Wired Science News for Your Neurons
City Life Could Change Your Brain for the Worse By Brandon Keim Email Author
Wired
June 22, 2011
Between the crowds and the noise and the pressure, city life often seems to set one’s brain on edge. Turns out that could literally be true.
A study of German college students suggests that urbanite brains are more susceptible to stress, particularly social stress, than those of country dwellers. The findings don’t indicate which aspects of city life had changed the students’ brains, but provide a framework for future investigations.
“Whether people are exposed to noise, live near a park, have a big group of friends or not — you can do those experiments, and tease apart which parts of urban living are associated with these changes,†said Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg, a psychiatrist at German’s Central Institute of Mental Health.
Meyer-Lindenberg’s findings, published June 23 in Nature, are a neurological investigation into the underpinnings of a disturbing social trend: As a rule, city life seems to generate mental illness.
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/06/city-brains/You know what? I have seen this with my own eyes. I lived in a downtown area when I was young. Loved it at first. Walking distance to bars, restaurant and even concerts. But after a few years it was starting to get to me. I finally had to leave. Reconnected to some old friends I had there this past week. They had to get out too, the ones that stayed, well it runs the gambit from a little flakey to dead too soon.
This study could also explain why so many DUmmies are in large urban areas. A lot of them might have started off ok but slowly went batshit.
