Effect of forest bathing for mindwandering

Abstract

After COVID-19, people are interested in healthcare, so the market for health tourism is increasing. Forest bathing is one of the attractive activities during a trip. To provide tourists with information on the healing effects of forest bathing, we are researching to clarify the questions of "What exactly are the effects of forest bathing, and what causes the healing effects? and "How can we optimally present tourist information on the healing effects? By building a generic model of technology for providing information on forest bathing through experiments in Oku-Nikko, we aim to spread our research results to the health-oriented society. In recent years, research on the default mode network, the idle state of the brain, has been progressing. It has been reported that during meditation and other tasks with low cognitive load, a state of mind wandering occurs, in which attention is directed not to events in the external environment but to one's internal self, and one thinks about various things in a hazy way. It has also been reported that the default mode network, which consists of multiple memory areas in the brain, is activated during mind wandering, and it has been pointed out that this activation may connect memories in various brain regions under conscious awareness, facilitating creativity. In forest bathing, people are relaxed with low cognitive load, which is thought to facilitate the activation of the brain's default mode network, and thus, benefits such as increased creativity can be expected. In this presentation, we will describe the results of our investigation into the relationship between forest bathing and the default mode network, and in particular, whether forest bathing activates the default mode network.