How the city hurts your brain

[archerships]

How the city hurts your brain

Now scientists have begun to examine how the city affects the brain, and the results are chastening. Just being in an urban environment, they have found, 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. While it’s long been recognized that city life is exhausting — that’s why Picasso left Paris — this new research suggests that cities actually dull our thinking, sometimes dramatically so.

“The mind is a limited machine,”says Marc Berman, a psychologist at the University of Michigan and lead author of a new study that measured the cognitive deficits caused by a short urban walk. “And we’re beginning to understand the different ways that a city can exceed those limitations.”

One of the main forces at work is a stark lack of nature, which is surprisingly beneficial for the brain. Studies have demonstrated, for instance, that hospital patients recover more quickly when they can see trees from their windows, and that women living in public housing are better able to focus when their apartment overlooks a grassy courtyard. Even these fleeting glimpses of nature improve brain performance, it seems, because they provide a mental break from the urban roil.

Original: craschworks - comments

Comments

[blueadept.livejournal.com]

Funny story: I was able to do more work on a personal project in a few days on a cruise ship (sitting in the sun at a table overlooking the sea, sipping on a bloody mary and coding on my laptop) than in the several months before and after that cruise.

[ersigh.livejournal.com]

I remember the first time I went into San Francisco and walked around. I ended up completely depressed. My friends gave me a hard time but it became quickly clear to me that living in the city would not be good for me. I prefer being at the outskirts where I can go if I want or need to but am not required to see it or deal with it. I miss the house my exhubby and I owned... I could see redwood trees from every window.

Actually, where I live now is the first time I've lived in a city like environment but when I look out my window I see a nice lemon tree and grass... and on occasion a hispanic peeing on stuff. :p

[nasu-dengaku.livejournal.com]

Hmmmmm.....

Some vaguely connected thoughts:

I theorize that some people either genetically or though experience tend to function better in crowded urban environments than others.
They should repeat the post-city-walk cognitive tests with both New Yorkers and rural Americans and see what kind of difference they get.

As long as it's not too busy on the streets, I'm usually inspired by urban walks just as much as I am by nature walks.

I also become less likely to make large purchase decisions in a bustling environment where people are constantly trying to sell me things. I tend to *only* make big non-essential purchase decisions when I'm able to think them through.

And I'm also curious, if it is a broad phenomenon, is it specifically nature that improves thinking, or is it serenity, beauty, pretty fractals, the presence of a benign life form. Depending on what it is, cities could be made to exude more of the "naturey" goodness even in cases where more actual plants is not an option.

I have also thought while walking through dense forests and jungles that they are the "cities" of the natural world in terms of sensory complexity, and if I knew as much about nature as I did about cities that I would be constantly bombarded with detailed information. I have had some of a sense for this by going on hikes with botanists -- they're constantly noticing things that I miss.

[evelynne.livejournal.com]

Many of these are the same thoughts I had about the article. I largely agree with the observation that nature is beneficial and the lack of it in the city is bad, but the anti-city bias put me off a bit (grid streets are not confusing relative to the suburbs unless you don't know how the system works). I can't really comment on what the city does to me cognitively, but the suburbs in particular make me very unhappy, and being in the woods seems to make me downright stupid (I think much less, and just "am" more, which is lovely and necessary, but not very productive).

I am in vehement agreement that being close to nature is important and that cities need to incorporate nature into their design as much as possible. The tree-lined streets here are the most beautiful and calming ones, and I'd be crushed if any of my neighbors cut down their trees. (I should probably plant one of my own, actually.)

One thing I found particularly interesting, given how much I hate suburban lawns and golf courses, is that savannah-like parks don't work -- there needs to be a variety of plant life. That fits in with your musings about pretty fractals too.

[nasu-dengaku.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I found the "savannah parks" comment interesting too. I was recently at the Japanese Garden in SF, and it's probably the least savannah-like type of park out there. There's a very wide variety of plants, it's all human-scale, and fractals abound. The plants are also encouraged to look like ideals of nature as opposed to being shoehorned into geometric shapes.