How the City Hurts Your Brain

Hugh Pickens writes "The city has always been an engine of intellectual life and the 'concentration of social interactions' is largely responsible for urban creativity and innovation. But now scientists are finding that being in an urban environment impairs our basic mental processes. After spending a few minutes on a crowded city street, the brain is less able to hold things in memory and suffers from reduced self-control. 'The mind is a limited machine,' says psychologist Marc Berman. 'And we're beginning to understand the different ways that a city can exceed those limitations.' Consider everything your brain has to keep track of as you walk down a busy city street. A city is so overstuffed with stimuli that we need to redirect our attention constantly so that we aren't distracted by irrelevant things. This sort of controlled perception — we are telling the mind what to pay attention to — takes energy and effort. Natural settings don't require the same amount of cognitive effort. A study at the University of Michigan found memory performance and attention spans improved by 20 percent after people spent an hour interacting with nature. 'It's not an accident that Central Park is in the middle of Manhattan,' says Berman. 'They needed to put a park there.'"

Comments

Cities Murder People

[b4upoo]

I have ranted for years about cities destroying both people and nations. The first evil is that cities actually send out a message that the rural person is inferior by offering higher wages than tiny towns and villages. The next problem is that education is excessively valued in cities. Sadly, education in itself causes the brain to shift functions away from areas that are vital. We have all seen college and even high school students get goofy when they are forced to study too much. The other side of the coin is that as children are born in cities many can not comply with the regime needed to attain higher levels of education and become the dreaded and violent, chronically unemployed.
          Further cities are like a cancer as they physically spread out oozing all kinds of toxins into the more rural environments. Rural environments never ruin cities but cities always destroy rural areas.
          Much of this falls squarely upon capitalism as in the beginning businesses deliberately attract throngs of labor and then as the businesses decline they abandon the very people that they have imported into the cities. And like a disease cities have helped spawn such a huge population that we have no way to get rid of the curse that we call cities.

Re:It makes more sense now...

[Mr. Firewall]

Yes, this does explain why city people are so stupid -- something that those of us from Rural America have been aware of for a long time....