alt Hacker NewsThis "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
Hmm I don't do bird watching so I'm assuming it's not entirely passive, as in you need to sneak up on the birds to watch them. Even if sneaking is only coming in binoculars range.
If you sit on a chair on your porch and watch whatever birds happen to come by, it's still bird watching?