phone from her home state of New Jersey. Becky, thanks so much for joining us.
Becky 1:55
Thanks for having me, Jeff.
Jeff 1:58
Becky, we met probably over 10 years ago at the conservation psychology Institute at Antioch University. But I was hoping that you could share a little bit about just your professional background beyond what you just shared with the listeners that preceded that conservation psych institute that we met, and then what you've been up to since then.
Becky 2:20
Sure. So I've been teaching about the environment for many years. It started with an internship with a Forest Service teaching conservation education to rural and urban youth in Asheville, North Carolina. And it was during my time in Asheville, where I had my own profound experience with nature, which led me to study this phenomenon many years later at Antioch. But after graduating from Penn State with my undergraduate degree, I started teaching environmental education to children and adults in a variety of settings. So I worked at nature centers, environmental education centers, that sort of thing. And it eventually led me to a full time position with a public school here in New Jersey. The school had its own Environmental Education Center. So I was teaching to students in kindergarten through eighth grade predominantly. It was during that time that I found myself at Lesley University where I received my master's in ecological teaching and learning. And starting about 10 years ago, I started teaching at the college level, teaching mainly classes about the environment such as environmental science, principles of sustainability, ecology, natural resources, that sort of thing. And as you mentioned, currently, I'm the postdoc researcher on the UStrive project at Arcadia University, where we're teaching urban STEM Educators how to incorporate socioscientific issues into their curriculum with the hopes of inspiring their students to become agents of change within their own communities.
Jeff 4:08
You have a new paper just out in the journal called frontiers in psychology, titled the power of a profound experience with nature: living with meaning. Can you tell us a little bit about this study how you became interested in this topic? And what did you learn through your research?
Becky 4:30
Sure, so the article that was recently published in frontiers, is based on my dissertation research. So for my dissertation research, I interviewed 21 individuals who self identified as having a profound experience with nature. So I let these individuals define what profound meant to them, and the 21 experiences we're all unique Some involves being out in deep nature, such as the Appalachian Trail, whereas others were more indirect experiences. In fact, one individual just visualized a nature scene in her head. And that was her profound experience. So I interviewed these 21 individuals, really yearning to understand how their experiences changed them and shaped their lives, and how they used the memory of their experience in their lives. Going into the master's program at Lesley University, I had no idea that others had similar experiences like the one I had in Asheville, so I was very interested in learning about the profound experiences that others have had.
Jeff 5:54
And as we're focusing on on sound in the first season of this podcast, and we've we're going to be talking with folks all throughout this season about how they're experiencing sound, the meaning of sound those also we're gonna be talking with folks that are experts in those that maybe are have some sound impairments that that reduces their ability to hear. But I'm wondering, How did nature sound show up in this research? How did nature sounds actually impact people as they reported?
Becky 6:27
That's a great question. A number of people in my study actually described sound as being important in their profound experience. So for example, the one I spoke of earlier about the woman who visualized a natural experience in her head. She was just 15 years old, and she was living in an unstable home situation. And she was in a social workers office. And she sat there and had this image of a very beautiful natural setting, one that she had never actually seen before in real life. But during that vision, she actually recalled hearing a brook gurgling. And she remembers seeing and feeling the sun shining on her. And that helped her make the decision to leave her unstable home at the age of 15, and go into foster care, which led her to a fulfilling life ultimately, in another profound experience recounted to me, a girl was in Hawaii, for the last semester of her graduate program, and she had been traveling around the country studying the local people and the land. And they were learning about the idea of the whole aloha spirit, which means the relationship with the lands and that the land, has a consciousness. And near the end of her time on Hawaii, she stopped at a visitor center on the way up a dormant volcano, and a park ranger approached her and told her not to take any of the rocks with her, even if they talked to her. And from her perspective, she thought that comment was odd. But then she went over to these rocks, and sat among them, and she felt that they were alive. She felt like they were talking to her. And that's how she referred to them as talking rocks. And she felt deeply connected to these rocks into the world at large, on a visceral level, which she had never experienced before. Another was in Africa. She was a