WikimediaAll by myself. I don’t need anyone at all. I know I’ll survive. I know I’ll stay alive.
Perch are shy. They like to band together for protection, swimming together in schools the way nerds all share the nerd table in the high-school…
Today the United States Food and Drug Administration approved a device that treats depression using… magnets. About 14.8 million American adults, or 6.7 percent of the U.S. adult population, are diagnosed with major depression in …
This year, the CDC reported that autism now affects 1 of every 88 American children, which is an unusually high increase from previous years. Now, we may have some more clues as to what is causing the dramatic increases. The Mount Sinai Children’s…
One of several versions of the painting “The Scream”. The National Gallery, Oslo, Norway. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Cities have been the engines of civilization for millennia, serving as places where the arts, commerce, and ideas flourish. But as we are reminded in a recent article, the close social interactions that make a city so productive also proved ideal for tuberculosis, measles, the plague, and many other diseases. In European capitals, circa 1800, deaths exceeded births; these cities only grew because of the influx of people from the countryside. An average man in 19th-century Paris was physically shorter than his rural counterpart. Today, the physical threats of cities are being exceeded by mental ones. People living in an urban setting are 21 percent more likely to experience an anxiety disorder, and 39 percent more likely to experience mood disorders. City life roughly doubles the chances a person will suffer from schizophrenia, and this threat increases with time in cities, like the effect of an accumulating toxin. The article notes that German scientists have found, for the first time, the specific structures in the brain affected by city life. Using brain scanners, they demonstrated that people who lived in cities showed a greater stress response in the amygdala, a brain area that processes emotions. And a second structure, which helps regulate the amygdala, showed a heightened stress response in people who were raised in cities, according to a report in the journal Nature.
The discovery suggests a specific mechanism by which cities, with their steady stress, might unbalance parts of the mind. Scientists can now look at particular aspects of urban design — a particular layout of streets, say, or the preponderance of straight lines — to see which ones cause the signature brain changes. Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg, one of the German scientists who led the research, says he has already begun to look into just these sorts of questions.
English: Percent of Youth 4-17 ever diagnosed with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder: National Survey of Children’s Health, 2007 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
sarahpetersmiller1969, grist.org
TimBatchelder 