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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.'"
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.
'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.
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.-
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....
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 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.
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.
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?
I think you left out roughly 70% of the Earth's surface there.
I am officially gone from
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).
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).
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.
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
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
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.
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.