A new study published this month brings new meaning to “nature is healing.”

Writing in the journal Nature Communications, researchers discovered that watching scenes of nature reduces pain. It wasn’t just a placebo, either: Viewing nature reduced neural activity in brain regions that pinpoint where in the body pain comes from and gauge how intense it is. 

“It’s a really well-designed study—very timely,” said Dr. Karin Dijkstra, a behavioral scientist at Saxion University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands who wasn’t involved in the study. “Given that it’s the first that looked at pain this way, I think this will be around the block for quite some time.”

The finding builds on four decades of research showing that nature reduces pain. A seminal paper published in 1984 showed that patients who had their gallbladders removed took fewer pain medications and left the hospital earlier if their room had a window rather than a brick wall. Subsequent studies confirmed that nature reduces pain during medical procedures, including dental fillings, tooth extractions, and bronchoscopies. 

Still, it wasn’t clear how nature provides pain relief. Nature could lessen the actual sensation of pain, or it could alleviate the emotions, anxieties, anticipation, and memories associated with it. Subjective self-reported assessments of pain can’t tease apart these possibilities. 

The new study’s authors overcame these challenges by measuring brain activity during painful events. They used functional magnetic resonance imaging to look at two neural pain signatures, which were developed and validated in previous studies. The “lower-level” pain signature tracks where on the body pain comes from and how intense it is, while the “higher-level” one responds to cognitive and emotional processing of pain.

“It’s basically a pattern that spans different areas of the brain, but it gives you a single value, a single neural response,” said lead author Max Steininger, a neuroscientist and environmental psychologist at Universität Wien in Austria. “This pattern has been shown to specifically react to pain but not to other unpleasant aversive stimulations.”

From inside an MRI machine, study participants received light shocks to their hand while viewing three types of scenes on an LCD screen: nature, urban, and indoor. 

The study subjects reported feeling less intense and unpleasant pain while viewing nature. Moreover, the fMRIs showed that nature reduced activity in the “lower-level” pain signature associated with sensing pain intensity, but not the “higher-level” one reflecting emotional or cognitive processing.