Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe mcformick.
So the title for this episode comes from a poem by English poet Elizabeth Jennings With nineteen twenty six through two thousand and one. This poem contains the lines observe it there the fountain too fast for shadows, too wild for the lights which illuminate it, to hold even a moment an ounce of water back. The poem in full details how we might observe a fountain in an urban center and makes a comparison to more ancient traditions. Joe, were you familiar with this poem or this poet prior
to this episode? She was a new one for me.
I'm not sure the name is familiar, but I need to look up more of her stuff to to see if there's anything I recognize well.
This poem fountain, Like I say, it also connects back to some of these more ancient traditions that are reflected in our tradition of spending times with fountains and other water features. Just to read another bit from it, quote see in that stress, an image of utter calm, a stillness.
There it is how we must have felt once at the edge of some perpetual stream, fearful of touching, bringing no thirst at all, panicked by no perception of ourselves, but drawing the water down to the deepest wonder well.
That phrasing gives a much profounder spin to the kind of awe that I recall feeling when looking at fountains as a child. Particularly, what I remember is a fountain in the mall in my hometown when I was a kid that had a kind of kind of a tile mosaic bottom that was always covered in pennies. I guess the idea is that people would throw pennies into the
fountain and make a wish. At least that's what I was always told you did, and I really liked to do this, and I think firmly believed in the magic of the wish granting powers of the fountain.
I didn't even think about fountains and water features and malls, but oh man, shopping malls had some great ones as far as I remember, and of course smaller at the time, so they seemed more gigantic, you know, some sort of a fountain there in the atrium of the mall beautiful to behold.
I do remember thinking when I saw all of the pennies on the bottom, I also thought, at some point they must clean all those up, because it's not like overflowing with pennies. They've got to go in and get them. And then my thought as a child was who gets to keep all that money? That's so much money when you collect all of them, you know, that's got to be tens of dollars.
I mean, this is why that one scene in the Goonies I think was so impactful, the extrap elation of our dreams of harvesting the coins of a fountain.
You know, Oh, is that is that in the Goonies. I don't remember that they had the same thought I did.
Well, no, they in the Goonies, if memory serves, It's been a long time since I've seen it. There's that there's like these caverns beneath the wishing well, and that's where all the coins are, and one of the kids goes to steal a bunch of them, and they're like, no, no, those are peaceful people's wishes. You're not supposed to take them. And the children, you know, abstain and ultimately they have pirate gold on the radar.
So well, I didn't make the connection. I did believe in the wish granting powers, and I did greedily lust after all of the penny money, but I didn't think that would be stealing people's wishes. It's already granted right once the pennies there, Now it's just free money.
Yeah. I don't know how that it depends on superstitious Sure, I guess how it works, but at any rate, I yeah, I always am curious to see if a fountain has coins, And even though I don't nowadays, I'm not thinking about harvesting them. I'm still just one of the things I kind of like checking off the mental checklist when I check out a fountain. Are there coins in it? What's the filtration system look like? You know, where's the water
coming out of? Like, if there's a fountain somewhere, I need to get closer to it so I can take it all in. Beyond that, I don't think i'd ever really thought about, you know, any universal truths about the calming nature of fountains. I've always just kind of in
the back of my mind thought well, they're nice. Sometimes they have interesting statues incorporated into their design, and they can be cooling on a hot day, that sort of thing, And they're often like at the center of everything, you know. I think of like the fountain in Washington Square, you know, I think about the indeed, the fountains in the atrium at a mall, at a shopping mall, which was like a center of community in some respects.
Well, and yet another way that the fountain was sacred to my child's brain. But taking some of the profound varnish off of it, I do associate the idea of a fountain with the smell of the mall food court, you know. It's that's where the saborrow mingles with the with the Kariaki place.
