Everybody ("Everybody") thinks that country life makes you boring, that you have to go to the city to sharpen your mind. But what if just the opposite is the case, as this Boston Globe essay sent along by reader Sarah Sheldon suggests? Excerpt:
While the modern city might be a haven for playwrights, poets, and physicists, it's also a deeply unnatural and overwhelming place.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."
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Consider everything your brain has to keep track of as you walk down a busy thoroughfare like Newbury Street. There are the crowded sidewalks full of distracted pedestrians who have to be avoided; the hazardous crosswalks that require the brain to monitor the flow of traffic. (The brain is a wary machine, always looking out for potential threats.) There's the confusing urban grid, which forces people to think continually about where they're going and how to get there.The reason such seemingly trivial mental tasks leave us depleted is that they exploit one of the crucial weak spots of the brain. 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.
Natural settings, in contrast, don't require the same amount of cognitive effort. ... This also helps explain why, according to several studies, children with attention-deficit disorder have fewer symptoms in natural settings. When surrounded by trees and animals, they are less likely to have behavioral problems and are better able to focus on a particular task.
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But the density of city life doesn't just make it harder to focus: It also interferes with our self-control. In that stroll down Newbury, the brain is also assaulted with temptations -- caramel lattes, iPods, discounted cashmere sweaters, and high-heeled shoes. Resisting these temptations requires us to flex the prefrontal cortex, a nub of brain just behind the eyes. Unfortunately, this is the same brain area that's responsible for directed attention, which means that it's already been depleted from walking around the city. As a result, it's less able to exert self-control, which means we're more likely to splurge on the latte and those shoes we don't really need. While the human brain possesses incredible computational powers, it's surprisingly easy to short-circuit: all it takes is a hectic city street."I think cities reveal how fragile some of our 'higher' mental functions actually are," Kuo says. "We take these talents for granted, but they really need to be protected."
When I was younger, I found living in New York City to be stimulating. On the trip we made there last summer, I was ground down by it, and was surprised to feel grateful that we no longer lived there. I don't know how I'd be able to concentrate on anything.
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I feel the same way, but the city was Rome, not Taipei. Perhaps it is the architecture itself: Rome is a human-scaled city, and even though it is busy it didn't feel overwhelming; there are no skyscrapers in the Eternal City. American cities are so ugly, they take the life right out of me.
This reminds me of National Lampoon's Vacation, when the family from Chicago, while on the way to California, visits the wife's family somewhere in the rural Midwest. The country kids end up corrupting the city kids.
I like large cities precisely because they have so many people I don't know. I'm the sort of person who likes to be lost in a crowd.
I agree about Rome. It's not only human-scaled, it's eminently walkable, in a way few American cities are.
Almost precisely this same argument was advanced one hundred years ago by Georg Simmel in his 1903 essay, "The Metropolis and Mental Life." What Simmel called "the blase attitude" resulted both from the proliferation of stimuli in an urban environment and from what Simmel called "the rational mind," the tendency of urban dwellers to reduce all relationships to economic ones. For Simmel, however, the cost of life in the city was balanced out by the freedom cities offered. Part of what accounts for the "lack of cognitive effort" in village life is that one lives in a well-defined network of relations, a network that can, however, be constraining. Your mind isn't taxed because you immediately know the social role of everyone you encounter. If someone wants to change his or her social role, however, well, that's more of a problem in the tight network of the village than in the busier and more complex city. This helps explain, I think, why the city, despite being mentally taxing, remains "a haven for poets, playwrights and physicists." Moreover, one could even argue that the characteristics that Simmel identified as urban are no longer limited to the city. The spread of capitalism and the development of popular media mean that in the smallest villages people can be overwhelmed by economic data or subjected to a constant barrage of stimuli (say, through computer games or the Internet.) In his 1944 poem "Raleigh Was Right," William Carlos Williams wrote, "We cannot go to the country/for the country will bring us no peace." Maybe Williams was right too.
The article mentions Newbury Street, which is a boulevard of stores and coffee shops. Perhaps a sort of artificial shopping center like that is a unique experience.
To compare the city to the country, you have to use natural cities, like New York or Paris. For example, Times Square might be in a city, but it is not real "city life." I think we ought to focus on the kinds of cities where a given intersection in an urban residential neighborhood organically becomes a market of many shops and stores. THAT is a city.
I find the suburbs boring and dull.
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