Mathew White

Mar 13, 2025 | nature.com | Maximilian O. Steininger |Mathew White |Lei Zhang |Simone Kühn |Claus Lamm |Lukas Lengersdorff | +1 more

Nature exposure has numerous health benefits and might reduce self-reported acute pain. Given the multi-faceted and subjective quality of pain and methodological limitations of prior research, it is unclear whether the evidence indicates genuine analgesic effects or results from domain-general effects and subjective reporting biases. This preregistered neuroimaging study investigates how nature modulates nociception-related and domain-general brain responses to acute pain. Healthy participants (N = 49) receiving electrical shocks report lower pain when exposed to virtual nature compared to matched urban or indoor control settings. Multi-voxel signatures of pain-related brain activation patterns demonstrate that this subjective analgesic effect is associated with reductions in nociception-related rather than domain-general cognitive-emotional neural pain processing. Preregistered region-of-interest analyses corroborate these results, highlighting reduced activation of areas connected to somatosensory aspects of pain processing (thalamus, secondary somatosensory cortex, and posterior insula). These findings demonstrate that virtual nature exposure enables genuine analgesic effects through changes in nociceptive and somatosensory processing, advancing our understanding of how nature may be used to complement non-pharmacological pain treatment. That this analgesic effect can be achieved with easy-to-administer virtual nature exposure has important practical implications and opens novel avenues for research on the precise mechanisms by which nature impacts our mind and brain. Virtual nature exposure reduces self-reported pain and is associated with decreased brain responses linked to somatosensory and nociceptive processing, providing new insights into the underlying mechanisms of nature-induced analgesia.

Sep 1, 2024 | medicalxpress.com | Mathew White

Imagine you've had a hard day. You've only managed to get a fraction of your urgent tasks done. Your partner, boss, friend or mother (delete as appropriate) has been giving you a hard time. Just thinking about this is raising your blood pressure (my apologies). Now, imagine "paradise." Suddenly, thoughts of a calm, deep blue sea lapping gently onto a white sandy beach fringed with palm trees start to come to mind.

Aug 29, 2024 | tolerance.ca | Mathew White

By Mathew White, Senior Lecturer in Environmental Psychology, University of Exeter Looking at, listening to, and immersing ourselves in inland and coastal waters can directly benefit our physical and mental health - here’s how the study of blue health has evolved. Read complete article© The Conversation -

Aug 29, 2024 | theconversation.com | Mathew White

Imagine you’ve had a hard day. You’ve only managed to get a fraction of your urgent tasks done. Your partner, boss, friend or mother (delete as appropriate) has been giving you a hard time. Just thinking about this is raising your blood pressure (my apologies). Now, imagine “paradise”. Suddenly, thoughts of a calm, deep blue sea lapping gently onto a white sandy beach fringed with palm trees start to come to mind.