How the city hurts your brain – and why Jamaica Plain is good for you.

Written by William on January 7th, 2009

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In a recent article by Jonah Lehrer on Boston.com it is explained that the city is bad for us. Duh. But it is interesting to hear just exactly why. Some of the research he cites is really interesting. The natural settings provided by Jamaica Plain were exactly why I have stayed here for 16 years.

Olmsted designed Central Park in NYC and many other public commons

I wouldn’t live anywhere else in the city. I’m not saying you shouldn’t – I’m just saying that coming from the country (Ozark Mountains) it would be very hard for me to live anywhere else. I enjoy the rough, undeveloped woodlands that JP is surrounded by. Check out some of the green space links on the right to learn more about them. The Emerald Necklace is a green corridor designed by Frederick Law Olmsted (Central Park) that surrounds Jamaica Plain and includes Franklin Park and Arnold Arboretum. Check them out, and then buy real estate in Jamaica Plain. Here are some excerpts from the story on Boston.com.

clipped from www.boston.com

And yet, city life isn’t easy. The same London cafes that stimulated Ben Franklin also helped spread cholera; Picasso eventually bought an estate in quiet Provence. While the modern city might be a haven for playwrights, poets, and physicists, it’s also a deeply unnatural and overwhelming place.

Natural settings, in contrast, 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. 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.