{"id":936,"date":"2010-11-03T12:00:39","date_gmt":"2010-11-03T16:00:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/ombs\/?p=936"},"modified":"2010-11-03T12:00:39","modified_gmt":"2010-11-03T16:00:39","slug":"new-york-i-love-you-but-youre-bringing-me-down","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ombs\/2010\/11\/03\/new-york-i-love-you-but-youre-bringing-me-down\/","title":{"rendered":"&quot;New York, I love you, but you&#039;re bringing me down.&quot;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"addthis_button\" href=\"http:\/\/www.addthis.com\/bookmark.php?v=250&amp;username=xa-4bb6bcc8320e5dd9\"><img loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/s7.addthis.com\/static\/btn\/v2\/lg-share-en.gif\" alt=\"Bookmark and Share\" width=\"125\" height=\"16\" \/><\/a><script src=\"http:\/\/s7.addthis.com\/js\/250\/addthis_widget.js#username=xa-4bb6bcc8320e5dd9\" type=\"text\/javascript\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>It was very important to me that I go to college in a city.\u00a0 The people!\u00a0 The opportunities!\u00a0 The public transportation!\u00a0 Surely you must develop certain skills navigating through streets full of academics and artists and doctors, all with very\u00a0cool places to go and things to think, right?<\/p>\n<p>Perhaps not.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_959\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-959\" style=\"width: 310px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><a href=\"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ombs\/files\/2010\/11\/lcdsoundsystemkermit.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-959 \" src=\"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ombs\/files\/2010\/11\/lcdsoundsystemkermit-300x175.jpg\" alt=\"lcdsoundsystemkermit\" width=\"300\" height=\"175\" srcset=\"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ombs\/files\/2010\/11\/lcdsoundsystemkermit-300x175.jpg 300w, https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ombs\/files\/2010\/11\/lcdsoundsystemkermit.jpg 400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-959\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Kermit singing his sorrows of living in the city in LCD Soundsystem&#039;s &quot;New York, I Love You, But You&#039;re Bringing Me Down&quot; music video<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>Some research suggests that city life is less exciting and stimulating and more&#8230; draining us of mental resources.\u00a0 Walking down that busy street dodging people on cell phones, hopping over that crumbling bit of sidewalk, staying aware of the honking, aggressive city drivers, all while trying to spot a restaurant without an hour and a half wait on a Friday night.\u00a0 Your mind is forced to allocate an extreme amount of processing power to execute such controlled navigation. \u00a0We are simply asking too much of ourselves to maintain awareness of such noxious, disagreeable stimuli and to still function at a normal level.<\/p>\n<p>Marc Berman, psychologist at the University of Michigan, recently published a study measuring cognitive deficits after a short urban walk.\u00a0 Berman sent University of Michigan undergraduates on walks either through an arboretum or downtown Ann Arbor.\u00a0 After the excursion and several psychological tests, those students who walked through the\u00a0urban environment\u00a0scored significantly lower on test of attention and working memory.\u00a0 The study goes on to claim that even looking at a photograph of a city leads to significant impairments when compared to the effects of looking at a photograph of nature.<\/p>\n<p>Researchers give a long list of\u00a0symptoms exacerbated by city life: Reduced attention, reduced ability to handle major life stresses, reduced self-control, reduced memory, reduced emotional control, and increased aggression. \u00a0At the same time, the research supporting nature&#8217;s calming, restorative qualities are numerous: hospital patients recover more quickly when there are trees visible from through their windows, women focus better when their apartment overlooks greenery, children with attention deficit disorder show fewer symptoms in nature.<\/p>\n<p>And yet, research from the Santa Fe Institute used a set of complicated algorithms only to find that &#8220;the very same urban features that trigger lapses in attention and memory&#8211; the crowded streets, the crushing density of people&#8211; also correlate with measures of innovation as strangers interact with one another in unpredictable ways. \u00a0It is the &#8216;concentration of social&#8221; interactions that is largely responsible for urban creativity, according to the scientists.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Minimize concentration of disagreeable stimuli. \u00a0Maximize concentration of social interaction. \u00a0But how?<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\"><a href=\"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ombs\/files\/2010\/11\/central-park-763209.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-965 aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ombs\/files\/2010\/11\/central-park-763209-300x219.jpg\" alt=\"central-park-763209\" width=\"240\" height=\"175\" srcset=\"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ombs\/files\/2010\/11\/central-park-763209-300x219.jpg 300w, https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ombs\/files\/2010\/11\/central-park-763209.jpg 400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 240px) 100vw, 240px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left\">&#8220;It&#8217;s not an accident that Central Park is in the middle of Manhattan,&#8221; says Berman. &#8220;They needed to put a park there.&#8217;&#8221; \u00a0Urban landscape architects look for ways to integrate nature into your urban playgrounds. \u00a0In fact, the more biodiversity, the better. \u00a0Richard Fuller at the University of Queensland found that subjects scored higher on psychological well-being tests when parks had a larger variety of trees.<\/p>\n<p>A walk through the park may be more effective than your third Red Bull.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.boston.com\/bostonglobe\/ideas\/articles\/2009\/01\/04\/how_the_city_hurts_your_brain\/?page=1\">How the city hurts your brain<\/a> &#8211; The Boston Globe<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It was very important to me that I go to college in a city.\u00a0 The people!\u00a0 The opportunities!\u00a0 The public transportation!\u00a0 Surely you must develop certain skills navigating through streets full of academics and artists and doctors, all with very\u00a0cool places to go and things to think, right? Perhaps not. Some research suggests that city [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4162,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ombs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/936"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ombs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ombs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ombs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4162"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ombs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=936"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ombs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/936\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ombs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=936"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ombs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=936"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ombs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=936"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}