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.
Just head to Manhattan and look at the people around you. Everyone is constantly glancing around at everything. It's not just the tourists either--very nearly every single person is constantly shifting his gaze from point to point like a coked out monkey with ADD. It's one of the things that I hate about New York.
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.
Isn't this similar to the report a while back saying that our brains are becoming affected by google browsing - information overload if it arrives in huge chunks is difficult to assimilate. Imagine you are on a plane for 10 hours - the white noise of the engine, and the bland colours - then you are off the plane, into the airport, a bustling place - you are tired, the airport is busy, and you feel overwhelmed.
I wonder if they studied city people or country folk?
Personally I like having that level of movement and activity around, I find it somehow comforting. I certainly don't find "coping" with city streets stressful, except when it's nearing christmas and all the f*ck-damned tourists are crowding up the place and getting in the way.
Guess I've lived in the city long enough to not find it a problem.
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.
If only advertising could be better targetted. There are garish billboards everywhere, many of which don't apply to lots of the folks who see them.
Advertising directed only at the folk who actually might use the product or service, would give us all back some minutes/hours every day.
Environmentalism is the new Victorianism. Everyone ties on a green corset and pretends we're virtuous.
I can imagine that shopkeepers might oppose parks on the grounds that urbanly stressed people are more likely to buy stuff they don't need.
"...Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
'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.
As far as i can tell it was a ncie enough compromise to lead us to where we are, and maybe even further beyond. I leave the attention span and nature life to my short lived ancestor.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
I must be even worse the pilots. Especially doing a Trans-Ocean flight, Say LHR to JFK each end completely manic, multiple commands from ATC, lots of other aircraft to watch out for, reconfiguration of the aircraft but in the Middle Several hours of not a lot.
That's one job I'd hate to do.
Its true! Since i moved from Ironforge to the gardens of Dalaran i gained +20 int!
> be it by crossing 5th avenue at the wrong moment
When I was a lot younger (and spacier), after about a year and a half of living in Manhattan, I was walking on 51st St. and suddenly a ladybug landed on my hand. I was so surprised and thrilled at that (being the opposite of a real "city boy") that I crossed 5th Av. against the light (or mostly against the light) and only a few minutes after understood what I had done.
You seem kind of bitter about it. New York has some things going for it--if it didn't, it wouldn't be such a huge place economically and culturally.
The public transportation is pretty good, except that they haven't put in new subway lines since the private sector got less involved. But the subway is 24-hour, which is pretty great, and it basically never shuts down for maintenance. That doesn't mean it's always safe, but it's nice. (At 3 in the morning, there are places you don't want to go.)
The pizza's good because the water's right for it--you can't make good pizza with the wrong kind of water. I don't know why, it just works out that way. If you are also lucky enough to know a place with a good chef, you're in heaven.
Other cities have virtues, too--e.g. Seattle with its Coffee and Imperial Walkers. And I've heard they have a troll under a bridge, which is wonderful!
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.
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.-
The last times I remember doing any work of significance, requiring intensive thought, I was either in my home or at my office. Seriously...I we'll be okay if the best innovations don't all take place on a street corner at a busy intersection.
OTOH - what these guys should really be examining is the impact that reading /. has on our brains. Ouch!
on an inter personal level as well i've found most city born and breed types are emotional train wrecks.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Nice study that confirms what we all knew: that the downtown is the worst place to live and full of smog. Downtowns developed for safety and economic reasons, but now we have the Internet, so I expect people to start abandoning the downtown to live in suburbs and the countryside close to nature, communicating and working through the Internet (as I do). We really don't need a smog-infected and crime-prone downtown anymore.
In the order I got to know them:
What do these have in common? They're port cities, where cultures have met and traded and fought and blended for centuries. You don't find the same vitality in inland cities such as Frankfurt or Salt Lake City, which I've always found to be, well, boring.
I've never lived in a city for more than a few weeks, but I've always found the experience to be inspiring.
What?