Yeah, the ma All food court of our childhoods. This is a place where you also had freedom, like suddenly you could often often the case, you could choose what you were going to eat, and it made you feel powerful. But coming back to water features and fountains specifically, of course, we have to think larger than that. We have to think too about just like running water, bodies of water in general, and you know, personally, and I think this
applies somewhat universally. I've always found waters to be calming to be around. They're often great places to do some thinking or to do less thinking in a good way, you know, to sort of unshackle from your normal thought process. And I think I've mentioned before on the show that there's a very useful stress reduction exercise that makes use of this connection. It's called leaves on a stream. It's a cognitive diffusion technique that allows you to distance yourself
from the thoughts that you're having. So the way it goes, and you can look this up online. There are plenty of online resources that that spell it out in more detail. But you imagine yourself seated beside a running stream. You imagine taking a given thought, essentially taking it out of yourself, placing it upon a floating leaf, and allowing the stream to carry that leaf and the thought away from you. And you know, everyone's mileage may vary, but I find
it very constructive. But I was thinking about it again here, thinking about fountains, thinking about natural bodies of water, and they're they're they're calming powers.
It does seem like an especially nice image for concretizing your your emotions and your thoughts because it's it's passive, like the the water does the carrying away for you, so it doesn't even involve you having to imagine like forcing or shoving the idea away. It is just carried away by nature.
Yeah. Yeah, Now we've talked a bit on the show previously about the history and importance of public water works. We're not going to reachret all of that here, but I wanted to at least touch on some of it in this case via a twenty fifteen article titled Short Global History of Fountains by Juty at All, published in
the journal Water. That's pointed out that the word fountain stems from the Latin fawnds, which can refer to both artificial and natural water features, not like the fawns on happy Days, but fis I've also read that the source is fontana, which informs the medieval fount or source, and so fountain becomes a symbol of a providing source as well. Like this idea of a fountain as being this thing from which something else beneficial arises becomes pretty crucial to
a lot of a lot of our language. Now, the construction of fountains properly dates back to ancient times, and the authors of this paper point out that regional water available played a role in what form fountains took and how they were fed. For instance, they mentioned that for the ancient Egyptians bringing water out for the people or for personal use, it was a matter of pulling water from the Mighty Nile. Meanwhile, the Minoans and the Greeks
brought water down from the mountains via aqueducts. So this is, you know, something to keep in mind. There's the sort of especially when you go back into the origins of fountains, there are a lot more practical purposes in mind for having that water there, And then how do you get the water there? You're not just piping it in from the local modern water system, you know, there are other
means that have to be in place. One of the primary purposes for ancient fountains was of course to bring water to the people for drinking, as well as for other uses such as bathing. We've talked about that on the show before. Another big one that I hadn't thought as much about, and I guess part of this is because we haven't we've touched on Firefight, but we haven't done a lot on firefighting, but this was another reason to have a source of water available in a center of the population.
I think we actually did a pretty extensive look at firefighting in our Invention episode on the fire extinguisher.
Yeah, and we got into like fire extinguisher grenades and so forth. Yeah.
But going into ancient history, how the fire fighting in ancient Rome and how it had a very different character because if I remember correctly, the early version in maybe like the first century BCE or so, there was like a rich guy who instituted fire brigades who would come to your house if it was on fire, not to like as a public service, put it out for you, but to say, hey, I will buy your house for
the following price, take it or leave it. And if you know, if you agreed to let this guy buy your house, then his dudes would put out the fire.
Yeah. I think there's a scene in one of Stevens Sailor's Gordian Honest books that take place in ancient Rome where this exact situation takes place with like the building burning down and here's the sky shows up and he's like, well, you know, it looks like your property is really plummeting in value. Now would be a great time to sell to me, as opposed to five minutes from now.
Wicked in an especially hilarious way. But of course, you know, later on the idea of firefighting as a public service that benefits everyone does develop, And yeah, of course there are a lot of different ways to fight fires, and not all of them involve water. Of course, some involve like you know, pulling down structures to create barriers to fire spreading and things like that. But yeah, water of course is quite often one of the most important tools in fighting fires.
Now. One of the things about bringing water into a city, one of the problems here are potential potential problems, is well, you can have to deal with drainage, removal, fouled water, and various public health challenges that can emerge from public water works, and that can get into things like you know, I have to worry about water borne ill illnesses, potentially mosquitoes,
things of that nature. So systems to bring water into a city these were extremely important for human civilizations, and we see them in all the major civilizations of the ancient world as well as the various ancient civilizations of the New World. The earliest carved water basin apparently dates back to three thousand BC in the Mesopotamian site of Tello, and a stone fountain figure in another Mesopotamian site, Mari
dates back to two thousand BCE. This would basically be in line with the common fountain trope that we've seen again and again of a goddess holding a base of some sort that releases piped in water, just sort of an irresistible image. And I guess part of this comes down to, like what a fountain does that like recasts the idea of water being gifted to people.
