THE CITY AND THE BRAIN

In this eclectically growing scroll of electrons I am often diatribing about the city/country schizodichotomy, in an admittedly subjective, tongue-in-cheek kind of way, based on personal experience and predilection, but it seems there is a scientific basis to my fugues after all...

"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 subjects were then run through a battery of psychological tests. People who had walked through the city were in a worse mood and scored significantly lower on a test of attention and working memory, which involved repeating a series of numbers backwards. In fact, just glancing at a photograph of urban scenes led to measurable impairments, at least when compared with pictures of nature."

Tell me about it...