{"id":2411,"date":"2011-11-12T20:47:27","date_gmt":"2011-11-12T20:47:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thetravellerslastjourney.com\/shai\/?p=2411"},"modified":"2019-07-12T07:49:55","modified_gmt":"2019-07-12T07:49:55","slug":"the-stress-of-city-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thetravellerslastjourney.com\/shai\/2011\/11\/12\/the-stress-of-city-life\/","title":{"rendered":"The stress of city life"},"content":{"rendered":"

People are strange, when you’re a stranger<\/p>\n

The Doors – People Are Strange<\/span><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

We’re born into a world submerged in strangers.\u00a0They<\/em>\u00a0– the strangers – are everywhere, doing so many different things, and\u00a0we know almost nothing about them<\/a>. Looking around, we realize that we live between the cogs of an impersonal, gigantic clockwork; and yet, we’re social creatures, charged with the prime directive to interact with others<\/a>. We go so far as to categorize those we’ve no intention of ever meeting; as we gaze at strangers we measure\u00a0their appearance and their role in our society<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Evaluating others is our species’\u00a0raison d’etre<\/a>.\u00a0But even though we’ve evolved for sociability, the very scale of modern institutions and governments, strains our capacities. Our various circles – friends, family, sports, work, and others – form centres for social networks of dizzying complexities, and which we consider so\u00a0important\u00a0<\/em>to\u00a0traverse properly<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Given the scale of the modern social phenomenon, it’s no surprise that those\u00a0raised\u00a0<\/em>in cities experience increased stress; increased social stress that permanently affects the brain. It’s as if the developing neural circuitry of\u00a0areas assoc<\/a>iated with social stress<\/a>, are vulnerable to an overload that scars for life. Cities may be a psycho-neurological analogue to\u00a0foot binding<\/a>.<\/p>\n

City living is well known to be a causative factor in a host of psychological conditions, including especially\u00a0schizophrenia<\/a>. This effect is limited to\u00a0development<\/em>, specifically affecting people as they grow up in cities, but not as adults living in cities. The specific factor which underlies this effect is suspected to be “social evaluative stress”, that is, the stress we feel at being judged. To be a social being<\/a>\u00a0is to be aware that\u00a0other<\/a>s think of us, and this evokes\u00a0almost<\/a>\u00a0universally some element of stress which we use to navigate our lives amongst the reefs of expectations.<\/p>\n

Evolutionary tinkering has developed a system for determining how others think of us, using those expectations as stressors for\u00a0conditioning our own behaviours<\/a>. Presumably, this system is correlative: the more important others’ expectations are, the more the brain will adapt to being responsive to those expectations. This system would allow for various important conditioning patterns which would encourage our capacity to operate in groups, and allow groups to form meta-priorities which filter through the population by implicit expectations.<\/p>\n

In cities this capacity is overworked, teaching the brain to either overdo or overcompensate for the conditioning patterns we associate with others. As a consequence, cities produce a new breed of people. Whether or not this new population is overall better or worse, and what other benefits or handicaps are caused by city living, remains to be discovered<\/p>\n

Every change in our social structures is another step in a long road that began in a fading prehistory and that heads towards an unknown\u00a0strange new world<\/a>. From agriculture to cities to internet to whatever comes next:\u00a0the traveller is the journey<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n


\nReference<\/strong>:\u00a0Yates, D\u00a0Psychiatric disorders: the stress of city life<\/em>\u00a0(2011)\u00a0Nat Rev Neuro<\/em>: In this study, the authors gave volunteers arithmetic tests during which they received negative feedback. Brain imaging (fMRI) was used to establish different neuronal responses which could then be correlated for urbanicity. Only the brain areas mentioned above showed any significant urbanicity-dependent effect. A few follow up experiments were used to confirm various conclusions.<\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

People are strange, when you’re a stranger The Doors – People Are Strange We’re born into a world submerged in strangers.\u00a0They\u00a0– the strangers – are everywhere, doing so many different things, and\u00a0we know almost nothing about them. Looking around, we realize that we live between the cogs of an impersonal, gigantic clockwork; and yet, we’re […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[159,103,204,108,77],"tags":[],"metadata":[],"class_list":["post-2411","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-all-posts","category-essay","category-everything2","category-observations","category-perspective"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1740,"url":"https:\/\/thetravellerslastjourney.com\/shai\/2010\/12\/04\/hide-and-seek-2\/","url_meta":{"origin":2411,"position":0},"title":"Hide and Seek","author":"Pala","date":"December 4, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"Hide and Seek\u00a0is the\u00a0third episode\u00a0of the franchisee show\u00a0Stargate Atlantis[1]. 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