Science Related Articles
Garden Smarts
The following article was taken from Organic Gardening, Vol. 57:6, Oct/Nov 2010.
Not only are gardeners happier, but they might be smarter, suggests a new study from the Sage Colleges in Troy, New York. In 2007, United Kingdom researchers linked that happy feeling gardeners have after they’ve been digging in the dirt to a little soil organism called Mycobacterium vaccae, which decreases anxiety and increases serotonin, the “happy hormone.” The same common soil bacterium has now been found to increase learning ability.
“We know there is a relationship between serotonin and learning. When you’re stressed, you don’t learn as well,” says Dorothy Matthews, an associate professor of biology at the Sage Colleges and the study’s lead author. This knowledge inspired Matthews and her team to study how the bacterium might affect the ability of mice to navigate a maze and to remember that information over time.
Even the researchers were surprised with the results. “The mice exposed to M. vaccae performed twice as fast with much less anxiety. They were focused on getting the reward,” says Matthews. And the positive effects lasted well after the exposure to the soil bacterium ended.
Matthews believes the take-home message is that spending time in the garden not only provides us with food but puts us in contract with microbes that play a role in our mental health.
This line of research also has clear implications for the current educational system. Learning environments that include outdoor play, especially school gardens, could boost students’ ability to learn new material. “We should design future schools with curriculums that put kids outside planting seeds and seeing how things grow – where they can develop a respect for and appreciation of nature,” Matthews says.
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