medical researcher, and she was in a small village and a small boy walked up to her and asked her if she was American. And when she replied, Yes, he said, Oh, you're rich you pee in your water. And she felt like it was this instant reality check. Like, wow, we as Americans, we really waste our natural resources. And a short time after that experience. She ended up leaving her job in medical research and going back to school for environmental policy and environmental law. Another quick story from my research was someone who was camping in the Catskills and she heard the trill of spring peepers for the first time and she described it as deafening. And that sound has stuck with her. And years later, she went on to write a children's book about discovering the source of the sound the peepers which are really hard to see because they're so tiny, but their sound is so deafening. And then finally, one last profound experience that was shared with me was about a woman who was scuba diving, and had a close encounter with a giant cuttlefish. And during her recollection, she recalled how quiet it was under the water, you could just hear your own breathing. And if you were scuba diving with others, you had to communicate with hand signals. And she's a psychotherapist. And she describes her work as needing to be very quiet, and she has to be deeply present in her work. And so she made that connection, sort of between her present work as a psychotherapist and her experience with the cuttlefish as this moment of intense presence, And my own profound experience with nature when I was in Asheville, where I was caught in a rainstorm, and instead of instinctually running to get out of the rain, I just stopped and stood in the rain and let the raindrops fall upon and around me. And I heard the rain and I watched the rain and just felt this immense peace and beauty inside me.
Jeff 11:23
You know, Becky, so much of this, the stories that you tell, I think the research really supports that sounds in particular nature sounds, the sounds of water, the sounds of wind can actually have a very calming effect on us. I know that there's some studies that have looked at that creek sounds. And how the sounds of creek sounds. And you mentioned one of the participants had this visualization of seeing and hearing Creek sounds can actually induce changes in blood flow in the brain that are indicative of of a relaxed state. And we've also seen that there studies on post operative coronary bypass graft patients that found that listening to ocean sounds at night in the recovery Ward, you know, led to better sleep depth and quality of sleep and quicker recovery time. And it's not surprising that so many of the applications on our phones that are used to induce sleep, replicate nature sounds, because they can have such a calming state. But I'm wondering if everyone is sort of responding to nature sounds in the same way? Do you think that there's any ways or do you know of any situations in which some nature sounds could mean different things to people?
Becky 12:45
Absolutely. And this is speaking, mainly anecdotally, but you know, nature sounds are very important to me. I'm very absorbed in the natural world. And I'm very aware of natural sounds. I wake up every morning to the sound of birds as my alarm clock, and I fall asleep at night listening to nature sounds on a sound machine. When I'm walking outside, if I hear a bird or I hear a squirrel, I have to stop and just listen and try to find the source of that sound. Nature is certainly very soothing and calming to me. But I know that for others, nature sounds can cause different feelings. My father is a big hunter, and he has been hunting for the majority of his life. And after hunting for decades white tailed deer. He has decided he wanted to go on different hunting adventures. So most recently, he's been to South Africa to hunt mainly deer like creatures. But he has recalled how hearing the sounds of lions was the spookiest sound he's ever heard in the natural world. He's also commented on hearing wolves in the wild and how they sound eerie and spooky as well. I've taken different groups on night hikes. And recall one incident when we were walking near a lake at night and a beaver was spooked by us and it sort of flapped its tail at us and watching the children react to sort of that slapping of the tail. I've had experiences when I've been running on trails and I've been confronted with a white tailed deer and had the whitetail deer snort at me. So I think that a natural sound can induce different emotions in people, whether it's awe or fear, or calmness or excitement depending on the situation.
Jeff 15:20
Yeah, and it's interesting that it doesn't even need to be a lion, right, or a wolf or a coyote, something that that might more universally instill some fear in folks, that could actually be something just as simple as cicadas or you're hearing, you know, other creatures of the nights that are just insects. And I know that in working with some environmental organizations outside of Boston, and when we would bring folks out from the city, in particular kids who hadn't really experienced those things before, you know, some of us were, it's, we're speaking about those things in such a majestic awe inspiring way. And to these kids, it was actually sort of terrifying, because it was a world that they hadn't heard before in a world that they hadn't experienced before. And so the familiarity piece is, of course, a big part of that.
