Our brains are under attack! …City/nature’s affect on the mind

By: Peter Guercio

A newly discovered threat to the human mind has just recently been researched and examined by scientists and the results are astonishing. This inconspicuous attacker is known now, to restrict the mental processes of all city dwellers such as their memory, and reduction of their self control. The culprit of our misfortune, dulling our minds and exhausting our thoughts are the same cluttered, busy city streets that we all venture through day in and day out.

Jonah Lehrer of the Boston globe wrote an article on this important and fascinating matter entitled How the city hurts your brain… and what can you do about it, in which he argues and describes in detail how the city is so detrimental to the human mind.

In the article scientific research and examples are strongly used to greatly prove what horrible side affects the city and all its clutter can have on the citizens thoughts and behaviour. One of the major points of the article is that its no wonder a species that evolved from the basic resides of nature with wide open spaces, are now having mental and physical health implications due to unnatural surroundings of crammed city streets.

Some results of the scientific experiments that were explained in the article were quit alarming such as when women were assigned to different apartment rooms, some facing natural seetings and others facing urban unnatural (city landscapes) for a certain numbe of months. After each set of women were measured on a variety of tasks and the researcher found that living in apartments facing nature were significantly better in basic motor skills and concentration than the women facing city environments. This test was done by Frances Kuo a director of landscape and Human Health Laboratory at the university of Illinois in the late 1990s, and it has demonstrated clear evidence that unnatural urban environments hinder human thought and activity.

As a Torontonian I grew up in the city and can safely that this article holds true, each time I went ventured to downtown Toronto I would always come home groggy and extremely tired and wasn’t sure what the reason was. This article made it clear to me that my exhaustion was due to the over stimulation of my brain, there were too many detractions (street lights, cell phones, various noises) that my brain attempted to process and was overrun. Furthermore it was evident to me that

This study has great implications towards the world that we live in, is it possible that we have revolutionized our way of living too quickly in these past years that it is unbearable for a brains to handle and the only way we can survive is to go back to our roots, which is nature. The article outlines this as a sort of last resort to save our minds from being taken over by meaningless thoughts of the jammed packed city streets. Nature is our only hope, if we want to live a stress free day without having to be completely disorientated at the end of it.