I had a longish article in the Boston Globe Ideas section yesterday exploring some recent research on how living in a city affects the brain:
The city has always been an engine of intellectual life, from the 18th-century coffeehouses of London, where citizens gathered to discuss chemistry and radical politics, to the Left Bank bars of modern Paris, where Pablo Picasso held forth on modern art. Without the metropolis, we might not have had the great art of Shakespeare or James Joyce; even Einstein was inspired by commuter trains.
And yet, city life isn’t easy. The same London cafes that stimulated Ben Franklin also helped spread cholera; Picasso eventually bought an estate in quiet Provence. 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.”
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.
A historically minded-skeptic might note that there’s nothing new, or even particularly modern, about such anxieties. Charles Rosenberg, a historian of science at Harvard University, has done some marvelous work documenting our tendency to “pathologize progress.” He has shown that the fast-pace of “contemporary” life has always been seen as harmful to the fragile human brain. The influential 19th century neurologist George Beard, for instance, blamed the telegraph and the steam engine for an epidemic of what he termed “nervous weakness”.
So I’m certainly not advocating that people get up and move to the suburbs. I think the real lesson of this research is that we should pay more attention to our urban parks. Olmsted was right.