Living Near A Forest Makes For A Healthy Amygdala

A link from a reader:

A study conducted at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development has investigated the relationship between the availability of nature near city dwellers’ homes and their brain health. Its findings are relevant for urban planners, among others.

Noise, pollution, and many people in a confined space: life in a city can cause chronic stress. City dwellers are at a higher risk of psychiatric illnesses such as depression, anxiety disorders, and schizophrenia than country dwellers. Comparisons show higher activity levels in city dwellers’ than in country dwellers’ amygdala — a central nucleus in the brain that plays an important role in stress processing and reactions to danger.

I suspect those with healthier amygdalae shy away from the city. I knew a rabbit once, and asked him why he liked traveling so often to the local city. His eyes lit up, as he described all the people around, all the things happening, and all the smells, and sounds. Clearly his amygdala was enthralled.

When I traveled to the same city periodically, I smelled little more than burned diesel fuel, garbage, and the periodic smell of some indeterminable food like scent. The people around me were always stressed and busy as they hustled on their way, there was a clear criminal and homeless element which I felt compelled to keep an eye on, used chewing gum over various ages was all over the sidewalk, and it seemed as if everything had a thin layer of a solidified smog-like material coating it. When I would get home, I’d feel as if I needed a shower.

In retrospect, it would seem his amygdala was flagging gross movement-like stimuli he saw a positives, and ignoring the negatives. My amygdala was flagging the negatives, and ignoring the gross movements of people around me.

To me, a remote forest is the opposite of that city. Be it the bark, the rocks, the moss, the grasses, the waterfalls, or the plants, everything seems pristine and fresh. The air is pure. Threats are usually minimal, and being armed will just about eliminate them entirely. The pace is slower, and relaxing.

The environment has a way of taking an amygdala in relax-mode, and focusing it on the minute beauty, from the complex individual leaves of thick moss beds, to the beauty of little minnows hanging in the water of a pond, to the silly wiggles of tadpoles rising up to take breaths of air with little frog legs dangling out their backsides, or crawfish slowly moving from one hiding spot to another on the rocky floor of a pool in a stream, to the smell of grasses, freshly broken and stomped as you walked through them. And then occasionally your amygdala enters high gear as a porcupine clumsily stumbles into view, or a garter snake slithers through the grass away from you, or you come on a box turtle digging a hole in a sunny area with its rear legs to lay eggs.

My guess is a city slicker in the wild, with an amygdala that needs shocks and aggressively stimulating stimuli to feel alive, would miss all that entirely and find the environment boring.

It is possible those with more developed amygdalae that prioritize threats/negativity well and operate at lower revs absent them, would choose a forested environment. Regardless, I have no doubt they would do worse in the city than they would in the woods.

Then again, this is probably just another case of amygdalae subconsciously seeking out the environments they are adapted to. Rabbits gravitate to the world of high population densities because that will mean a resource glut, while K’s seek out places where things are a little more spread out, signaling a more K-selecting environment where they can thrive honestly.

Another interesting data-point, nonetheless.

Spread r/K Theory, because there is nothing as sublime as living in the environment you are designed for