It looks like neuroscientists have discovered what social scientists and epidemiologists have know for a long time. It’s been well established that urban populations suffer from certain mental illnesses, including schizophrenia, at a higher rate than rural populations. Now a German team has used MRI scanning to investigate differences in brain activity between urban and rural dwellers. In short, college students from the city showed a significantly greater response to social stress than kids from the country.
The finding were published in Nature, and also reported on the journal’s web site.