Becky 16:05
Absolutely.
Jeff 16:06
And so your your research and your work really focuses a lot on on connection to the natural world. Your research at at Antioch, and you know, some of your teaching, and you're working with environmental education centers, this idea of connecting to the natural world, what does that really mean? And why is that so important when when we hear that term?
Becky 16:30
Yes, great question. Obviously, my connection to the natural world has influenced the path of my life. I had no idea what environmental education was prior to my internship with the Forest Service. And after that experience, it changed the direction of my life, that I've been teaching about the natural world now for 20 years. So I know personally, that a connection to the natural world can deeply impact a person's life, through the 21 stories that were shared with me during my dissertation research. I also know that that profound experience changed each person's life, some in small ways, some in very large ways. And the research that others have done also has found that nature heals that it soothes and calms people. That it restores individuals and it connects creates this connection to the natural world. The research found that nature positively impacts health, and you mentioned some of those ways. But it could impact our body, what we see what we hear what we experienced at any moment. It changes our mood, but also our nervous, endocrine and immune systems. The research has found that nature can help us cope with pain. So just seeing or hearing nature, it causes us to be distracted. And therefore, were distracted from the pain and the discomfort. Nature improves our psychological well being reduces our anger or fear or stress, it increases pleasant feelings. Time in nature is associated with positive mood, and psychological benefits such as well being, meaningfulness, and vitality. The research has shown that time in nature increases our ability to pay attention. And it also helps us feel connected to ourselves, other people and the world at large. Ultimately, which could lead to, you know, environmental concern, care and action. And there's countless studies that support this that we could put in the show notes if people are interested in learning about the data that is out there that supports all the positive benefits of nature.
Jeff 19:24
Yes, we'll definitely do that. And I know one of your mentors, Louise Chawla has has written a lot about this idea of an emotional connection, especially one that's that's formed during childhood, and how impactful that can be in predicting whether or not those individuals that do have these profound experiences that are connected to nature as young children become the ones that are advocating for for conservation, for sustainability for protecting the natural world. Without having those experiences the path is not quite as clear as to how we get folks to actually care and to be concerned and to be advocates for the natural world, which of course, so desperately needs that now in this current state. So based on on your experiences in your work, how do we facilitate this better awareness of connection to the natural we know how important is we know how impactful it can be for psychological health, for physical health and for the conservation of the natural world? How do we facilitate this through sound? How do we get folks to be more attuned when they're in nature, to allow themselves to connect more deeply?
Becky 20:35
Honestly, I believe that the best way to facilitate a connection to the natural world through sound is to be open to nature experiences. So get outside as often as possible, even if it's just for two minutes, and be present. Slow down, standstill, close your eyes, breathe, and just use your senses to experience the world around you. When we spend time, outdoors, we are more mindful of what we see, and what we hear what we smell what we feel. And when we feel connected to nature, we feel more grateful for it and appreciative of it. And this automatically creates an urge to protect it. Specifically related to sound, we know that listening has incredibly positive effects. And then it can create all those positive impacts we spoke about earlier. So essentially, even if someone cannot get outside in nature, the evidence suggests that even looking at nature or listening to natural sounds can positively affect an individual, which hopefully will lead to a greater concern and desire to protect the natural world.
Jeff 22:04
Which of course, we now need more than ever. Becky, thank you so much for your time for your wisdom for your insights and for joining us on the interdisciplinary investigations podcast.
Becky 22:16
Thank you, Jeff, for this opportunity.
Jeff 22:18
Thank you for listening to the interdisciplinary investigations podcast hosted by me, Jeff Perrin, thank you to Half moon island for providing our intro and outro music. Please rate review and check out all of our episodes wherever you stream your podcast. Thanks so much for listening.