As if from a morton.
Joe, Yeah, yeah. The Romans were, of course masters of hydraulics, which they adopted from the Etruscan civilization, and the Roman tradition greatly influenced the medieval fountain tradition to follow. Now, one thing in this paper that I thought was really interesting. They point out that in China, wells and streams were along the primary source of water, so wells tend to play the role we see public fountains play in other
parts of the world. In some of these Mesopotamian accounts, these public wells were crucial as well to city planning. These would be the things that you plan the structure of the city around. They also note that quote spring and structures have also assumed characteristics of fountains in China, so what we might think of as proper fountains were also introduced and built in urban and palace settings later
over the course of centuries. But sometimes you might have something just constructed at a where a spring emerges or where a spring has come to, and this will sort of take on the building and appearance of a western fountain. Now The authors even include discussion of modern and industrial age water kiosks in the paper, which serve the purpose of distributing clean water to the people, though without most of the more aesthetically pleasing aspects that you associate with
a public fountain. Nowadays, you can look up images of various water kiosks that I believe they're especially common in subs of how in Africa a place where people can go and get water, and it often takes on a more I guess, sort of commercial appearance. I mean it looks like a little shop in many cases. Sometimes they even you see something that looks more like a vending machine.
And you can also make comparisons like water kiosk and say public ice dispensary, you know those you see these especially, we see these a lot in the United States. I know, when you go into rural areas and there's like the standalone machine that you can pull up to, you pay the machine and you get some ice. You know you are buying water. I'llbeit in a frozen form from that machine right now. That Beings said, I guess water kiosks could still be considered like a social center, a place
where people were going for water. And while most of the examples I was looking at seem largely transactional and functional, I suppose it doesn't have to be the case.
Though.
When I looked around for like more pleasing designs and water kiosks, the only thing that was coming up for me were various design competitions that were more situated in say London, and were essentially coming up with water fountain designs that you know, looked crazy things that weren't necessarily I think, actually brought to life in urban settings. But I don't know, maybe the there have been efforts to sort of evolve water kiosk sites throughout the rest of the world as well. I'm not sure.
Well, this idea sort of highlights the two different faces of the civic water dispensing area. So you can have on one hand, something that is functional that is there. It's a place for people to get water that they need for you know, everything in life basically that you need in order to drink, to cook, to clean and so forth. And then the other idea is water based infrastructure that is there to be enjoyed, maybe the same way that a park would be there to be enjoyed.
I think in the popular imagination, something that brings all these together is, of course the chocolate factory of Willy Wonka, where we see the chocolate mixed by waterfall. It is a pleasing water fall to behold. You're you're not supposed to swim in it, of course, but still, you know, some uses of the chocolate are available via fun and then of course we do have chocolate chocolate fountains at
events and all. So it is weird how we get into this use of fountains, both in the imagination and in reality, for liquids that are not drinking water.
Why do the culinary fountains always go in the sweet direction? I want to see more savory ones, you know. So it's the nacho cheese fountain, the gravy fountain. I don't know what, maybe cheese fondue fountain. I guess that's pretty similar to nacho cheese.
Well that that surely exists, right, some sort.
Of a cheese fountain, I suppose, I would guess.
Anyway, coming back to this Water Journal paper, the authors here they stress that fountains also often stood as symbols of power and wealth. Somebody builds them, someone provides them for the people. But there's still this calming element to the urban fountain, offering sites and sounds conducive to relaxation
that are frequently cited in histories and literature. As many of the practical reasons for public fountains declined in modern times, the esthetic elements remained in playing the soothing sites and
sounds of the running water. Another interesting point this is something I read in Fountains as Reservoirs of myth and memory from Myths on the Map the Storied Landscapes of Ancient Greece from twenty seventeen by Betsy A. Robinson, or this section about fountains is by Robinson, and in this they point out that public fountains, specifically those in Greek traditions, were also a means of quote, connecting past and present and establishing authority by the manipulation of architectural form and
the selective retelling of stories. So I found that fascinating to think about and be reminded of, because the public fountain here is both a means of bringing water to the people, but also conceptualizing the deliverer of that water by means of myth and legends reflected in the carvings, the statues and so forth then make up a given fountain.
