Hello again! I'm sorry for the delay, but sometimes I just have to work. One would argue that I have to work in a constant manner, but the practise shows that this is impossible-the work follow its own tempo and I can only bear with it, not change it too much.
Anyway, since I'm in stall moment for a little while, I decided to post here a very interesting article on the effect the city has on our brain. It looks like living in crowded city makes us less attentive (and aware) and diminishes our self-control. One could wonder if this intentional, but I think it's more a natural consequences of our evolution. If you think about it, the city offers immense opportunities for developing your talents, without having to work from sunrise to sunset. And I mean it. I spend every weekend outside the town, on green, as the french say. I have taken care of gardens and cattle. It really takes so much of your energy and time. It's generally colder there and more or less, you're less inclined to do more sophisticated things like thinking and engineering. From the other side, if you have someone to take care of you there, it's the best place to create. But that's another story. If you have an expensive mansion on the top of a skyscraper, you'll be just as creative.
The point is that the city naturally distracts us and stresses us. It hurts our most important functions-attention! It deplets our energy. The article imply that the building of parks and gardens can reduce that effect and I agree-it's so soothing to stand below a tree, in its shadow, or to watch flowers. But I think we ought to think how to reduce the effect of the crowdiness for us. Because cities are the next evolutionary step-we have to make it the best we can. And this starts from us, in the inside. We have tobe more pleasant, more unintrusive and everyone to watch his/her steps/road more carefully. If we all behave better, we will feel better. And that's what we all need.
Why I'm saying all this? Because I came to very important conclusion. Our respect for our fellow citizens is proportional to the way we feel in our environment-if it's dirty and polluted, we avoid to watch around and we avoid to watch people in the face. Thus, we're unpleasant, sometimes even rude, because when someone draws our attention, we have to start looking around and to feel bad, because of the unpleasant surroundings. And thus, the whole society becomes grim. On the contrary-if the surroundings are pretty and attractive, we'll pay more attention to people, we'll enjoy their company, even when they are strangers and we will all have a better time communicating with each other. And that's the key to a good and healthy life.
Enjoy!
How the City Hurts Your Brain
By Jonah Lehrer / Source: Boston Globe
The city has always been an engine of intellectual life.
And yet, city life isn't easy. 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.
This research arrives just as humans cross an important milestone: For the first time in history, the majority of people reside in cities. For a species that evolved to live in small, primate tribes on the African savannah, such a migration marks a dramatic shift. Instead of inhabiting wide-open spaces, we're crowded into concrete jungles, surrounded by taxis, traffic, and millions of strangers. In recent years, it's become clear that such unnatural surroundings have important implications for our mental and physical health, and can powerfully alter how we think.
This research is also leading some scientists to dabble in urban design, as they look for ways to make the metropolis less damaging to the brain. The good news is that even slight alterations, such as planting more trees in the inner city or creating urban parks with a greater variety of plants, can significantly reduce the negative side effects of city life. The mind needs nature, and even a little bit can be a big help.
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 idea is known as attention restoration theory, or ART, and it was first developed by Stephen Kaplan, a psychologist at the University of Michigan. While it's long been known that human attention is a scarce resource -- focusing in the morning makes it harder to focus in the afternoon -- Kaplan hypothesized that immersion in nature might have a restorative effect.
Imagine a walk around Walden Pond, in Concord. The woods surrounding the pond are filled with pitch pine and hickory trees. Chickadees and red-tailed hawks nest in the branches; squirrels and rabbits skirmish in the berry bushes. Natural settings are full of objects that automatically capture our attention, yet without triggering a negative emotional response -- unlike, say, a backfiring car. The mental machinery that directs attention can relax deeply, replenishing itself.
"It's not an accident that Central Park is in the middle of Manhattan," says Berman. "They needed to put a park there."
....
"We see the picture of the busy street, and we automatically imagine what it's like to be there," says Berman. "And that's when your ability to pay attention starts to suffer."
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.
Studies have found that even a relatively paltry patch of nature can confer benefits.
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."
...
City life can also lead to loss of emotional control. Kuo and her colleagues found less domestic violence in the apartments with views of greenery. These data build on earlier work that demonstrated how aspects of the urban environment, such as crowding and unpredictable noise, can also lead to increased levels of aggression. A tired brain, run down by the stimuli of city life, is more likely to lose its temper.
When a park is properly designed, it can improve the function of the brain within minutes. As the Berman study demonstrates, just looking at a natural scene can lead to higher scores on tests of attention and memory.
Given the myriad mental problems that are exacerbated by city life, from an inability to pay attention to a lack of self-control, the question remains: Why do cities continue to grow? And why, even in the electronic age, do they endure as wellsprings of intellectual life?
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.
The key, then, is to find ways to mitigate the psychological damage of the metropolis while still preserving its unique benefits. source
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