I mean, I can post this from my cell phone while walking in the city...sorry what....was I talking.....gotta go, I see something shiny!
Monstar L
At one point a proposal was floated that suggested that pilots be allowed/encouraged to play video games during those 'down times' so that they'd be more alert and ready to handle an emergency if one should pop up. I can't seem to find the link to the article. 8-(
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
I believe you failed to read the articles. The benefit was increased interaction, the detriment was over-stimulation. Smog, crime, safety and economics were not mentioned at all and somehow, someone rated you up.
Everybody seems to think I'm lazy I don't mind, I think they're crazy
> 'It's not an accident that Central Park is in the middle of
> Manhattan,' says Berman. 'They needed to put a park there.'"
Maybe it's just me, but personally I would have considered Central Park to be an urban environment, not very much less crowded than a city street. It *certainly* doesn't qualify as a natural setting of any kind.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
ADD has evolved.
Some might say its a disorder, but once you learn to cope with it, your "multi-tasking skills" go through the roof - or maybe i'm just a freak - i've been accused of both.
wait... pineapple?
.
Central Park is the product of the same political compromises that put the county seat in Dogpatch as a close to dead-center on the map as it is physically possible.
In 1855, the site was uptown rock and swamp, suburban, lightly inhabited, difficult to develop commercially.
840 acres of [mostly] rustic, naturalistic, park, still looked to be a less expensive proposition than a densely populated public garden less than one-tenth its size - and - not incidentally - far more attractive to its future and very wealthy neighbors. CentralParkHistory.com
According to this non peer-reviewed post cities also make you myopic
Dont make a better sig, you insensitive clod!
Or worse for people with anxiety disorders, your brain gets overstimulated until it starts to "shut down", producing a zombie-like state, provided you don't have a panic attack before then and escape to somewhere less crowded.
I figured that out for myself about 25 years ago and opted to live in rural settings. I made the mistake of taking a job in a big city in 1999 and lasted a little more than 3 years. I get the same feeling in big box stores -- especially Wal-Mart. It creeps me out just to be in one of their stores.
...not only is the air obviously clear and sweet, but it is significantly easier to read and absorb information, not to mention, be creative. Yes, one misses the 'buz' of the city, but then that is animal nature. I think as the world currently stands on edge ("End of days"?), it may be time to rethink our way of living.
O'WONDERWe're working on it.
Having moved from small town (a suburb of Scranton, of all places) to progressively larger cities over the years, I know that my brain is vastly understimulated in suburban and rural areas.
In my teenage years, I always had a problem remembering people's faces.
It was so bad that I actually went to a psychologist to see if it was some mild form of autism. There was no conclusive diagnoses.
Now, the interesting part is that I was living in London at the time, and commuting on the train every day through the city. I'd see thousands of new faces every day, each of which I had to recognize, then ignore. I'd never see any of them again.
Since moving out to a smaller city and driving to work, my memory for new faces has dramatically improved, to the point where I no longer need to make a special effort to remember them. It just comes naturally.
I have wondered to this day whether it was the stress of the city that lead to the failure in recognition, or whether being overloaded with so many new faces I had to immediately forget each day was too much for my poor little brain.
Evolution doesn't work by changing yourself and passing on the changes to your children, but being happy with that mutation you gained (when you were just 1 cell) and thus manage to NOT get killed like everybody else before having children.
....
Since ads don't kill people (well, yet)
But maybe I've got an old-style brain aswell
0 001 11 1
Central Park is a planned, man-made structure. It is no more natural than the skyscrapers that surround it.
There are only three types of natural areas; deserts (including frozen deserts), forests and savannah/heath. Everything else is artificial.
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
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.
