So reports Jonah Lehrer for the Boston Globe:
[S]cientists 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."
. . .
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.
This kind of research seems calculated to generate splashy headlines -- such as "How the city hurts your brain." I'm sure anti-density types will eventually cite it in debates over urban form as evidence that density is "bad for us." So let's fisk it now.
I do not doubt that a crowded urban sidewalk impairs the cognition of some people. Some environments impair my own cognitive ability (Barton Square Mall two days before Christmas, for example).
I don't like malls, though. Other people don't like urban environments. People who find a particular setting draining or irritating are unlikely to spend much time there. I avoid malls; others avoid crowded urban sidewalks. And, regardless of preference, I would be overwhelmed during my first visit to a large mall or the New York City subway or O'Hare airport. But I find a walk through downtown Austin at lunch time relaxing.
So if Berman wanted to find out what impact a crowded city street has on the "human brain" -- and not just the brains of those who find crowded city streets disorienting -- then he needed to test those who are familiar with that environment and who like it or are at least content to live in it. He needed to control for preferences.
But Berman did not do that. He gathered some University of Michigan students and sent some to walk around downtown Ann Arbor and others to stroll through an arboretum. He did not pick people who necessarily lived in and liked downtown Ann Arbor. A proper test would have required sending a group of downtown residents to walk the nature trail and another group to walk their familiar streets. If people comfortable with downtown Ann Arbor experienced diminished cognitive function, then Berman might be on to something. But from this account of his research, he has not done that.
Regardless, we know that dense, urban environments can't be too bad for our cognitive function, as Lehrer belatedly acknowledges at the end of his article:
Recent research by scientists at the Santa Fe Institute used a set of complex mathematical algorithms to demonstrate that the very same urban features that trigger lapses in attention and memory -- the crowded streets, the crushing density of people -- also correlate with measures of innovation, as strangers interact with one another in unpredictable ways. It is the "concentration of social interactions" that is largely responsible for urban creativity, according to the scientists. The density of 18th-century London may have triggered outbreaks of disease, but it also led to intellectual breakthroughs, just as the density of Cambridge -- one of the densest cities in America -- contributes to its success as a creative center. One corollary of this research is that less dense urban areas, like Phoenix, may, over time, generate less innovation.
H/t Ryan Brown.