For instance, who is the goddess that is pouring forth the water, and what is that goddess's relationship to the to the people in power at the moment, et cetera.
Yes, flowing water almost kind of naturally tells a story, or it easily can be narrativized in some way by you know, filling in the infrastructure around it with images and representations.
Yeah, can you imagine if our primary sources of water today are faucets, what if by law they were required to resemble entities or beings or specific people in power as they're bringing forth your prescious drinking or dishwashing water.
Yes, the faucet is like your local water commissioner's face and the water is coming out of their mouth or something like vomiting the water to you.
Yeah. Away. The main idea we're exploring this episode, though, is the idea that there is something soothing, calming, and mentally restoring about public fountains, something that may, you know, subjectively seem to be the case with many of us, but you know, is there something more objective there as well. There's actually been a fair amount of certainly recent scholarship on the topic that we're going to touch on in this We're going to get into this idea of blue spaces.
So in the world of urban and land use planning, there's green space obviously, you know, we think of gardens, trees, whole parks, et cetera. And then there's a subset of green space known as blue space. And the blue of course refers to water, you know, as water is often blue on the map, if not in actual visual appearance, and it entails all manner of naturally occurring and artificial
water features, including fountains. Now, once again it's important to stress that proximity to natural and or artificial Blue Spaces has always come with certain additional risks and potential danger. We talked about those already, but there's also this compelling idea that blue spaces are an overall mental and or physical health benefit to those with access to the feature. And on one hand, this basic idea would seem to
line up with the late EO. Wilson's biophilia hypothesis, something we've talked about on the show before.
Yeah, this is kind of interesting. So we've done multiple episodes exploring and critiquing the biophilia hypothesis at length in the past, so we're not going to go into great depth on that again here, but briefly, in Wilson's words, this would have been what he believed was quote the
innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes. So the argument goes that there is something in our brains that calls us to be fascinated by and attracted to other forms of life beyond just the obvious and direct benefits to our survival that we would get from them.
So it's obvious why you would be attracted to, say an animal or a plant that you might eat for food, but that our fascination by and attraction to life forms goes way beyond this, goes to you things that you can't eat, things that you can't necessarily get any tangible, quantifiable benefit from. We still these other life forms, We still want to see and touch and spend time around them, and when they're not present in our lives, we feel a kind of we feel that loss as a kind
of malaise or unhappiness. And so a funny thing here about water is that, of course, moving water is very often associated with the suite of esthetic and environmental preferences suggested by the biophilia hypothesis. Yet of course water is itself not alive. It, like rocks and air, is part of the inorganic environment. And yet of course the presence of water is greatly associated with the presence of life. Basically,
all life on Earth needs water to survive. And it's not an accident that when you know, you're walking through the desert and you come to an oasis, it is suddenly surrounded by forms of life that were not found in the surrounding landscape.
Yeah yeah, And you know, you can make the argument that, you know, we're hardwired to appreciate something like a nice flowing stream as opposed to another body of water. How would how would Donald Pleasance put it?
Joe, Oh, the spirit of dark and lonely waters.
Yeah, yeah, the dark and lonely water.
That's it, ready to trap the unwary, the show off the fool.
In this, we're of course referring to something we discussed in an older Halloween episode what Jenny Green teeth, But it was what a British public service advertisement or video message warning you against stagnant ponds and the danger to young children posed.
There right, warning children not to play in the in the pools of black liquid that gather in abandoned buildings.
Yeah, it's yeah. Thinking about biophilia hypothesis in light of all this is interesting. And I was looking around in the book that Wilson co wrote on it, and at one point mentioned he mentions that while uphill or spraying aspects of artificial fountains rarely occur in nature, He points out, you know, obviously the geysers.
But.
Still even if a fountain is pumping water straight up in the air, you know, it's still something we connect with, even if this is not the normal way that water behaves in just the average environment. He writes, quote, yet the motion of water in fountains seems to have the same hypnotic attraction as water flowing downhill in a waterfall.
