How cities hurt your brain

I lived in Chicago in my 20's and thrived for a number of years. While I was living there, I couldn't imagine how anyone could be an intellectual and not live in a city. I eventually had to move away, however. Living in a large city took too much effort and the crime and violence was pretty overwhelming. (I was working as an ER nurse).

Now, I'm in my 30's, living in the Valley and loving it. It seems to have hit (for me) a sweet spot of livability and intellectual stimulation.

Of course my experience is just anecdotical but I lived in a a small village in the countryside (350 inhabitants if you count the cows) until I was 17. I find that since living in big cities, I have more energy, I'm much more upbeat and much less depressed. In the morning, I love walking or biking through busy streets looking at everyone move around.. I feel that it's invigorating... Right now I'm back in the countryside in malaysia and I clearly don't have as much energy as I had before...

Now, the cities I've liked the most and for which this was the most true are rennes and kyoto which are both cities with quite a bit of nature (and hardly any sky scraper). And when I lived in shanghai (which I really liked), I lived right at the back of Zhong Shang gong yuan so I could see the nature everyday when I went to work...

I have experienced this first hand. I grew up in the country and I've also known that I've got issues with ADD but when I moved to the city to go to school I started notice it more and more. I also noticed that I would be exhausted after normal days and that I never really felt satisfied after working a hard day(like I did in the country). I thought it was just that my job was hard but when I went home I worked a full day(that would normally exhaust me) but I wasn't. I could look outside, breath the fresh air, drink clean water and feel good.

I need to convince my boss to let me work remotely 24/7 :)

I also wonder if they did tests of people within rooms with forest pictures surrounding them. Furthermore I wonder if they tried doing the same with forest noises going on.

"In a study published last month, Berman outfitted undergraduates at the University of Michigan with GPS receivers. Some of the students took a stroll in an arboretum, while others walked around the busy streets of downtown Ann Arbor.

The subjects were then run through a battery of psychological 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."

I'm amazed by how the effects arise so quickly, but it makes intuitive sense to me too based on my experiences.

Personally I like to go back and forth, spending extended periods of time in quiet towns where I can focus, and then traveling somewhere exciting to connect with people and be inspired by what's going on in the world around me.

Highly recommend Jane Jacobs' "The Death & Life of Great American Cities"

As someone who lives in the city but lived in the 'burbs prior, I think the article was fair. There is no perfect place to live - on my way to the train station I intentionally cross over a block to walk through a grassy courtyard. The thing I enjoy most about the city is walking around - when I lived in the suburbs I had to get in a car to go anywhere because you need a car to live in the suburbs. As a side note, one of the reasons public transportation does not work in the suburbs is you can't cut through people's yards to get to a stop which means a bus stop that is 0.6 miles straight line from your location might be 1 mile since there are houses (whereas in the city you have regular block patterns and established pedestrian traffic)

I don't go out as much as my friends but I think drinking more, more often might be more accepted here more because you don't have to worry about DUI.

I think it is ok to live in the suburbs; your priorities in life change. For example, the city school system is scary (both educationally and safety wise). Where you live is a big influence on you.

Seems like it could be as simple as the pollution. The pictures simulate the same experience. For instance, if colleges students subliminally read words about old people, they'll walk slower.

Breathing car exhaust can't be good. Carbon monoxide is known to slow actions. Different urban environments are also more likely to have poor conditions (e.g., lead exposure) that leads to brain damage (smaller frontal lobes) and criminality (less rational decisions):

http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-docum...

In most cities I have lived in, when you feel like taking a walk, it doesn't seem to make a difference which direction you walk in: you will be traveling along the same buildings, built into the same mold. Come by a park, the park will still be an accessory of this mold, like makeup on a woman without charisma.

I can only recall a few instances when you could take a stroll into a modest expanse of nature, and anticipate to find bugs and critters around your path. Every walk, even when retracing the same route over and over, is different and interesting.

Talk about Newbury, or 5th ave even. When I glance into the stores I am happy to myself that I am not in the store being looked at by the passer by.

I'm going to have to point out the obvious here, that nobody lives in a city. People lives in houses and then neighborhoods.

For example I lived in a very small town and my bedroom was directly above the one and only biker bar in the town. Needless to say concentrating was hard.

But I was born and raised in quiet green island in the middle of an urban jungle and it was quiet yet exciting and wonderful.

The bottom line is if you live in a hell hole your life will suck and it doesn't matter if that hell hole is a tiny village or a huge city.

But any big city should contain tiny islands of heaven and hell within it.

The lack of nature is exactly why I'm not a city person. The constant stench, noise, cracked concrete in every direction. I don't understand how people can do it.

It's relative right, b/c unlike the rest of you I only find stimulation and focus in cities. Everything pails in comparison... so does my attention. This is very interesting read though, enjoyed this post.

In that case, Internet (especially social news websites) hurts your brain more. At least I am one data point that they do.

The article also explains the headache I get when someone drags me to malls.

"One of the main forces at work is a stark lack of nature, which is surprisingly beneficial for the brain."

Isn't it sad that we find our natural habitat surprisingly beneficial?

I live in suburban Holmdel, NJ, home to Vonage, AT&T Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies, and other telecom companies. Parts of Holmdel are rural, though the population has gone up in recent years. The trees and natural setting make it a great place; I feel smarter just being here, haha.

The schools here rank high (local High Technology High school ranked #4 school in the nation and Holmdel High ranks as a top New Jersey high school).

They didn't mention whether they controlled for individual city/country preferences amongst the study subjects. As evidenced by the comments here, people tend to have very different conscious feelings about cities. What if they had conducted the study at NYU and not Ann Arbor? Likely the students at NYU feel more favorably towards big city life than those in Michigan.

I wonder what the root cause of these findings is. It seems to be a combination of attention diversion and something else-- after all, trees and buildings (presuming no extra stuff like birds, shouting neighbors, etc.) seem about equally distracting. One thing that occurs to me would be to do studies with subjects who are blind, deaf, both, and neither, as well as possibly autistic vs. not, etc. Also, comparisons between different cities, especially if you include small cities (still fairly urban feeling, but not a million people either) would be interesting to see.

Hmm, I'd like to see how people's use of iPods & other music players correlates to being in the city. It really helps reduce the amount of background data you have to process.

Hypothesis: From a mental recharging standpoint, meditating about a passive scene from nature is close to being in nature. Lets say for 20 minutes a day.

I'm one of those people who thrives in an urban environment. I have more energy, I feel like doing more things and I get a lot more extroverted.

There's something about the hum of the traffic, the lights, the people.. it just gets me going, in a big way. Viva La Urbana!

How does he know that the brain is limited?