The place where we live is a key element in our identity. Who we are is reflected in the places we occupy and the spaces we control. These places range from nation to region, state, metropolitan area, community, neighborhood, block, and residential dwelling. Each location has profound social meaning for us, and, in a literal sense, defines not only who we are, but also how we live and die. Despite the evolution of cyberspace technologies capable of transforming “there’s” into “here’s,” residence continues to have dramatic consequences for individual health and well-being.

The City, an Artificially Built Environment?

The problem is that most of us live in the city, nowadays. Most of us live in crammed spaces, that don’t get enough lighting. In the next few decades, it will be the single biggest issue facing those in big cities who may not realize their hectic lifestyles are adding to their stress, which could lead to a mental illness. The city is a distinct social environment that over time has accentuated great inequities between peoples. Within its boundaries, dramatic variation exists in material wealth, personal well-being, and overall quality of life. Finally, the city is an artificially constructed environment, an “intentional” or “built” environment, and thus it can be reengineered and should promote more desirable health outcomes. For example, one in five Australians is diagnosed each year with a mental condition of some sort, from anxiety and depression to more serious conditions such as schizophrenia, the conference at St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney was told.

City Life, Affecting the Work of Our Brains

In an incredibly interesting paper in Nature, a group of scientists from the University of Heidelberg in Germany asked the question: can the urbanicity cause measurable changes in the brain? For that purpose they placed ads in local newspapers to recruit 32 healthy German adults from cities (with more than 100,000 inhabitants), towns (with more than 10,000 inhabitants), or rural areas. Inside a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner, they had the subject to work on difficult arithmetic problems while a fake “performance monitor” indicated a dismal success rate compared with other subjects. Then the researchers ramped up the stress. As Meyer-Lindenberg, the head of the group, explained that the team would call them in between runs and say,

“We notice this seems to be very hard for you, but please understand these experiments are very expensive, so if you could just try to at least be above the bottom quarter, we’d really appreciate it.”

Measurements of the subjects’ heart rates, blood pressure, and stress hormone levels indicated that the stress was indeed getting to them. And the results: the fMRI scans showed that volunteers who currently lived in a city exhibited greater activation in the amygdala than did rural dwellers. The amygdala, among other roles, evaluates social threats and is overactive in people with anxiety disorders. But here is the surprise: people who’d been raised in a city, regardless of their current home, showed an additional area of activation: in the perigenual anterior cingulate cortex. This particular region is believed to be involved in emotional and social control of actions, and has also a part to play in schizophrenia.

Our Thinking and Inner Peace is Affected by the City Buzz

Consider everything your brain has to keep track of as you walk down a busy street. There are the crowded sidewalks full of distracted pedestrians who have to be avoided; the hazardous crosswalks that require the brain to monitor the flow of traffic. (The brain is a wary machine, always looking out for potential threats.) There’s the confusing urban grid, which forces people to think continually about where they’re going and how to get there. The reason why such seemingly trivial mental tasks leave us exhausted is that they exploit one of the crucial weak spots of the brain. There’s just too much information and we have to cope with it somehow.

A city is so overstuffed with stimuli that we need to constantly redirect our attention so that we aren’t distracted by irrelevant things, like the background music/noise you’re trying to tune out while concentrating on studying. This sort of controlled perception — we are telling the mind what to pay attention to – takes energy and effort. The mind is like a powerful supercomputer, but the act of paying attention consumes much of its processing power. Natural settings, in contrast, like the environment of our ancestors, don’t require the same amount of cognitive effort. This idea is known as attention restoration theory, or ART, and it was first developed by Stephen Kaplan, a psychologist at the University of Michigan.

Is Nature the Solution?

While it’s long been known that human attention is a scarce resource – focusing in the morning makes it harder to focus in the afternoon – Kaplan hypothesized that immersion in nature might have a restorative effect. Nevertheless, past studies have shown that exposure to green space reduces stress, boosts health and makes us less vulnerable to depression. The findings come from the brain scans of 32 healthy volunteers from urban and rural areas. City life is even more dangerous because when you are in a city, you are more likely to use the computer and to become a couch potato.

Related Read: Your Desk Job is a Slow Killer

Another threatening problem city populations face is obesity – a condition which can lead to diabetes, cancers and cardiac and respiratory problems – is epidemic in America’s cities. The Centers for Disease Control reports that more than half of New York African-Americans are obese. Javier Lopez, director of New York’s Strategic Alliance for Health, says the problem is especially severe among children in minority neighborhoods. He believes fatty, highly-processed foods are partly to blame, but so is lack of exercise. He says that some of New York City’s educational policies for example, such as mandatory standardized testing, don’t help. When there is an open hour in a school day schedule, teachers often choose to fill it with academic drilling rather than physical education.

Better health education is key, says Dr. Aubrey Clark, a Harlem Hospital Center cardiologist. He led a panel at the conference on atherosclerosis. That’s a clogging of the arteries linked to stress, poor diet and other factors which can lead to diabetes, heart attack, stroke and other health issues.