Our brains are overstimulated, and cities aren’t helping

You are standing at a crosswalk. The light is red. A bus roars past you a little too closely. Your phone buzzes with a BOGO offer from Starbucks. A billboard changes from a perfume ad to a phone number of a personal injury law firm. Someone is talking about their cheating ex-boyfriend beside you. The walk signal starts flashing. You step forward, but a pickup truck next to you is already inching into a right turn. Before you cross a single street, your brain has already sorted through a dozen competing demands. Then you arrive at work, class, or the library and wonder why on earth you cannot concentrate. What’s wrong with you? We tend to treat that feeling as a personal fault. Put down the phone. Stop scrolling. Have better discipline. But city design is asking people to maintain attention in environments deliberately designed to fracture it. While urban planners carefully measure traffic congestion, pedestrian flow, and air pollution, they rarely ask: What is all of this doing to the brain? Neuroscience gives us a reason to take this issue seriously. Attention depends on limited-capacity cognitive systems that must continuously select which information receives priority while sup…