Urban brains behave differently from rural ones

From The Economist
Urban brains behave differently from rural ones

Jun 23rd 2011
from the print edition

Shelley contemplates urban decay

“HELL is a city much like London,” opined Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1819. Modern academics agree. Last year Dutch researchers showed that city dwellers have a 21% higher risk of developing anxiety disorders than do their calmer rural countrymen, and a 39% higher risk of developing mood disorders. But exactly how the inner workings of the urban and rural minds cause this difference has remained obscure—until now. A study just published in Nature by Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg of the University of Heidelberg and his colleagues has used a scanning technique called functional magnetic-resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine the brains of city dwellers and country bumpkins when they are under stress.

In Dr Meyer-Lindenberg’s first experiment, participants lying with their heads in a scanner took maths tests that they were doomed to fail (the researchers had designed success rates to be just 25-40%). To make the experience still more humiliating, the team provided negative feedback through headphones, all the while checking participants for indications of stress, such as high blood pressure.

The urbanites’ general mental health did not differ from that of their provincial counterparts. However, their brains dealt with the stress imposed by the experimenters in different ways. These differences were noticeable in two regions: the amygdalas and the perigenual anterior cingulate cortex (pACC). The amygdalas are a pair of structures, one in each cerebral hemisphere, that are found deep inside the brain and are responsible for assessing threats and generating the emotion of fear. The pACC is part of the cerebral cortex (again, found in both hemispheres) that regulates the amygdalas.

People living in the countryside had the lowest levels of activity in their amygdalas. Those living in towns had higher levels. City dwellers had the highest. Not that surprising, to those of a Shelleyesque disposition. In the case of the pACC, however, what mattered was not where someone was living now, but where he or she was brought up. The more urban a person’s childhood, the more active his pACC, regardless of where he was dwelling at the time of the experiment.

The amygdalas thus seem to respond to the here-and-now whereas the pACC is programmed early on, and does not react in the same, flexible way as the amygdalas. Second-to-second changes in its activity might, though, be expected to be correlated with changes in the amygdalas, because of its role in regulating them. fMRI allows such correlations to be measured.

In the cases of those brought up in the countryside, regardless of where they now live, the correlations were as expected. For those brought up in cities, however, these correlations broke down. The regulatory mechanism of the native urbanite, in other words, seems to be out of kilter. Further evidence, then, for Shelley’s point of view. Moreover, it is also known that the pACC-amygdala link is often out of kilter in schizophrenia, and that schizophrenia is more common among city dwellers than country folk. Dr Meyer-Lindenberg is careful not to claim that his results show the cause of this connection. But they might.

Dr Meyer-Lindenberg and his team conducted several subsequent experiments to check their findings. They asked participants to complete more maths tests—and also tests in which they mentally rotated an object—while investigators chided them about their performance. The results matched those of the first test. They also studied another group of volunteers, who were given stress-free tasks to complete. These experiments showed no activity in either the amygdalas or the pACC, suggesting that the earlier results were indeed the result of social stress rather than mental exertion.

As is usually the case in studies of this sort, the sample size was small (and therefore not as robust as might be desirable) and the result showed an association, rather than a definite, causal relationship. That association is, nevertheless, interesting. Living in cities brings many benefits, but Dr Meyer-Lindenberg’s work suggests that Shelley and his fellow Romantics had at least half a point.

Picking the scapes

I picked about 2,000 scapes. I also removed some of the mulch and did some weeding.

"Stop and Smell the Soil"

BY PETER MCCLUSKY  Summer 2011 issue of Edible Toronto

“Hey, check out this advertisement for farm interns,” I said to my partner Deborah between bites of spinach salad.

Whole Circle Farm offers an eight month farm internship… spring begins with tapping for maple syrup and work on the garden starts in the greenhouse, followed by raising of livestock, working the field, selling produce, making compost and biodynamic preps, food preservation, building and tractor maintenance; plus field trips and in-field and inclass education. Weekly stipend of $50 comes with room and board and access to vehicles. We promise long back-breaking days starting at 6 am.

I’d just come off my first summer growing vegetables part time in a small patch provided by a friend at FarmStart’s McVean Farm in Brampton. A small part-time patch it was, and a farmer I wasn’t. My “harvest” consisted of one gourd, an epic failure. Frozen dinners were looking better and better.

After ten years of running the international department of a digital stock photo agency in midtown Manhattan (selling things like airbrushed photos of tomatoes), I no longer wanted to sit in an office where the closest thing to a vegetable garden was the mould blossoming in the overhead air vents. Could farming be the change I was looking for? Or was it merely something to occupy my daydreams while I rode the elevator each morning? I’d soon find out after quitting my job and returning to Ontario.

“Well, Peter, this is as good a time as any for you to work on a farm. Call them.”

I choked on my limp spinach.

“No, no, no! It’s not healthy to wake up so early...$50 a week?” I sputtered. “What year is this? 1934? If you think it’s such a good idea, Deborah, why don’t you go?”