He also writes that it would be interesting to see a study of people observing quote, quiet and repetitive motions of predators, sharks in an aquarium, circling birds of prey, or other stalking movements of wolves, or large feeling which combine Heraclitian movement with potential danger. Now, just to note there, Heracliteanism is a philosophy concerning everything except the logos remaining in flux, with the four elements eternally cycling into each
other and so forth. There's a lot to it, but the philosopher of its namesake Heraclitis circle of five hundred BCE. His ideas can be basically condensed down to the idea that everything flows, that everything is becoming but never being, and that does feel like it lines up with a lot of the essence of moving water observations and the various metaphors we form about it. But at any rate, yeah, I like how this flows into the idea of the
attractive nature of streams and fountains. But coming back to what Wilson ponders here and I looked up. I looked it up. I wasn't able to find any studies that actually took the challenge here, but I was wondering, Okay, aquariums are especially relaxing, I find, or at least the parts that involve fish and water. Sometimes the you know, the crowds can be a bit much, but in terms of like steering in through the aquarium glass at an
aquarium enclosure can be very relaxing. Sometimes there are sharks there. Our local aquarium has sharks, and I was trying to I was looking back on my experiences of viewing those sharks, and I'm like, is this relaxing? And I'm not entirely sure. I mean obviously for me anyway. I mean, if I'm looking at a shark in a shark tank, I know that I'm not in danger. It's not gonna you know, pop out of the glass at me. I'm distant from it.
On the other hand, observing large predators and zoo environments sometimes can feel a little uncanny in my experience, you know, like if the lion's looking right at you, that sort of thing, or you know, another large predator is eyeing your toddler, your infant, like that that gets a little that starts, you know, turning on some some lights that are kind of buried in your psyche. But in terms
of the sharks and the aquarium, I'm not sure. I asked my wife about this and she was like, like, no, no, it's it's absolutely relaxing. There's nothing, there's nothing stressful about observing these predators. For her, I don't know if you have any thoughts in this show.
Well, I feel like I may have missed something. Here was Wilson suggesting that the predators would be relaxing. I interpreted that him to mean that the idea of a slowly circling predator with Heraclidean movement would be like an arresting image.
Well, I think what I took to be the idea is like which energy is going to win out? Like the movement is relaxing, but it's a predator engaging in the movement. In these we see traditional movements have said predators like what is going to be the end result?
I see, yeah, okay, Well, I'm not sure what I would say about sharks in particular. I mean, I certainly find aquariums incredibly relaxing. But like you also, that is, they're strongly counteracted by the presence of loud crowds around them. But like a viewing an aquarium in a quiet space is I think one of the most relaxing things I
can imagine. I'm not sure, Yeah, I'm not sure that a shark being in there would really change anything about it seeing a shark swimming around, I mean, assuming I'm not in the water.
Yeah, or in the captivity of a bond villain that sort of thing.
Right, Yeah, I think that's probably still just as relaxing as any other side of an aquarium.
All right, Well, we've drifted off course a little bit. Let's get back to just the basic idea that spending time near a body of water would have some sort of beneficial effect on you.
Right, So, at this point there have been a lot of different studies investigating the impact of green and blue spaces on human well being, and specifically, the question with blue spaces would be does living near or spending time I'm near a body of water improve your mental and physical health, and if so, how does it create those improvements?
