How the City Hurts Your Brain

I thought this was a particularly interesting study, given some of my own frustrations recently, as well as my activities this summer. Basically, the upshot of this is that cities stress us out. It takes mental energy to concentrate and make all the decisions involved with something like walking down a city street. There are people to avoid, intersections to negotiate, temptations to buy, which route to take. All of this takes brain power, and in a given day, the mind can only do so much.

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....A city is so overstuffed with stimuli that we need to constantly redirect our attention so that we aren't distracted by irrelevant things, like a flashing neon sign or the cellphone conversation of a nearby passenger on the bus. This sort of controlled perception -- we are telling the mind what to pay attention to -- takes energy and effort. The mind is like a powerful supercomputer, but the act of paying attention consumes much of its processing power.

The result, say the scientists here, is that you get moodier, have less self-control and less ability to avoid temptation. You will, in other words, be more likely to head for chocolate cake than veggies. So that's a bundle of fun all at once.

The good news is that trees makes us feel better. Any kind of nature really, but trees in particular. One the scientists here did a test-- sent some students out to the park, the others to walk around the busy streets, and then administered a number of mental tests.

People who had walked through the city were in a worse mood and scored significantly lower on a test of attention and working memory, which involved repeating a series of numbers backwards. In fact, just glancing at a photograph of urban scenes led to measurable impairments, at least when compared with pictures of nature.

Another scientist put various women in two kinds of apartments-- one with a view of only concrete and highrises, another with trees and grassy lawns. The result was that the latter scored better on just about every mental test they administered, as well as surveys measuring how well they dealt with life challenges. And, "a tired brain, run down by the stimuli of city life, is more likely to lose its temper."

So this isn't supposed to indicate a panacea. But it does explain some things to me. Why, this summer, so stressed out, I almost instictively headed to the park for the day. Why living in a basement has such a notable effect on my mood. It's a lot harder in winter, but even so, might be worth sitting on a park bench for 15 minutes every day. A tiny recharge might do a lot of good.