Anecdotally, I've noticed that the extra cognitive effort required to get by in cities can be useful. I grew up in a fairly small town (pop. ~8000) and now live in Chicago. My friends back home who haven't moved away have for the most part seemed to me to go a bit soft, meaning I feel in conversation that I think a lot faster than they do, even with people who I once considered smarter than me. I know that some of this is self-selection (the less ambitious are less likely to move and more likely to go soft, etc.), but a lot of it seems to be that I am more often challenged intellectually and don't have the opportunity to become spacey, and spaciness is the main difficulty I'm describing. I see it especially in grocery stores, where there are far more people wandering confusedly through the aisles and being baffled by the oatmeal than there are here.
What I'm saying here is that I fully accept that an urban environment is more stressful than a rural or semi-rural one. I would just dispute the idea that that is always a bad thing. Sometimes stress can force you to stay on your toes.
a proposal was floated that suggested that pilots be allowed/encouraged to play video games during those 'down times'
Maybe a flight sim?
Let me know when they do a study about the effects of how reading slashdot hurts your brain
I thought I had found such a study once upon a time but it was really just a horrible image of Natalie Portman covered in hot grits while holding open the place where the sun doesn't shine. My brain hurts a lot now.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
A city park is a contrived environment intended to promote feelings of well being and safety. In reality they increase crime on their margins and are the least safe places to be in a city at night. While they have their deleterious effects they are like processed food in another way, every element is there to serve a purpose. The landscape architect believed those elements would help the user relax and as a rule they do.
A walk down a city street is like a walk in actual nature, you need to pay attention to your surroundings. Instead of being mortally wounded by a bear or a snake, you get plowed over by a feckless tourist. A small portion of your mind is at all times dedicated to the task. If you engage in some artificial mental test during or shortly after completing this task you will be a little distracted. Duh!
It goes without saying that this study says nothing about the obvious benefits to the mind of living in a city. These are primarily due to your interaction with other people who share your interest or otherwise are part of your social sphere, but are also due to smaller effects such as better overall health (the pollution is balanced by more exercise than average and much better medical care).
I'm not going to RTFA because of something in the summary that jumped out at me:
The mind is not a machine - the brain is. Saying "The mind is a limited machine" is like saying "MS Access is a limited machine". The brain is a limited machine, but the mind is not a machine at all.
It's this kind of mental sloppiness that made me drop my psychology class in college (that and the professor siad since I'd spent 4 years in the military I had no need for it, and that there isn't a psychologist in the world that there isn't another calling him a gold studded liar).
I wonder if and when the study of the mind reaches the level of hard sciences like physics or chemistry? Hell, they can't even explain consciousness and refuse to see the similarities between human brains and the brains of other animals. Thought and feeling are chemical processes. Hari Seldon, where are you?
Another poster asked if they studied city folk or country folk, I'm wondering (maybe TFA said) what they call a "city"? Springfield is a small city of 110,000, Chicago is a big city of millions, and the two are nothing alike.
Free Martian Whores!
There was a thread a few weeks ago about "stretching before exercise reduces muscle power". Oh noes! I feel like this article is very analagous.
I'm a musician/mathematician, birthed-college in rural Maine, 10 years game engineer in Boston, moved to New York 3 years ago. I've never been more delighted about where I live, and my only regret is that I didn't move here years ago (largely due to family/friends saying terrible things about NYC, turns out that's all mythology). I'm far more rested than I was before -- I could ditch the car, not get stressed out driving every day, nap on the bus/train every day, and arrive at work refreshed and energetic. I have a regular (late) sleep cycle for the first time in my life.
I feel far more intellectually stimulated and productive now than before. I'm also gotten enormously more efficient, and the city does challenge me to improve my productivity on that score. Like a lot of athletic/professional coaches will say, or the old article "How to Win a Nobel Prize", you've got to be challenged in order to improve. Surround yourself with a lot of people smarter/faster than yourself (in my case, the college where I teach and the music industry), and you will get better.
