Growing Up Urban – Environmental Impact on Intellectual Capacity

It represents one of the Globe’s most e-mailed stories. Jonah Lehrer has the audacity to suggest that city living can actually damage your brain.

While he does offers some concrete steps to combat the issue, we could not help but think about the ramifications of the assertions for urban children and the schools they attend.

Interesting Notion

Lehrer offers one of the longstanding assertions of society, that city life “has always been an engine of intellectual life, from the 18th-century coffeehouses of London … to the Left Bank bars of modern Paris. Without the metropolis, we might not have had the great art of Shakespeare or James Joyce; even Einstein was inspired by commuter trains.”

But of late, scientists have begun examining how city life affects the brain of the average citizen living within the city itself. The results according to Lehrer “are chastening.”

He goes on to note that “just being in an urban environment … impairs our basic mental processes. After spending a few minutes on a crowded city street,” he writes of the latest research, “the brain is less able to hold things in memory, and suffers from reduced self-control.”

In addition to the noise and the bustle, the city fails to deliver one of the brain’s most beneficial elements, the force of nature upon cognitive development. We have traded quiet, wide-open spaces for crowded concrete jungles. Instead of mother nature and its ability to soothe, we are “surrounded by taxis, traffic, and millions of strangers.”

The research comes forward at a critical time in world history. According to Lehrer, the majority of people across the world now live in cities.

Recent Study

Central to Lehrer’s notion is the result of a study published last month involving some young adults. Outfitted with GPS receivers, undergraduates at the University of Michigan, were asked to take a walk. Some were tasked with taking a leisurely stroll within an arboretum. The others were tasked with walking around the streets of bustling Ann Arbor.

Later the two groups were given a battery of psychological tests. Not too surprisingly, the people who had spent time walking the hectic city streets were in a more negative mood. But more importantly, they scored significantly lower on a test of attention and working memory.

According to the study, “just glancing at a photograph of urban scenes” can lead to measurable impairments. The conclusion is that we are hard-wired to be wary of danger, a trait that we have been handed by our ancestors.

And according to the latest research, the danger that currently lurks in many urban areas has most of our brain power focused on being ready for potential threats. Add in the over-stimulation that is embedded in the urban setting and it is easy to see why urbanites’ brain power is consumed by tasks that consumes much of the their intellectual processing power.

Urban Design

The notion that natural settings require less cognitive effort has even been assigned a name, attention restoration theory, or ART. Developed by Stephen Kaplan, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, one central notion is that human attention is a scarce resource. Essentially each of us has within us only so much attentiveness without some action that restores our capacity to pay further attention.

Given our desire to improve inner city schools and the performance of the students attending those schools, this news represents an important element to consider. In fact, it is an element seldom considered within the complex equation that represents the cognitive development of urban children.

Certainly, urban school design should take into account this new research. If the mind needs nature, then urban schools must be designed in a way that contrasts vividly with the crowded concrete jungle that currently forms a child’s home environment.

Of course, the notion demands a rethinking of the construction of the very neighborhoods these kids grow up in as well. The need for tree-lined streets and parks is critical.

Yet, city life apparently offers other elements that cannot be offset simply by incorporating a few more trees or green space. Because our inner city streets offer everything from caramel lattes to iPods, self-control is tested regularly.

Resisting those temptations taxes our brain and further reduces our ability to be attentive. Therefore, the city “subverts our ability to resist temptation even as it surrounds us with it.”

Taking Learning for Granted

With each new brain study it is clear that we still know very little about the various impacts of our society on enhancing learning in children. All too often the focus is simply upon the role of the school to overcome societal issues.

Studies clearly indicate that growing up in poverty has an enormous impact on the cognitive development of children. Now we can add to that the simple notion that living in heavily populated urban area is also a hindrance to the development of our youngest learners.

Unfortunately, these varied issues are simply not being addressed in a cohesive manner. And while everyone focuses on the schools and the teachers delivering instruction within their buildings, perhaps these external issues are at the heart of the problem.

That would certainly explain why the intense school reform efforts over the last couple of decades have produced such limited results.