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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.'"
According to my MIT Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science: Cities function as a cognitive artifact. Cognitive artifacts are external physical things that aid cognition.
Humans are not all the same, and what most humans were 10,000 years ago has little to do with our default abilities and preferences today. There is not even a linear progression, various climate and cultural filters have output humans with vastly different ideal environments.
The nature-would-do-us-best thesis is a feelgood mythology for people ill suited for the present technological norms most humans practice.
On a personal note have lived in Seattle, Akutan AK (island in Bering Sea), Kanab UT, and Antarctica. My mind did fine in all four places.
"It's also noisy. Maybe they should do some maintenance, and switch over to a rubber-tired system."
That would be difficult, since the NYC subways use the rails for grounding. The main reason the subways in NYC are so noisy is the speed that the trains operate at, which is typically 10-20MPH faster than other subway systems in America (which is why similarly old systems, like the Boston subways, are so much quieter). There is an effort with the newest subway trains to reduce noise, but that is mainly aimed at the passengers riding the train, not those standing on the platforms.
One of the things that the NYC subway system has going for it, that other systems do not really have, is the ability to operate 24x7x365 with few disruptions in service. There are several reasons for this, but the primary two are the distributed nature of the control system (which is unfortunately due to be centralized as part of a plan to install computers to replace the ancient equipment they use) and the large number of lines and tracks which make reroutes possible. It is possible to perform maintenance on the NYC subways, and in fact, this is done on nights and weekends, which is why there are route changes every weekend, with the exception of holidays.
"Must be all those pollutants in the river. Maybe they've permanently altered your taste buds."
NYC's water supply does not come from the rivers that surrounding Manhattan. The water in NYC comes from a large reservoir in the mountains in the middle of New York State, and is carried to the city using three enormous pipes. The tap water is actually among the cleanest in the US, and NYC is one of the few places where the majority of contaminants in tap water come from old pipes in the final stages of delivery, rather than the supply itself.
"Seriously, the air absolutely stinks and the streets are filthy."
This is not unique to NYC, it is the case in any large city. Large cities always have been and always will be more polluted than small cities and towns. When you have millions of people living in such a small area, it is difficult to keep the ground and air pristine.
Palm trees and 8