I consider the "urban street" part of my life to be the mental exercise part. I consider the "rural holiday" part to be the rest-heal-the-muscles part. You need both. If you measure muscles immediately after exercising, you will look weak and fatigued, but it's an essential part of growing stronger. Same here.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
When I was working in my last co-op, I took one morning to do my work outside. I thought that working indoors all day made me really lethargic, and that changing scenery would fix that. Not only was I more productive, I could listen to my music in the open air of the courtyard and nobody would bother me! I had no cow-orkers to worry about, and full exposure to natural light and a beautiful campus.
I wasn't allowed to do that again. It wasn't a coincidence that my favorite part of going to that job was riding my bike and taking a train for two and a half hours getting there (and the same amount of time coming back).
New York City's mayors have a bad track record, especially over the past 30 years, but Giuliani did a decent job of reducing crime. When I was just a baby, Times Square was actually a dangerous place to be, 5th Avenue was full of seedy shops and illegal fronts; those are now considered to be safe places to be, even in the middle of the night. The subways are also very safe, especially since the institution of "off hours" waiting areas that are in plain view of the police and MTA personnel.
"I don't deny that nature is important, and don't doubt that experiencing natural settings regularly is a contributor to mental health."
Funny you should mention this, this TFA is way off with regards to central park. Central park was not originally in the middle of Manhattan, it was north of the developed part of Manhattan, and was put in place to preserve some part of the natural landscape of the region. Of course, it did not really preserve the natural landscape, since they started the construction of the park by razing the forest that was there and then creating meadows in its place, but it turned out to be a good idea. Ironically, there was some pressure against the park originally, by people who felt it robbed the city of prime real estate; ironic, because a park view vastly increases the value of apartments and condos, probably because people so desperately want to see green instead of gray.
Palm trees and 8
Correlate this with presidential voting results maps broken down by county. Urban counties generally voted Democrat whereas rural counties voted Republican.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I can see the argument. But when I was living in a big city in Asia I felt more stimulated and motivated than I've ever felt anywhere else. I felt like there was always something going on, something to take a part in, something new to see, something to absorb.
Now I'm back in the US, back in the suburbs, and in some ways it feels like a wasteland of blandness. I live in an area where the homes are all very close together, but there just isn't much life to be found. It's all hidden away indoors.
I recall getting back and over the first few weeks feeling this sense of emptiness, similar to hearing silence. I can see where too much stimulus might be a problem, but to me it isn't much different than being bombarded by crap on TV, but I think television is worse.
The problem I see with big cities is the impersonal nature of life there, how a person can feel isolated even in the midst of millions of people. That leads to all sorts of problems. But with culture today it seems to be a problem everywhere but small towns.
To be honest, if I had the opportunity to move back I would.
The mods took the point and modded you down. Better luck next time, you pompous moron.
Fortunately, some of your vital areas have been saved from too much scientific education?
Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
In a real natural environment, you have to worrie about where your next meal is going to come from, and if you're going to get killed by a bear while trying to get it...So I doubt its much better.
So really, they're saying the human mind cannot take the real world. It cannot deal with a natural habitat, it cannot deal with a city...it can only deal with something artificially in between, or in rural areas. Oh yeah, thats slick...
My brain hurts a lot now.
It will have to come out. All the bits of it. Nurse! Nurse! Nurse, take Mr Gumby to a brain surgeon.
I am officially gone from
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
As pointed out on MindHacks, its not that urban environments are bad for your brain, just that they are not beneficial. That is, it does not impart the positive benefits of natural environments.
Trust me, kids; don't drink and post.
I had noticed back when I was studying Physics that almost all of my classmates came from small cities (I was the exception). (I believe the situation is similar for other sciences such as biology and chemistry). However, the University itself is located in a small town so it may have skewed the data.
This article seems silly. You take someone who's used to a way of life, put them in a different settings, they feel stress because they're in a completely different environment. Then you thrown them back to the type of settings they're used to and they feel less stressed out and can remember things because they're not stressed out. DUH? If you take someone who was born and raised in the city and put them into a non-city setting, they get stressed too.
City people don't put their desks on the fucking street, so the cognitive load of those times when you're on the street doesn't matter.
