Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
Is the damage reversible, or do New Yorkers stay like that indefinitely?
bush, bush, tree, bush, tiger, bush, oh wait...
Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer. - Ludwig von Mises
Everyone is constantly glancing around at everything.
Probably trying to avoid muggers and eye contact with the crazies.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
'It's not an accident that Central Park is in the middle of Manhattan,' says Berman.
For real? I thought they'd just forgotten to build shit there.
Its true! Since i moved from Ironforge to the gardens of Dalaran i gained +20 int!
I was walking on 51st St. and suddenly a ladybug landed on my hand.
On 51st St, it might've been a gentleman bug dressed as a ladybug. Sometimes it's hard to tell.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
The truth is that most people work in office buildings that are not that busy, and they only spend a tiny fraction of their day in a busy and distracting environment.
An office environment is not distracting? Have you ever heard of e-mail, youtube or slashdot?
No. Certainly not the last one; it sounds like somewhere freaks would live.
Because the test subjects' brains were so bored during the *walk in the park* they jump for joy when given something to do. Ever see a hamster given a wheel for the first time?
Requiem for the American Dream
The amount of disdain you have for New Yorkers borders on the amount of homophobia you would find from a closeted homosexual. I'm not saying you're a closet New Yorker, but that's just what it comes off as... just saying...
Gee, psychoanalyze much? Typical New Yorker.
I laughed at the weak who considered themselves good because they lacked claws.
Yes! Whether distractions are bad depends completely on what you are doing (or how you do it).
For instance, people who use Python need a fair bit of distraction to keep their minds occupied and thus find some kind of satisfaction while working in that highly restrictive environment. But people who program with Perl need a low distraction environment while they exercise their creative potential.
There is so much more to programming than whitespace can contain :-)
Consider this the post-modern, performance art way of proving my point.