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Probably. This is what happens when you let Big Bird fund science.

Those other things aren’t activities people are currently doing. Bird watching is a social activity with clubs you can join right now.

> so I can enjoy the same effects by looking at tiktoks of birds,

Birdwatching includes looking at top trees searching for birds. Looking at complex fractal-like accumulations of branches and leaves. Also following sounds and identifying their source. The brain was designed for this task.

A screen does not seem a substituted for such a incredible rich experience. Screens are a flat low-resolution, low fidelity view of reality. And no brain has evolved to watch at them. It can actually be quite tiresome to look at screens all day, as so many things about them go against how our eyes and brains work.

The mindset that every hacker and tinkerer has. Trying to take the system apart and decouple it.

Meanwhile most people just do the traditional thing

I know this is absolutely not the point, but I wanted to touch on the "hunting = bad for nature" idea.

All animals die, and dying from a clean rifle shot is preferable to 99.9% of the ways animals will die in the wild.

Regulations like bag limits and license lotteries prevent over-hunting, and in many situations (like the wild boars in Italy) hunting is an ecologically positive activity, as it reduces populations that would otherwise explode and destroy its own ecosystem.

Engaging with Torment Nexus Less Found to Lower Stress, Increase Life Expectancy

Funnily enough, my bird watching does in fact involve a screen — the electronic viewfinder on my camera[0].

Jokes aside, there is a very definite difference in how my brain "feels" when I'm walking around, camera in hand, looking for things to photograph. It's like I'm in a different "cognitive mode", for the lack of a better term. It's not just about being present and in the moment, but about seeing the world around you from a different perspective.

0. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tnMlazV0g1syoRPLALJ6576YSYQ...

I suspect we'll find out that "programming is good for your brain" as well...

NB I'm 61 and recently started developing something almost entirely for the mental workout if provides

Edit: I also wanted to use HTMX so I could become CEO one day

I think it is slightly different than that. I think it is more about active brain activity versus passive. Learning how to play Riichi Mahjong (e.g.) would likely show a similar effect. A lot of people push brain puzzles as a tool against dementia, etc. but it is only helpful when learning a new puzzle type. Once you over learn it, our innate pattern matching takes over and you start playing on auto-pilot, it stops "rewiring" your brain. Just sitting on the couch binging streaming or swiping through shorts is likely to atrophy your brain.

Obviously being out in nature has other mental health benefits. The key thing is to keep learning and stay curious. Drive to some new nearby town on a weekend and learn about its history. Learn a new hobby like full f-stop photography or learn how to bake or cook (learn all four base sauces). Take up board games and explore all the different kinds of experiences they provide today.

> with X just being any activity that doesn't involve a screen

and done by top 1 percent of the world

    > now that attention spans are so short

    > Psychologists and neuroscientists find no structural decline in the human brain's ability to focus. Sustained attention limits remain largely unchanged.

For what it’s worth, this article cites a longitudinal study done by German researchers.

They basically installed a bunch of bird feeders outside nursing homes to see if watching birds improves the health of the elderly people. The researchers concluded that it did:

    Nursing home staff were the first to see the difference the birds made. "For weeks, they haven't seen a smile on [a resident's] face, and then they see the smile," Kals says.
    Some of the memory and concentration improvements are evident after just three to four weeks, Kals says.

https://www.lbv.de/umweltbildung/fuer-seniorenheime/ausstatt...

You have quite a biased sample because most people are not going to suffer going to remote parts of Scotland to look for birds, so you are only seeing the more devoted birdwatchers.

Birdwatching can still be enjoyed in most places without needing to travel far. Birds are less active in bad weather so you don’t need expensive outdoor gear, and in many places there will be freely accessible nature reserves with hides in which one can sit in shelter to watch birds.

The highest quality glass is going to get pretty expensive (camera lenses can get to the region of $20k; binoculars $4k or so) but there are also much cheaper options and often these can be quite reasonable: you don’t need to take photos of birds; a superzoom point-and-shoot can work great; more expensive binoculars make a bigger difference in low light and if you’re young (older people’s pupils won’t dilate as much so bigger objectives at a lower magnification won’t be a huge help).

I feel like mostly you’re observing that rich people spend lots of money on their hobbies and not that opening your eyes to look at birds is some expensive exclusionary activity.

Birdwatching is truly one of the cheapest possible hobbies you can have. Yes, you can make it expensive if you're committed to photographing them and traveling to remote locations to find "life list" birds, but that's not the vast majority of hobbyists.

This is also a great app: https://github.com/woheller69/whoBIRD

Not sure, but this is definitely a thing - the "a single glass of red wine a day is good for you" claim is pretty likely more about how people who can afford daily wine are probably wealthier people with better access to healthcare, not that any amount of daily ethanol intake has a therapeutic effect. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...

I'd say a lot of activities like this can be done for cheap or free. Taking an elderly person to the park is free, it just costs time. Binoculars are ubiquitous, and bird books are a dime a dozen in your local charity shop.