It was a cold grey day in March when I showed up at Whole Circle Farm in Acton, Ontario with too much luggage. I stashed my suitcases under my narrow bed, the handles facing out. The first month was hellish, mornings in particular. Prior to being fully awake, I sometimes thought I was back in my Brooklyn apartment – until I’d hear the cock-a-doodle-doo of roosters outside my window. I’d half fall out of bed, briefly stretch my battered bones, and feel my way down the stairs to the kitchen. Gazing at the snowcovered fields from inside the farmhouse common room, heated by a wood stove, there was no inkling of the verdant fields I’d imagined. Already some of the interns were complaining: “I can’t take it.” “Why do we have to do things this way?” “This is slave labour.”

My concerns were graver. My back hurt, I was waking up with headaches, and I found it hard to relate to most things. At office jobs there were familiar features, like staplers, water coolers, power point presentations and swivel chairs. On the farm I listened with knitted brow to talks about three-point hitches, green manure, and how to tamp seeds. While the other interns worried about making it to November, I was thinking each morning that I wouldn’t even make it to noon, when I’d be sent away on a Medevac with my ten suitcases. I buried my car keys deep in my sock drawer and swore to myself that I would make it to November.

The drip, drip of the icicles at the entrance to the vegetable wash shed harkened the arrival of spring. We began to see the fruits of our labours, including the thousands of sprouting seeds we’d planted in the greenhouse. I started to keep meticulous notes so I could later remember the concepts I’d learned.

From the beginning we were exposed to some amazing things. Staring into the mist-shrouded vat of a maple syrup evaporator, we got a lesson from an 80-year-old sugar-shack operator on the subtleties of making maple syrup. Heather and I visited a local butcher who explained, cut by cut, the major parts of a cow. Nitya and I built a thermophilic compost pile (and I suffered minor burns when I excitedly plunged my hand into it). And Monique helped me prep a bio-intensive bed using a broadfork.

Some things brought us closer to understanding the ebb and flow of life on a farm. We watched 400-pound Greta give birth to seven piglets. A few days later she rolled over them, killing them all. Greta would no longer be useful for breeding, and the next week I thought of her while grilling pork chops marinated in crushed sage and minced Rocambole garlic.

Being on an organic farm with no herbicides, we spent many hours hunched in the field, weeding by hand, hoe and Farmall. I had an affinity for the Farmall, a tractor with steel discs that knock out weeds alongside a vegetable row. It’s mundane and unforgiving work. One moment of distraction and twenty feet of spinach becomes coleslaw.

The greatest revelation for me was to smell and taste the farm food. Breakfasts included hot oatmeal from oats we’d ground the day before and soaked overnight in creamy homemade yogurt, and eggs from the pasture-raised chickens. The bacon tasted like… bacon and superbly complemented the pancakes that were made from our own red fife wheat. Cooked in sweet butter from a neighbour’s farm, they slid off the griddle and onto our plates, which overflowed with chocolate-brown-coloured maple syrup distilled from the thousand gallons of sap we’d carried from a maple bush. At night the frenetic whoosh-whoosh of the slippered footsteps of interns Andrew and Heather in the kitchen meant that yet another couple of loaves of fresh-baked bread were on the way. No five-star hotel could match the quality ingredients from Whole Circle or the culinary passion of the interns. Complaints about the workload and the “hundred miles of weeds” were muted at mealtimes when we ecstatically gorged our way through another brilliantly prepared meal.

My weekly turn to cook became known as Spaghetti Tuesday, with a recipe that’d shrunk to four ingredients: olive oil, tomatoes, thyme, and a whole bulb of garlic. I was growing my own garlic, from twenty rare strains, at FarmStart, and was gradually discovering the range and subtlety of each.

One day in late September, I led tours for about twenty separate groups visiting the farm. I explained how soil fertility connected the components of the farm – the cows, chickens, pigs and vegetable garden – to the great-tasting meals they produce. I felt like a revivalist preacher as I walked and pointed and asked children and adults to reach down and smell a handful of soil. I had finally grasped why I was there and later thanked Deborah for helping me take the leap. And I would never have been as impassioned and informed about farming as I was that day if not for the guidance of Johann and Maggie Kleinsasser, the farm stewards at Whole Circle Farm. Their farm internship program is a blend of hard work, education, and plenty of humour.

I also learned many things that were applicable outside of Whole Circle Farm. I went to monthly board meetings in Aberfoyle with a group of community members keen on starting a market centered around farmers, and I was happy to contribute the marketing skills I’d acquired in New York. Now, a year later, farmers and customers meet every Saturday in the new pavilion at the Aberfoyle Farmers’ Market, which includes a market café to showcase the local produce. I was also inspired to initiate the First Annual Toronto Garlic Festival, featuring Ontario garlic and food prepared with garlic, which will take place this fall.

Everything on the farm seemed beyond my ken when I arrived. After my eight-month internship, it’s supermarkets that seem peculiar, with their photos of farm scenes plastered above the fruit and vegetable aisles. On a recent trip to the grocery store I looked up at those images, including those of airbrushed tomatoes, and wondered which stock photo agency they’d come from. In my former life I might have sold the rights to those digital photos; now I grow the tomatoes.

Peter McClusky, garlic farmer, is the manager of the Aberfoyle Farmers’ Market (Saturdays from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m.) and director of the First Annual Toronto Garlic Festival to be held September 25 at Evergreen Brick Works. Visit his personal farming blog at www.PeterOnTheFarm.blogspot.com.