And fortunately, just a couple of years ago, there was a meta analysis that rounded up all of the existing research and synthesized what we know so far with a special focus on the mechanism of action the question of
how blue space works on us. The paper is called Mechanisms of Impact of Blue Spaces on Human Health, a systematic literature review and meta analysis by Mikhail Georgiu at All published in the journal the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health in twenty twenty one, and this study begins with a general survey of the research on
the health effects of exposure to natural environments. The authors note that most of the research in this area has actually been focused on something slightly different, on green spaces rather than blue spaces, and this is also something we've
looked at in multiple episodes in the past. But short summary, there is pretty strong evidence that living near or spending time in areas where surfaces are covered in plant life basically where you'd be exposed to grass, trees, vegetation of various sorts, is correlated with a wide range of benefits in all kinds of domains and everything from markers of physical health, cardiovascular health, and so forth, to mental and emotional well being, lower rates of anxiety, and things like
that and even like greater cognitive performance in school children. So, in short, I think we can say with pretty high confidence that it is good for you to spend time in a park or a forest compared to spending the same amount of time in a landscape fully paved with metal and concrete and plastic. Something about living near and spending time in those kinds of environments has a wide
range of benefits for your body and mind. Now, the authors of this study note that a lot of the research, unfortunately does not disentangle the variables of exposure to blue spaces, meaning bodies of water, including lakes, rivers, coastlines, canals, and in some cases even smaller features like fountains and things, from exposure to green spaces. Sometimes the presence of water is treated as part of the definition of green spaces,
sometimes not. So that's unfortunate, and it would be good to separate these variables out to see if they have effects independent of one another, And fortunately some studies have done that. They've separated them out and looked at blue spaces independently. Now, the first half of the question, do blue spaces have positive effects on our well being? The answer seems to be a pretty firm Yes, the author's right.
Recent epidemiological studies have shown that blue spaces have a positive effect on public health, including the reduction of mortality rate with the greatest rate of decline seen in areas closest to blue space, better physical health, and better minntal health, and their copious citations and support of these general statements. So this brings us to the main question explored here, which is why why is exposure to water or living
near water good for you? Why would it be good for say, lowering your mortality or giving you better physical health or mental health. And the authors of the study explore four main hypothetical mechanisms, all of which are on their own known to have significant positive effects on mortality, physical health, and mental health. And these mechanisms are social interaction, physical activity, environmental factors, and restoration. So physical activity, this
is pretty straightforward. Maybe blue spaces encourage people to get more exercise. Getting more exercise is strongly correlated with decreased mortality and improvements in mental and physical health. And maybe something about living near water or having water in your geographical area makes you more likely to exercise.
Okay, that seems to track.
Yeah, second mechanism. Maybe it's social interaction. Maybe blue spaces encourage people to spend more time interacting with others rather than alone, which again has well known, well established benefits. Third thing is environmental factors. This refers to the effects of bodies of water on other local environmental variables that
have their own effects on human well being. The author's right quote blue spaces may contribute to a healthier environment and reduce air pollution, heat island effect, risk of flooding, etc. And then fourth restoration, Exposure to blue spaces might improve restoration, which they define by saying that they use the definition from another paper, So I had to look up what that paper was to get the definition, and basically it
seems to be quote recovery from depleted attentional capacity or stress. This is also something we've blowed on the show before, but basically the question here would be weather. Exposure to water sources helps people relax and recharge, to recover from depleted attention spans from having you know, people spend a lot of their attentional energy on certain types of tasks, or not even tasks, maybe even just you know, like scrolling their phones or something all day. This creates a
lot of stress. And then there are other types of experiences people can have that tend to restore depleted attentional resources and relax you and sort of remove those biomarkers of stress that people would notice, like you know, elevated levels of cortisol and blood or in the saliva.
Interesting. So yeah, it's kind of a satisfying exercise to take these different factors and apply them to different sort of activities and environments. Like, for instance, you think of, say a fishing pond. A number of these you can easily check off. I don't know, physical activity. I guess you could have a discussion there regarding phishing, and I
guess it depends on how you're going about fishing. And then likewise, if you apply it to say a fountain in the middle of a public square, that sort of thing, some of these more easily or checked off the list here. But even like physical activity, I mean you think of environments that have a fountain. I mean, I don't know about the rest of you. I think of like children playing inside fountain, whether they're supposed to do or not.
I think of people doing things around the fountain. So even if you're not say attempting to swim laps in the fountain or do boating in the fountain. There still may be physical action that is encouraged around.
It, right, So we'll get to in a second what the evidence for these factors or not is. But yeah, you can't always know exactly how it works, but you can imagine tons of possibilities like maybe having a canal or a river or something nearby just makes people want to get out and go on a walk more often
that it could be. Yeah, But finally I wanted to finish up my note about what the mechanism with restoration would be if blue spaces do encourage restoration that leads to the better effects on mental and physical health, because the authors say, quote stress, anxiety, depressed mood, and psychological well being have been linked with the risk of cardiovascular diseases and mental health issues, so that link is also
firmly established. So the authors did their review and analyzed all the studies that had any results illuminating these possible mechanisms whether they hold true or not, and there were fifty studies total. In their review, they said twenty seven.