September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA
That's simply not true.
There are more opportunities in cities simply because anything that creates lots of jobs attracts more people, thereby creating an urban environment. It's cause and effect. Secondly, cities pay more because of two reasons - competition and cost of living. A decent studio in Manhattan costs at least 5 times that of a good 2 bedroom house in rural Oklahoma. Supply and demand. Just because a person in Manhattan gets paid more does not mean jack, because the cost of living is also much, much higher.
What utter crap. And how the hell do you define vital? If anything, I would argue that cities provide more opportunities. More opportunities to intern at a good place, more educational options, more museums, more programs, better facilities, better teachers etc.
My cousin is in NYC, and his wife holds a PhD in engineering. Of course, she's a stay at home mom, and she helps the kids in her apartment complex with school projects and things. I've another friend who studied math at MIT and now teaches high school kids in Boston. The probability of you finding a well educated, talented teacher in a rural area is extremely low. My girlfriend's family is from rural Oklahoma, and I've met some of her nephews' teachers. They are a joke. I knew more in high-school than they do now.
Hell, there isn't even a half decent library in most rural areas. Take a walk down Cambridge, Mass. There are probably more books owned by individuals there than in all the rural areas of Kansas (bibles not included).
Some people cannot cope with stress. Period. And some people enjoy learning enough that they can keep going. It's got nothing to do with cities. It's a personal thing.
Eh? Do you have any statistics or are you simply spewing this crap off your ass?
Cities are dense entities with lots of people. Do the math for number of people and you'll find it about the same.
Secondly, you are ignoring the conveniences of a modern city. Everything is easily accessible, quickly available and you expend less resources to get what you need (as opposed to rural areas with fewer options and more expensive for those limited options).
For example, I'm a strict vegetarian, and every time I travel to a rural area, it is hard for me to find good, organic vegetarian options. I go to a restaurant, and I literally have no options. Fresh fruit juice? Spices? Ditto. I either have to cook my own food, or eat what's available (which isn't much to begin with).
I don't even have to get out of the building I'm in, and I can find good vegetarian options - Italian, Chinese, Thai, Mexican, Indian etc. And there are at least 5 juice shops within a 2 block radius that give me good, fresh juice. Coffee? Beer? Same.
If you did the math for the conveniences and population, the damage caused by cities and rural areas come to about the same.
...doesn't necessarily make you stronger. This is yet another in a series of reports of diminished productivity from things ranging from multi-tasking to ridiculous levels of text messaging.
None of this should surprise anyone that can actually see the forest through the trees.
_______________________________
http://techdojo.org/
Yes, city life demands concentration and ignoring lots of irrelevant stimuli. That's what the mind is for.
Meanwhile, people who never learn that kind of mental focus often don't develop those skills to apply to other environments, like social groups of people.
But though city people can relax by going to a park, and have cramped memory or other "open minded" faculties restored, country people can't spend 20 minutes in a city and acquire a focus that will last a week or a year.
Sounds like these researchers are either country bumpkins, or just people who need to spend some more time walking in the park.
--
make install -not war
I know for 15 years, that the brain entered a transformation 50-60 years ago
you seem to think there is some sort of global blueprint on which all brains are based, and this global blueprint was somehow altered 50-60 years ago.
Just try and think about it for a second. That idea is complete bullocks.
It's the women with fine asses and brightly colored textiles. God-damn cities.
Quack, quack.
This change happened very quickly for evolutionary scales. And I'm pretty sure it's not over. Give humanity 20-30 years, and our brains will have adapted fine. No need to worry.
Yeah, because it almost certainly wasn't evolutionary. Humans brains, whether in a person born 100 years ago or 10 years ago, are amazingly flexible machines that can rewire themselves into new configurations, work around damage, and gain new abilities like the ability to block out flashy distractions. However this ability rapidly decreases as our brains age. So most likely the difference is just that people born before a certain point had brains too old and stuck in their ways to adjust, while younger people adapted.
