About hippocampus & temporal retirements in cities

“On a busy city street, it’s probably more adaptive to have a shorter attention span, ” says Sara Lazar, PhD, an HMS instructor in psychology and director of the Massachusetts General Hospital Laboratory for Neuroscientific Investigation of Meditation. “If you’re too fixated on something, you might miss a car coming around the corner and fail to jump out of the way. ”

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Studies show that spending a short period of time—even one as brief as 20 minutes—in a more natural setting can help the brain recover from the stresses of city life. That may be why urban greenways such as Central Park in New York City, Hyde Park in London, and the Retiro Park in Madrid remain such popular venues—they allow city dwellers a place to escape the turbulence around them.

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Watching a beautiful sunset or the nesting of birds in a tree doesn’t demand the type of attention from the brain that filtering a multitude of competing stimuli on a bustling city street does. Natural vistas allow the brain’s attention circuits to refresh.

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“If people are stressed about basic survival, they will have more cortisol and a smaller hippocampus, and thus potential difficulties with memory formation,” says Lazar. “Moving to a quieter place could help reduce stress, which in turn can reduce cortisol levels and create conditions conducive to neuroplasticity. ” Neuroplasticity describes the brain’s ability to form new neuronal connections to compensate for injury or changes in one’s environment.

-article by Scott Edwards, Harvard Medical School: City life and the brain

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