"How the city hurts your brain" by Jonah Lehrer

Jonah Lehrer, the author of "How We Decide," discusses the perils and benefits of city life as they relate to the brain in his article "How the city hurts your brain ...And what you can do about it" in The Boston Globe:

"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."

But the urban environment has its positive sides too, including creativity and innovation:

"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."

One of the ways to mitigate the negative effects of city living is to spend more time in natural settings that can restore and replenish our mental energy.  Click here to read the full article.

And check out the Urban Mindfulnes blog for tips on how to stay mindful in the city.