Evolution can happen in short timescales, but it generally takes a huge amount of pressure. With no obvious major die-offs due to the inability to ignore distractions, I doubt there was a shift in genetics responsible. But take say Australian snakes and imported poisonous toads, and in a very short time the snakes evolve heads too small to eat toads big enough to give a lethal dose of poison.
Anyway, our brains are amazingly adaptable, and I'm sure that especially young people will further adapt in the next 20-30 years, but it's still the same ol' brain that we've been tugging around for a very long time, and it still has weaknesses. It is not infinitely adaptable, nor indefatigable, and still vulnerable to stress. I'm not too worried, but I'm also not completely assured that we won't push our brains too far.
The enemies of Democracy are
While building a University by purchasing, evicting and razing city blocks might sound like fun to you I imagine it might be costly.
Quack, quack.
Just as long as they're not leveling a DK in WoW. Jesus, that's got to the the most mind-numbing thing I've ever attempted, with the possible exception of injecting Novocaine directly into my temples.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
...would have predisposed the human mind to perform poorly in an environment of multiple potentially dangerous stimuli which demand a minimum level of awareness... ...oh wait. I've just noticed that I'm talking complete nonsense. Never mind.
I live in New York, and we have a term for the end effect of all this strain. We call it 'sidewalk stare'. I've walked not two feet from someone I know on the sidewalk, and had to reach out and touch their arm to get them to notice me. It's not that they were staring at the concrete, their eyes simply pass over your face and they don't recognize you.
Think about it this way; Understanding expression consumes an enormous amount of processing power. Taking a sub-second glance at a person's face and intuiting their mood, which you do without trying, chews up calories and other cerebral resources. If you stand on the corner of 18th and 6th Ave. around lunchtime for a minute, you're likely to see literally hundreds of human expressions. You can't stop your mind from distilling all those mental states, because human animals' minds are built to do exactly that. It's exhausting, though you don't always notice it.
Moving around in a crowded city is mentally and emotionally taxing. Some people thrive on that, and some people are seriously impaired by it. I don't know of a selection criterion other than moving to the city and seeing if you like it, but I think if nothing else it's easier when you're younger. When people talk about being 'tired of the city', I think it's a side-effect of the aging process. All that background effort is, overall, more taxing than it was.
An interesting corollary: The more money you have, the less of this you have to deal with. Hired cars, large apartments, spacious offices, and frequent vacations all keep this from having as much of an effect.
Ideology breeds Hypocrisy. Just how much is up to you.
it still beats driving!
It's not hard, people!
Even if they succeed in 5-10 years, you can count on it taking another decade to reach the market, courtesy of your government. If it ever does: If the modern regulation regime had been around when they were invented, both aspirin and penicillin never would have been approved due to safety concerns.
Liberty in your lifetime
Just because its more distracting doesn't mean its bad for you.
Yes it does. The ancient equivalent of a city would be on the veldt surrounded by predators.
Hmm, I'm surprise no has mentioned that those who live in the city are not necessarily ALWAYS bombarded by the city's information overload. My home in the Bay Area is surrounded by trees and even has some wildlife. Working independently (at the moment), I can always retreat there and recuperate from any urban overload.
I would agree that a homeless person (or an overworked truck driver)who is constantly bombarded by the city's information would be driven insane by it - indeed, that's what we often see. But a resident who has a home to retreat to is not necessarily going to be crushed. Information overload, multitasking and similar stresses on the brain are no worse than physical stresses IF a person has proper rest and relaxation in between each experience. Recuperation is the difference between an athlete and a gallery slave and it is the difference between urbanite with a rich cultural life and a person crushed by urban existence.
And as far as the article, it seems like a collage of various more simplistic studies and perspectives, none of which look at the overall condition of life in cities or rural areas. One quoted scientist describes the brain as inherently limit and thus seems to have missed the unbelievable expansion of human intellectual activity in the last 100,000 years.