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Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin and the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, Germany, studied the impact of different noises on our brains. Conclusion: if you hear birds singing, stop and listen to them…
Traffic noise or birdsong: which of the two is more pleasant? The answer seems obvious, however German researchers wanted to understand how these different sounds could affect our mood, our “paranoia” and more generally our cognitive functions.
Listening to different sounds
To carry out this work, the researchers brought together 295 participants. They had them listen to six minutes of typical traffic noise or birdsong, with a varying number of excerpts each time. Before and after listening to the sounds, the volunteers had to answer questionnaires to assess their mental health and cognitive abilities.
“Everyone has certain psychological dispositions. Healthy people may also have anxious thoughts or temporary paranoid perceptions. The questionnaires allow us to identify the tendencies of people without a diagnosis of depression, anxiety and paranoia and to study the effect of bird sounds or traffic on these tendencies.” says one of the study’s authors, Emil Stobbe.
Good in your body, good in your head!
Reduction of anxiety and paranoia
After studying the results, the researchers noticed several things:
- Listening to birdsong reduces anxiety and paranoid perceptions in healthy participants;
- Birdsong does not seem to have an influence on depressive states in this experiment;
- Traffic noise generally aggravated depressive states, especially if the sound listened to by the participants involved different traffic noises;
- And finally, neither birdsong nor traffic noise influenced participants’ cognitive performance.
According to the researchers, the explanation for these effects is that “birdsong represents a subtle indication of an undisturbed natural environment, diverting attention from stressors that might otherwise signal an acute threat”. A kind of homecoming, in a way.