Consider this grist for the ongoing conversation about whether to leave New York I know many of us have. (At my apartment, it has become increasingly prominent during the last, say, six to nine months.) Jonah Lehrer takes note of new research done by scientists who “have begun to examine how the city affects the brain.”
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.
The essay, in the Boston Globe’s Ideas section, expands to consider how the urban environment also effects our self-control, especially emotional control. Lehrer, for those who aren’t familiar with him, is a wunderkind popular-science writer who is the author of the blog The Frontal Cortex. Prompted by the publication of his new book (which I have not seen), How We Decide, he was recently interviewed (somewhat maternally) by Deborah Solomon in the New York Times Magazine.
Tags: attention, Boston Globe Ideas, Jonah Lehrer, urban environment
