Humans may be hard-wired to feel at peace in the countryside and confused in cities – even if they were born and raised in an urban area.
According to preliminary results
of a study by scientists at Exeter University, an area of the brain associated
with being in a calm, meditative state lit up when people were shown pictures
of rural settings. But images of urban environments resulted in a significant
delay in reaction, before a part of the brain involved in processing visual
complexity swung into action as the viewer tried to work out what they were
seeing.
The study, which used an MRI
scanner to monitor brain activity, adds to a growing body of evidence that
natural environments are good for humans, affecting mental and physical health
and even levels of aggression.
Dr Ian Frampton, an Exeter
University psychologist, stressed the researchers still had more work to do,
but said they may have hit upon something significant.
“When looking at urban
environments the brain is doing a lot of processing because it doesn’t know
what this environment is,” he said. “The brain doesn’t have an immediate
natural response to it, so it has to get busy. Part of the brain that deals
with visual complexity lights up: ‘What is this that I’m looking at?’ Even if
you have lived in a city all your life, it seems your brain doesn’t quite know
what to do with this information and has to do visual processing,” he said.
Rural images produced a “much
quieter” response in a “completely different part of the brain”, he added.
“There’s much less activity. It seems to be in the limbic system, a much older,
evolutionarily, part of the brain that we share with monkeys and primates.”
The effect does not appear to be
aesthetic as it was found even when beautiful urban and “very dull” pictures of
the countryside were used.
Professor
Michael Depledge of Exeter University, a former Environment Agency chief
scientist, said urban dwellers could be suffering in the same way as animals
kept in captivity. He said the move to the cities had been accompanied by an
“incredible rise in depression and behavioural abnormalities”.
“I think
we have neglected the relationship that human beings have with their
environment and we are strongly connected to it,” he said. “If you don’t get
the conditions right in zoos, the animals start behaving in a wacky way. There
have been studies done with laboratory animals showing their feeding is
abnormal. Sometimes they stop eating and sometimes they eat excessively. How
far we can draw that parallel, I don’t know.”
The study
was part-funded by the European Regional Development Fund Programme and
European Social Fund Convergence Programme for Cornwall and the Isles of
Scilly. Dr Frampton was one of the coordinators of the research, which was
carried out by Marie-Claire Reville and Shanker Venkatasubramanian, of the
European Centre for Environment and Human Health at Exeter University.
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