Interesting article in the June 25 Economist (p.94) looking at a study just published in Nature about MRI studies of the brains of people raised in the city, in towns and in the country. The study involved deliberately raising stress levels by giving subjects difficult problems and then chiding them for failure. The study found varying responses in only two parts of our brain, both of which deal with emotion. One part was in the "instinctual" part of the brain that is similar to the structure of animal brains. This "instinctual" brain area deals with interpreting what we are experiencing right now. The other part of the brain was in our cortex, the part of our brain that is so characteristically human, and seems to control whether our immediate experience alters our underlying willingness to change our learned behavioral responses.
With regard to activity in our "instinctual" brain, City folk experienced the most immediate stress, town folk less and country folk were the most relaxed. In general the "thoughtful" brain reflected the amount of activity in the "instinctual" brain, city folks thought the most, country folk the least.
In a way the first part of this finding is a no-brainer. In cities you are constantly in contact with many people, and little potential conflicts arising over little things like vacant bus seats, or space to walk on a sidewalk Those conflicts are far less frequent in towns, and even less frequent in the country. City folk are forced to get smart about human interactions to a degree country folk are not. The country folk seem to regard the fact the folks doing the study are criticizing them as unimportant in the grand scheme of things. The city raised folk care. That is a two edged sword - seems like the overall level of anxiety in the city raised folk is probably higher, but another word for anxiety is vigilance, so they are also probably becoming more capable of finding adaptive strategies to avoid the stress in the future.
The exception to the tendency for both parts of the brain to exhibit similar levels of activity was for people who grew up in the city. There was sometimes a disconnect - either the "instinctual" brain could be buzzing away with the "thoughtful" brain much less active, or vice versa. (The authors of the study note this sort of disconnect is characteristic of schizophrenia).
It seems like as a result of the sheer level of stress people who are raised in the city experience some learn to tune the stress out from either the"thoughtful" brain or the "instinctual" brain. It probably allows them to lower their overall anxiety level, but at the cost of giving up a degree of their ability to learn from experience.
I find my thoughts going to a completely unrelated bit of information I ran into, some research from the Pew Foundation that found that New York and Florida, in 2000, incarcerated the same amount of people, about 70,000 persons. Today Florida has increased their prison population by an additional 30,000, while New York has added only 10,000. Crime has fallen in both states about the same, slightly more in New York.
I assume a larger percentage of the population of New York state have more heavily urban life experience than in Florida, and more Floridians come from a more small town or rural environment. That makes me wonder it this particular statistic reflects the fact New Yorkers are a bit more savvy about human behavior, about when incarceration is necessary and useful and when it is just wasted public money.
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2 comments:
Jan, a better way to study your hypothesis would be county-by-count incarceration levels, since both states have large cities, but also a great many rural counties. I think there is also something to be said for time to think. Cities tend to keep us so busy that it may give us reasons for thinking, but take away our opportunity to do so.
I fully agree with your conclusion that we incarcerate too many people. However, your present hypothesis lends itself too nicely to a conclusion that blue-state environments cause people to think and red-state environments produce voters who aren't thinking. Several of your recent posts have been angling in that direction, it seems to me, and I take exception to that conclusion.
And if it is cities that produce progressive thinkers, and rural areas that produce thoughtless reactionaries, I'd like to hear your explanation for Hamilton and Jefferson.
Bryan - Here are a couple thoughts your comment sparked
1. To the extent one uses education as a proxy for critical thinking I've heard data a number of times over the years (though haven't tried to confirm that data)that blue states are on average more educated.
2. When I look at the map the most urban states are generally blue states (which probably accounts for the higher education achievement levels).
3. In my experience education generally puts a higher premium on broad based critical thinking skills than daily life. In daily life we probably use our critical thinking skills doing whatever we do to make money, and not so much elsewhere. Also, in my experience, the more education you have the more broad the range of topics that will trigger the use of critical thinking skills.
4. We have a lot of "programs" in our head, logic is only one. I don't buy the notion that intelligence is all about education, or even about who gets the best scores in achievement tests. It is the ability to merge the programs in our head - to use the proper program at the proper time. If blue stater's are more educated it doesn't mean they are smarter or more capable people. However the fact they are more educated makes them better at some things and probably at the same time not so good at other things.
5. In a way you seem to be feeling something akin to a form of political correctness - it is wrong to say the people of one state might on average know a little bit more about some topic than the people of another state. To cite a more obvious example I think the voters in Wyoming know little of the downside of offshore oil drilling compared to a person from California, while the Californians know little about downside of living with wolves.
That all said, the basic point I was trying to make was that blue state voters draw on a deeper well of diverse social experience with strangers than the Red State folks - so the blue state folks are operating with more data in their political decision making in the context of crime.
With regard to Hamilton and Jefferson, when we talk about blue and red states we are talking averages. To me that says nothing about what individuals are or can be.
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