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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.
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'm feeling very ambivalent about this study. Sure, walking down a busy street requires concentration. And? If you look at it this way, it's actively improving your concentration.
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. Honestly, this sounds like a study that was trying to find evidence that supports a predetermined conclusion.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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
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
For me, it's the opposite. I find it easier to be productive at work, since there are fewer distractions.
"It is a denial of justice not to stretch out a helping hand to the fallen; that is the common right of humanity."
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.
Your arguments reeks of truthiness but turns out to not be true. It turns out that relaxing your mind and focusing on single tasks promotes good health and positive mood.
This has been scientifically demonstrated (The quick summary of the above link, for those too lazy to dig through the reference is that researchers found that a group of people receiving some mindfullness mediation training showed improvements in mood and in immune response compared to a control group.)
If I may spin the article in this context, it seems that having a quiet mind is a very, very good thing, and that quiet, natural settings are more conducive to quiet minds that busy urban environments.
"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
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
I am a city person, and I wholly agree with the study (personally). But then again I think some degree of silence and solitude are necessary for the intellectual life (actually for focus, with is necessary for the intellectual life).
I grew up in the city, but had the good fortune of going to college in the boonies, and I could tell the difference. A 20 minute hike would put you in the woods, completely away from anyone. There were no distractions. I could actually sit and read (in a deep way, not in the leisurely way) for hours without anyone talking to me ("what are you reading" is the most damnable question ever, btw).
Part of this was because the lack of people, cars, etc... And part of it was due to the change in context. In the city we have constant reminders of our bust life, escaping the city escapes this context.
It always is nice to get out of the range of the nearest cell-tower, off the roads, and away from the mindless chatter of others.
For some reason I feel that the people who are against this study are the typical Americans who are frightened of silence since it allows introspection. Most people in cities, IMHO, exist largly as interactions, and are frightened on some level of what remains (if anything) when there is no more superfluous stimulus.
Which brings me too; why the hell is there canned music EVERYWHERE in cities?
Yes, I'm a slightly pissy misanthrope, so this might have something to do with it. And yes, I grew up in the 5th largest metropolitan area in the US, so I'm not a country boy.
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