How the city hurts your brain
How the city hurts your brain is a Boston Globe article that has a ton of relevance to the recent post on sociability in online worlds. It is primarily about natural surroundings serving as a literal, measurable cognitive balm via “attention restoration theory.” It also speaks about the pressures of city life impairing working memory, attention, and even reducing self-control and increasing aggression.
But the density of city life doesn’t just make it harder to focus: It also interferes with our self-control. In that stroll down Newbury, the brain is also assaulted with temptations — caramel lattes, iPods, discounted cashmere sweaters, and high-heeled shoes. Resisting these temptations requires us to flex the prefrontal cortex, a nub of brain just behind the eyes. Unfortunately, this is the same brain area that’s responsible for directed attention, which means that it’s already been depleted from walking around the city. As a result, it’s less able to exert self-control, which means we’re more likely to splurge on the latte and those shoes we don’t really need. While the human brain possesses incredible computational powers, it’s surprisingly easy to short-circuit: all it takes is a hectic city street.
The hothouse effect also increases innovation, the article says — but it does seem like an interesting question for those of us making crowded virtual worlds, particularly ones chock-full of constant stimuli.
11 Responses to “How the city hurts your brain”
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Huh. Never thought I’d consider brains to be glass cannons, but I guess they are.
Neat article. I flipped through some of the research on attention restoration theory out of curiosity. As I’m understand it, being in the hustle-and-bustle conditions for these experiments doesn’t degrade performance, it limits future improvement. So I’m inclined to interpret the restorative powers of natural settings as a propensity to allow people to step away, clear their mind, and come back to a problem with fresh eyes. I wonder if you’d get the same results of, say, having people go to the gym, or being able to ignore those around them with headphones during a walk or bus ride home. Wouldn’t it be cute if there is a restorative effect to zoning out for an hour after work and farming fel iron ore…
I’d be interested to see if the findings correlate to chat — a quiet, structured conversation in private chat, for instance, versus an open chat environment with player and NPC spam, macro graphics, combat results, system messages, etc.
Swarming theory has been popular among the social network pundits, both how to start them, how to stop them and are they controllable. From Scientific American comes the following on locust swarming and the potential of serotonin stimulation to cause this:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=when-grasshoppers-go-bibl
Note the potential of **density** to engender desperation and fear and the effects on serotonin production. As an amplifier, the web is a great way to simulate density (see Facebook connections) and stimulate fear. Toss in a little environmentally mediated desperation and voila.
And the effects of games and dense virtual environments on neurotransmitter production are?
I would be surprised if there hasn’t been a study done comparing open, public chatrooms to private instant messaging. It’s been an available functionality for decades, and it’s a natural for academics to pontificate about. The neuroscience angle may not have been done, though. I’ll google around a bit, later.
The first thing I thought of was my web browser (which I was, of course, reading this in). I have a quick bar, the pmog bar, and TwitterFox running. Then I am using twhirl, and have bubbles popping up with the track titles from my media player, e-mail constantly checking…
Going for a walk would do me wonders, but I would probably be better just turning all this crap off and focusing on whichever task I am working on. It isn’t just a busy street that can stress the pre-frontal cortex.
That’s the same impression one of my friends got from the article, but I don’t think that’s what it’s talking about. The article isn’t talking about productivity at all, though that’s certainly related; it’s simply talking about health. Does focus have any adverse effect on the brain? Isn’t an increase in creative ability precisely what you’d want for getting tasks done? Because it seems both my friend and yourself missed the emphasis on nature as an attention restorative agent: why exactly is it about nature that produces a relaxing and restorative effect? And can we duplicate it?
It’s not a lack of sensory input; the volume may be cranked way down, but a quiet stretch of forest is just as busy in its own way as a city street. I think it’s a lack of “push”. The forest isn’t advertising, selling, persuading, restricting or otherwise trying to shape your behavior to some desired result. It rewards attention, but rarely demands it.
And I believe that game designers already replicate that experience to an extent, most particularly with resource-gathering activities. I find mining (in games that support it) to be soothing. I encounter monsters, but I’m not compelled to fight them and bring 20 of their skulls to Herbie the taxidermist – I can skirt them in peace and go about my business if I wish. My goals are self-determined and I can shift them at will.
The best titles for the “walk in a forest” dynamic, in my experience, are Star Wars Galaxies and Project Entropia/Planet Calypso (an MMO which in other respects is something of a cross between a crooked casino and a pyramid scheme). UO’s system is very good as well — even with the addition of ore elementals.
But… some people find mining to be terribly dull. So the systems get “spiced up” and simplified in many titles — instead of exploring for ore, it’s visible on the ground, usually as a distinctive rock icon, always spawning in the same places (often one haunted by particularly aggressive mobs), so mining turns into just another form of hack-and-slash.
WOW, EQ2 and LOTRO all place the most valuable resources in visible nodes in the toughest zones, forcing you to level up in adventure levels to effectively gather those resources. The sense of wandering freely is largely replaced with a sense of infiltrating a camp of numerous and powerful enemies. If you work up your adventuring level to the point that the zone enemies are non-aggressive, with no “locate and extract” system to make you think or explore, it’s usually a race to hit as many nodes as possible in the least amount of time.
Resource extraction is just one example, but I think it’s a good one to consider.
@Yukon Sam,
I think this is half right. The forest isn’t less busy than the street, but specifially in terms of things that the human brain has a hard time ignoring there’s a lot less going on in a natural setting.
Think of all the noises and motions that would startle animals that are encountered in urban environments. We are only not startled because we actively (not consciously, but actively) filter that stimuli and suppress that response. This filtering, this active directing of our attention away from things that would normally (in many cases briefly) snag it, takes more effort than previously thought and is more fatiguing than it is usually felt by the subject to be.
That’s my understanding of the article. Games and chat rooms likely don’t have nearly the same effect because there’s more control, more predictability, and narrowed parameters.
[…] Raph’s Website » How the city hurts your brain "The hothouse effect also increases innovation, the article says — but it does seem like an interesting question for those of us making crowded virtual worlds, particularly ones chock-full of constant stimuli." Comments on a Boston Globe article (tags: games cities wow) […]
That’s well explained, but that’s why we, as humans, must ”meditate” to keep the focus of the mind free from all intelligent forces that isn’t coming from ourselves.
Very interesting article that explain in a more modern approach what we hear and not do for ages. I totally liked it, but at the same time it isn’t a bad thing. If life is an experience, than being involved in one is a great thing.
The fact that we can create experiences that players will play, those experiences are going to stay in their memory… their DNA. If we can greatly influence the players, there is probably someone one day who will try to do the opposite and reach a very destructive concept.
We should stay careful with our medias…