Ultimately they concluded had data relevant to the meta analysis on this question, and what they found was quote three of the four hypothesized pathways physical activity, restoration, and environmental factors are supported by empirical evidence, while findings on social interaction are inconclusive. Now, as for physical activity, they say, people's physical activity seem to increase with both their proximity two blue space and and with the total amount of
blue space in their geographical area where they lived. So it seems that both of these factors are correlated with people getting more exercise. It seems people get out and get more physical activity if there is water somewhere in their neighborhood, and also more if their home is physically closer to water. So this seems like a pretty strong candidate explanation. Second one is restoration. They found that blue
space was correlated with increased restoration the author's rite. Intriguingly, the increase of amount of blue space within a geographical area was found to be the highest among all mediating pathways and exposures. This evidence, therefore suggests that developing more blue spaces within neighborhoods could primarily benefit the restorative character of an area. So having some kind of blue space
in your general geographic area definitely that helps with alleviating stress. However, the interesting and kind of prizing thing to me was that they did not find evidence that your individual proximity to blue space had an effect on restoration. And they write, quote, while urbanicity is found to increase mental disorders through stress, we propose that creating more blue spaces and promoting contact with them can be used to reverse this effect and
ameliorate urban living. So it looks like another fairly strong candidate to me here, Having more water and waterways in the general area where you live seems to have a relaxation and restoration effect on people, counteracting stress and thus achieving improvements in health. Of course, again, chronic stress is bad for you. Now, the other two mechanisms were more complicated or a different story. As for environmental factors, they say, there is evidence for a couple of things, but it's
kind of complicated. So the authors did find some evidence that blue spaces correlate with lowering heat stress and with improving air quality, but they said that the evidence base for those was kind of small and messy, and other environmental factors they looked at, such as effects on noise pollution and biodiversity, there was not enough evidence to reach a conclusion. And then they also say when it comes to environmental factors, there are some that could be operating
in the opposite direction. As you mentioned earlier, there could be some negative environmental effects of having water nearby, such as say being a vector for infectious disease or something like that. So this one seems to be sort of a question mark. The evidence for the effects that are there is kind of weak, and effects appear to be going in both directions. And then finally, for social interaction, they said that the evidence again is kind of weak.
Previous findings were mixed, but the meta analysis did not find a significant effect of blue spaces on social interaction. But it does look like the evidence for two of the four categories is pretty strong. Having more blue space in the neighborhood and living closer to blue space appears to increase people's amount of physical exercise, which has strong benefits for health, and living in an area with more blue space in the general geographical region has restorative effects.
It helps people relax and recharge to counteract the stress of life. Now, I do want to mention that this study was focused on blue spaces in general, and the majority of effects documented. From what I could tell, we're probably coming more from larger natural and artificial waterways like lakes and rivers and canals and so forth. So I don't know how much you could map the total effects of blue space onto specific things like smaller water features installations like fountains and so forth.
Right, So don't take this podcast episode or or these various studies here is just like clear evidence that it's time to install that water feature in your yard, because it might not have ultimately have that big a difference, but who knows. Maybe it'll be delightful, maybe it will be calming. Maybe all you need is that the sound of trickling water.
But a lot of the more specific and detailed oriented questions out of the way, it does seem just generally true that, yes, green space is good for mental and physical health, and blue space also seems to be pretty good for mental and physical health.
Absolutely. Now. I was looking at a study out of twenty twenty two titled a population based Retrospective Study on the Modifying effect of Urban Blue Space on the impact of Socioeconomic Deprivation on Mental Health two thousand and nine through twenty eighteen by Giorgio at all published in scientific reports.
I think this is the same first author as the meta analysis I just looked at.
