The city today is a wonder of the powers of human creation, a throb of light, sound, and motion. It thrums with an electric, kinetic power, a sense of perpetual potential and connection. But in that same force is also a dark, cancerous undertow. Because the human brain, shaped in quiescent natural settings with routine rhythms, the perpetual sensory barrage of urban life can be a source of hideous mental agony. Exposure to constant noise, visual disarray, and social tensions of urban life does not merely lead to short-term irritability; it leaches our psychological resources into one of perpetual pressure, tension, and an indefinable sense of being overwhelmed. Psychological cost of the city drenched in senses is an epidemic of silence, a cost to our psychic health we're only just coming to properly understand. The most widespread cause of overloading is noise.
Quiet in a city does not exist. The brain is constantly assailed by a raucous bombardment of auto hum, drill of building, horns, horn-honking, and low-frequency rumble of ventilation and distant machinery. Not just annoying; it is a biological stimulant. Human hearing is an alarm system. A swift, sudden sound initiates an automatic fight-or-flight response, flooding the system with stress chemicals such as cortisol and adrenaline. The city alarm system never has a chance to deactivate. The brain is constantly in a state of low-grade hypervigilance, scanning for danger amidst the din. Chronic watching drains the nervous system, leaving individuals irritable, inattentive, and constantly tired. Even when sleeping, the mind continues to sift through the white noise, producing even more disturbing sleep, and into the cycle of exhaustion, which causes one to work even harder to make it through yet another day. This barrage of sound is also joined by a constant visual din.
The urban environment is a cacophony of cross-purposed messages. Skyscrapers loom above, video signs flash and roll past. Hyperactive speed, billboards, and freeway signs compete for attention, and hordes of faceless strangers whizz by in dizzying waves. All "visual noise" demands input from the visual cortex of the brain, trying to sift through a blizzard of background information. No rest for the eyes, no level, no even horizon line, and a peaceful green area on which the eyes can quietly rest. It is one of the bad guys of cognitive overload, when working memory in the brain is so packed that it can't even have room to concentrate on material. The mental weight of merely walking across a crowded street, pushing past crowds in a world where one tunes out commercials and neon blasts, saps the very mental juice needed for originality, hard problem-solving, and self-control of emotion. Over the din and visual commotion, sheer numbers impose a routine social and sensory drudgery.
There are two varieties. The crowding sensation is the first. Being in the midst of mobs of people, particularly strangers, induces a visceral feeling of being trapped or having one's space constantly invaded. This induces stress and a defensive, isolated stance. The second, unconscious pressure is the social psychologist's "social attention." Among a crowd, we're automatically sensitive to the other person's awareness and possible disapproval. We move position, step, and expression in an effort to advance socially. This, every day, under-the-radar performance wears down the mind. Which is why being in a day among throngs of people in a big city can be so much more exhausting than being in a day in the countryside, even if the work is the same. The mind is always charting both physical and thick, implicit social space. The net psychological effect of this sensory and social crowding is a syndrome that might be labeled "urban psychopathology." It is not a diagnosis, merely a catalog of symptoms.
Increased anxiety is probably the most pervasive, a pervasive in-the-back-of-the-mind concern owing to the omnipresent hyper-vigilant nervous system that can never be sure. This can spill over into outright anxiety or panic attacks in especially overwhelming circumstances, such as an especially packed subway train or an extremely packed, rowdy music festival. Depression has its minions, too, ranging from the sheer fatigue of constantly having to adapt and being a little, faceless widget in a behemoth, impersonal machine. The town and the folk are a lonely community, and the capacity to be connected with other human beings is out of reach when the psychological batteries are low. Combine it with the awareness that the anxious mind goes haywire by defaulting.
It comes out as irritability and fury, where a small disappointment—a slow-moving pedestrian, an embarrassed train—elicits a crazily out-of-kilter angry response. The reservoirs of empathy and patience in the mind are just depleted. Another shutting down is dissociation, a sense of being cut off from self or world. The world may seem unreal, dreamlike, a psychic buffer against all the stimulation the mind is no longer able to process successfully. In children, this chronic overstimulation can complete the circle and virtually guarantee the onset of attention-deficit disorder symptoms, and guarantee that one can't concentrate for more than a minute or two. The human brain is resourceful, though, and it compensates by attempting to cram.
The most typical method is withdrawal. We construct sensory bubbles of noise-cancelling headphones, our eyes moving to scan phone screens in order to construct a contained visual world that is mobile. It works in the short term but can serve to accelerate the loss of our sense of place and sense of community, fueling the urban estrangement it wishes to counteract. A better solution is urban planning sensitive to this psychic expense. The development of "quiet zones," public parks and green belts, and walking zones gives the brain hyper-stimulated with oases it desires. Biophilic design, or incorporating natural materials such as wood, water, and plants into building design, has been shown to reduce stress and enhance cognitive function. Finally, the psychic cost of the sensory overload city reminds us that our brains are still not developed enough to keep up with the world we've created.
The city is a marvel of what human engineering can accomplish, but the incessant requirements test our old brains to their limits. To survive in such environments, we must be more attuned to their covert costs. It demands a personal habit of seeking quiet and a civic policy linking economic growth with mental health and concentration. The city of the future must be built not for efficiency, but for the state of humanity, stimulating not just but also protecting, providing space for the mind to heal, reorganize, and just be, in splendid, depleted disarray.