City Life Changes How Our Brains Deal With Distractions

[The Straight Story]

City Life Changes How Our Brains Deal With Distractions

City life requires a lot of attention. Navigating a busy sidewalk while processing loud storefronts and avoiding rogue pigeons may feel like second-nature at times, but it's actually quite a bit of work for the human brain. Psychologists do know that quick walks through the park can restore our focus, but they're still getting a handle on just what urbanization means for human cognition.

A new series of behavioral studies offers some of the richest evidence to date on the mental exhaustion of urban living. In an upcoming issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, a group of British psychologists reports that people who live in cities show diminished powers of general attention compared to people from remote areas. With so much going on around them, urbanites don't pay much attention to surroundings unless they're highly engaging.

Instead, as the researchers put it, city dwellers have developed a form of attention that puts priority on "the search for potential dangers or new opportunities":

While reduced attentional engagement may be advantageous in high-demanding urban scenarios, it comes at the cost of a generally reduced level of attentional selectivity.


http://www.govexec.com/excellence/promising-practices/2013/01/city-life-changes-how-our-brains-deal-distractions/60993/?oref=eig-homepage-module

[Cirque du So-What]

1. Case in point

All you urbanites better wake the hell up! Never know when you'll come across a bear when you're distractedly walking & texting, yunno.

[tridim]

2. I never got used to Manhattan. Lived and worked there for a year.

But I can vouch that almost everyone else there ignores distractions, like people, cars, stinky subways stations and almost everything else that happens there. It's not something I enjoyed.

I live in a much smaller and friendlier urban city now and am much happier. Sorry NY'ers.

[dixiegrrrrl]

3. That explains a whole lot to me.

Most of my life in rural areas and a few times had to live in cities.
Felt very stressed and wired in cities.
Yet have met other people who feel bored and restless unless they are in a fast paced city.

lol...when I was living in Seattle one of our roommates from New York complained that Seattle was just too slow paced for him. He moved back to NYC.

[marions ghost]

4. Once in New York City

I was walking along a busy street in lower Manhattan --when suddenly I see 3 or 4 karate guys run out onto the sidewalk with giant blocks of ice which they proceed to set upright in the flow of pedestrians and one of them then smashes the top piece, and the chunks cascade around him. Then they pick up the pieces and run back inside. The other pedestrians kept looking straight ahead, barely moving over, and I realized I was the only one who even stopped to spectate. Just another sidewalk obstacle.

Interesting study....