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.'"
Just because its more distracting doesn't mean its bad for you.
Natural settings don't require the same amount of cognitive effort.
A jungle or other wild forest does. It is living in cultivated land (farmland or even managed forests) that requires an unnatural low amount of cognitive effort.
Nonsense. This is the kind of semi-plausible revisionist bullshit that gives scientists a bad name. The park is a result of politics, New York simply wanted a stylish park to rival other big cities at the time, and they evicted the poor who already lived there to achieve that goal. It's got nothing to do with the need to improve people's mental faculties by communing with nature.
First, Central Park was put on the edge of the city when it was built. In the 19th century people tended to think ahead more.
Second, I would bet the author has never actually been in a truly wild setting, where there are animals around that might hunt you. The wild is no place to be oblivious.
Third, note this from the original article (really a press release) :
The researchers also tested the same theory by having subjects sit inside and look at pictures of either downtown scenes or nature scenes and again the results were the same: when looking at photos of nature, memory and attention scores improved by about 20 percent, but not when viewing the urban pictures.
If looking at pictures can help your memory its clearly not so much where you are, as what you are looking at. I wonder what city views they were showing, and whether, say, views of Paris or Prague would cause the same reaction.
If what they are saying really boils down to that we need some beauty in our surroundings, they are a few thousand years behind the times.
Presumably they eventually manage to recover at least somewhat, but I can tell you from personal experience that they remain permanently insufferable. Ask anyone who has lived in New York about pizza, or public transportation, or pretty much anything else for that matter and the conversation will eventually turn to how much better New York is than wherever it is they currently happen to be. One wonders why they don't just go back and stay there.
I have yet to meet an ex-New Yorker who isn't excessively proud of the fact that he once lived in "The City". They're worse than Texans.
I disagree. The tourists are the only ones looking at everything trying to catch it all in, not the locals going about their daily life. The rest of us are just avoiding eye contact and only paying attention to where we are going and what's going to intersect our path getting there.
A slip of the foot you may soon recover, but a slip of the tongue you may never get over. -Benjamin Franklin
being raised in a rural town, i suspect that I notice this effect much more strongly than urbanites. when i'm in the city, everything is fighting for my attention simultaneously, so i just tune everything out.
I wonder if something similar occurs when using a multitasking operating system.
in the old days, a personal computer would be set to do one thing and one thing only at any one time. now i have music running in the background, along with gimp and pidgin, while i try to post on Slashdot. I'm so distracted, this post took me nearly 45 minutes to type up, and i can almost guarantee I wont get a +5 insightful.
-I only code in BASIC.-
Or shared cubicles. Or cubicles where you can hear EVERYTHING your coworkers are doing. Or the noise of dozens or hundreds of PCs.
Since the city is supposed to hurt the brain, can I get a doctors' note to go work in the country instead of the office?
Seriously, it's no wonder that I get more work done when I work from home than from the office.
Kevin Smith on Prince
I find that people who have this view of Manhattan only know it from movies and TV shows. Generally, I have found people in Manhattan to be pleasant and helpful ... although one must make allowances for their adaptations to living in large crowds. The first time I went into Grand Central Station, I got swept along by a crowd that had just been disgorged by a subway entrance. My experience of Manhattan crowds is different from the GP's; generally I find the bulk of them very focused on going about whatever their business is. The sheer size of the crowds means that you can probably find any kind of behavior you're looking for. I find I can observe more people walking down a Manhattan block than I normally do in the course of a month.
Generally speaking, Manhattan feels as safe as any other city, especially if we are talking from Central Park south during the day time. There are a lot of human friendly aspects to Manhattan's urban landscape. First and foremost are the very very wide sidewalks, which other cities would do well to emulate. This gives plenty of space to large volumes of pedestrian traffic, fed by a dense public transit network. This creates a vibrant street level commercial economy, which may seem overwhelming at first, until you realize that a Manhattan block is like a city in miniature. You don't have to walk a mile to find something you want; as often as not it's no more than a block away; further and you take transit.
Overall, I find Manhattan to be very comfortable and convenient, once you've adapted a bit to the rhythm and pace. I wonder if the study was perhaps confounded by several things. First, are the subjects accustomed to walking in an urban landscape? If you repeated the experiment a dozen times, would the score for city walkers change? Secondly, are the routes chosen pedestrian friendly? If not the results may simply reflect the results of stress.
I don't deny that nature is important, and don't doubt that experiencing natural settings regularly is a contributor to mental health. But in many ways, dense urban landscapes are both good for people and the environment, when compared to sprawl.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
You can't just generalize about a city of millions. Try replacing New Yorker with a person from any country and listen to how offensive you sound.
I was born in NYC and am still living there currently. I also get really annoyed with the all the people who think New York is the greatest thing ever too, but you don't find me bashing it every chance I get on Slashdot. 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...
Shared cubes? Cubes are insulting enough. If I were offered a job in a shared cube, I would laugh, walk out the door, then shit in front of their door. That's called reciprocity.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Except the more things you have to concentrate on and worry about at once, the lower your attention span becomes.
A disproportionate number of top universities, relative to population, are in rural areas and small towns: Ithaca, New York; Urbana-Champaign, Illinois; Hanover, New Hampshire; Durham, North Carolina; Terre Haute, Indiana; etc.
Many of those that do find themselves in large cities were actually founded way out in the countryside, too, but have since been swallowed---Columbia was sort of in the middle of nowhere in far-upper Manhattan, most of the Boston universities are in Cambridge rather than Boston proper, Stanford was way off from San Francisco, Caltech was considerably outside Los Angeles, etc.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10