So this particular study quote aim to investigate whether living near blue space lounge of two udinally modifies the effect of socioeconomic deprivation on mental health the author's right quote. Hence, we study longitudinally the impact of a large scale regeneration of the Glasgow branch of the Fourth and Clyde Canal, an urban blue space, on mental health, using routinely collected clinical data. Now I had to look up some images of what this area looked like. I included one here
for you, Joe. It looks nice. You basically have a canal space with a lot of vegetation grown up on one side of it, you know, and then I mean a little bit on the surface of the water. You have all it looks like a walking and or bicycle path, and then some more green space and some walls and some trees and whatnot. And it looks pleasant, looks like a place if you lived in this area you might go to for a bike ride or a walk, et cetera.
So a number of factors went into this localized study, including distance one resides from the blue space, psychotropic medication prescriptions, socioeconomic deprivation in the area, comorbidities, and demographics. So what do they determined in this analysis? Will they identified a protective modifying effect of living near the blue spaces in relation to the impact of socioeconomic deprivation and mental health disorders.
So the idea here is that the blue space doesn't completely cancel out all of the negative effects on mental health, but it provides what they describe as a quote unquote protective moat mm, which is also clever because you know it's a water feature. But they also write that their findings suggests that increased exposure to blue spaces rolled out in urban spaces could reduce medication intake and reduce mental health inequalities in urban areas.
Yeah, I think it's important to note that while like the positive effects of things like blue spaces does appear to be pretty good, also the effects are fairly modest, so they're not going to be like a fix all for all of everyone's problems. But they seem to be part of a suite of solutions to generally make life and make urban environments more friendly and those kind of things. While no one of them is going to be life changing. Probably they can add up.
Yeah, yeah, they can all add up to an increase in quality of life, staving off some of these additional mental and health issues. So something that should certainly should be factored into urban planning, to urban restoration projects and so forth. And you know, just on an individual level, you can feel a little better about taking time out of your day to be near water, be it in the form of you know, some sort of an artificial pond, fountain, et cetera, or local bodies of water and so forth.
You know, there's something I wonder about that I haven't seen this sighted in any papers looking at or anything. This is just kind of an amusing but I wonder if there is some psychological benefit or quality of life benefit to just having something near you that is an excuse for you to go do something you don't have
to do, you know, And it can be anything. It can be a you could be a park, or could be a pathway near your house, or something just an excuse to like an excuse to go do something that is not work and is not like a screen. Does that make.
Sense, Yeah, And that you know ultimately occupies your mind in a way that that may force out other thoughts and other preoccupations. You know that that taps into, you know, our basic primal wiring to see what's going on over there by the water. Are there ducks? What are the ducks doing? Are they are they mining their own business? Or are they looking at me suspiciously? Are there in the fountain? Et cetera. And again, if you're on the fence about building that coy pond, you know, don't don't
build it just because you listen to this episode. But also maybe don't not build it.
We're not saying it's going to be a cure all, but also, hey, you know, water's nice. Why not go for it?
It might be nice.
Now, the one thing I would hesitate on is throwing pennies in the pond with the fish.
Oh absolutely, yeah.
I don't know that that's a bad idea, but I have a hunch.
Oh, I mean, based on all the signs I see places I go, they say don't throw the coins in because they're not good for the fish or the turtles or what have you. So unless it is a designated wishing fountain, don't cast your wishes because it's you know, it's not gonna work. All right, we're gonna ahead and close this episode out, but we'd love to hear from everyone out there. What are your thoughts on green spaces and blue spaces? On naturally occurring bodies of water and fountains?
Do you have a favorite that you have observed or hang out around frequently us, No, we'd love to hear from you. Also, thanks to my wife who suggested this episode. We were kind of casting around and I would I said, hey, what would you like to hear an episode about? And she said, oh, I've heard some about some studies regarding blue spaces, and so we looked into it, and here we are. If you would like to catch up on past episodes of the show, where you can find them
in the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed. We have core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We have episodes of Listener Mail on Monday's, short form Artifact or Monster Fact episodes on Wednesdays. On Fridays, we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema. And in terms of that fire Extinguisher episode of Invention that we mentioned offhand, I cannot remember if we have republished that one in the Stuff to
Blow Your Mind podcast feed. I assume that we have, but there is also a separate abandoned podcast feed for Invention, which is a show we did for a period based on inventions, so you can also find it there.
Wish huge thanks to our audio producer JJ Posway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
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