The critical thing is that these people need a hand to get out of the house or do any kind of activity. And I think that's partially behind a lot of ailments that affect the elderly, they don't go out, don't get physically, mentally or sensorily stimulated enough so they atrophy in all those areas. On top of age related conditions like senility, parkinsons, altzheimer's, etc of course.

> On a side note, the Merlin bird ID app from Cornell University is great.

Do you know how it compares to iNaturalist? I'm not a birdwatcher, but I have iNat on my phone and sometimes use it to identify birds, and it seems to do a great job.

I'd really say the opposite - birdwatching cuts across socioeconomic classes surprisingly well in the UK. At least the subarea of bitding which is focused on rare birds.

> "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. "It was so effective, it just economised money," Kals says."

Perhaps we need to provide opportunities for less well off people to access nature? It might have a positive cost-benefit. And design care homes around gardens? 'forest bathing' is apparently often recommended in Japan based on studies of blood pressure and other physical indicators.

Munlochy: if you ever saw a geezer wearing an ex-army parka, builders safety boots with Opticron bins it might have been me. I don't get up there often enough to warrant the pricey stuff.

Did they adjust for demographics?

I think going out into nature adds more physical factors (ham radio and video games are both physically pretty passive hobbies) and more sensory input, which gut feeling says are overall better.

But generally speaking, hobbies are good. That said, I wonder why video games don't seem to be more popular as post-retirement hobbies.

Yes of course, anything the requires skills you don't otherwise use. In particular continuous learning is very helpful.

The challenge however is, is it that those who engage in such hobbies have decline slowed. Or are they able to engage in those hobbies due to not declining.

It's not possible to answer clearly without some randomisation and control which is basically impossible.

Still, it's reasonable inference that hobbies and work maintain cognitive capabilities.

I think some hobbies tap into innate abilities more than others. And those tend to show more perceptible and immediate progress and so are more likely to become a regular habit. As a human you already have a facility for recognising things in nature, it is how humans can find food and detect threats. Where as other abilities (like playing a violin) are far less innate.

For someone that knows nothing about ham radios can you give me a taste for what you mean by requires continuous learning from a naive perspective? It seems like any other radio technology that has not changed in decades.

I watched this is and it's such a great documentary. I really want to take a year now and try to get at least in the top 25% of birders for the year. I was into casual birding before (it's my favorite thing to do when traveling to a new place, just wander around the area and spot local birds). But now I'm loving the idea of these monthly or annual "competitions"

I can’t recommend this documentary enough. The algorithm dropped it onto my YouTube homepage one day and I wasn’t expecting to watch more than a few minutes but I was drawn in immediately.

I don’t consider myself a birder but I’ve got into nature photography in recent years and it’s such a joy to get out for sunrise or sunset and to come home with a special shot.

It's so good. Nature documentary made by a pair of endearing dirtbags.

Absolute banger documentary, rewatched it last week with my SO!

Great doc. Also recommend the classic Encounters: Twitchers (1996) as a spiritual precursor.

nice. Still, competitive birdwatching sounds like competitive meditation :)

Really great.

There's the "always on" type of birdwatching as well, that allows you to recognize the birds you see and hear in the course of ordinary life. No patience required, just practising staying aware of peripheral vision and sounds, but equally rewarding when you are lucky enough to have a chance encounter.

The BBC article is perhaps truer to the paper:

  Erik Wing, who led this research at Baycrest Academy for Research and Education in Toronto, Canada, compared MRI brain scans from bird experts to those of novices while they identified birds. He found that expert brains were wired differently in regions important for functions like attention, visual perception and visual recognition. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_determinism

It's those darn spy pigeons watching back.

This "passive consumption" needs disambiguation, though.

What separates "I see colorful moving things" [watching birds] from "I see colorful moving things" [social media reels] is not the perceived passiveness but passiveness in the psychological sense.

Watching birds is active attention: you scan, predict, analyze. You get random, sparse rewards for it. Importantly, birdwatching is mostly nothing happening, which leaves room for your mind to wander - and wandering is the thing that's apparently really good for the brain.[1]

[1] - Moshe Bar, Mindwandering (2022), Michael Corballis, The Wandering Mind: What the Brain Does When You’re Not Looking (2015) and different related research papers

You might want to read it, then.

r/ekekek

look, look! A millenial father observing bird species in an effort to stave off cognitive decline, rarely seen away from his burrow and demanding offspring, we can see from its markings that this one was once a hipster, note the foliage pattern about it's left radiocarpal.

From birdwatching/neural plasticity to environmentalism/anti-Russian sentiments.

Wow.

In some ways they do, but actually going out into nature, smell different air, get aun on your skin, wind through your hair, see all around and not just a flickering screen and interface with reality with your whole body, not just eyes staring to a square and hands moving mouse and keyboard .. seems even more beneficial in activating the neurological system in the body.

They probably are, but only if you try new games, new maps, new strategies constantly - anything to get your brain plasticity working. Killing monsters in Diablo for 10 years in a row probably hastens the decline if anything.