生活在纽约的年轻人（居住在城里的人更容易变路痴）

生活在纽约的年轻人（居住在城里的人更容易变路痴）(1)

(本文选自《经济学人》20200208期)

背景介绍：

在生活中，我们身边不乏一些总是找不到路的人，他们往往被我们称为路痴。过去，我们常常认为方向感差更多的是由于先天性因素所导致的。但一项最新的研究发现，后天因素或许也很重要，在城市中长大的人往往更容易变成路痴。

Growing up in a city weakens the brain’s navigational skills

在城市中长大会削弱大脑的寻路能力

Country folk can find their way more easily

农村人更容易找到路

Rural folk can blame Aesop—of the moralising fables—for centuries of stories that mock them as bumpkins. The ancient Greek storyteller’s tale of the Country Mouse and the Town Mouse was only the first to emphasise their supposed simpler tastes and habits when compared with more sophisticated urbanites.

农村人对伊索（的道德说教寓言）或许是心怀怨恨的，因为在流传了几个世纪的寓言故事里，他们总是被当做乡巴佬而受到嘲笑。这位古希腊故事家创作的寓言故事《乡下老鼠和城里老鼠》最早着重描绘了农村人（相比精致的城里人而言）的纯朴品味和习性。

So listen for the cheers from Somerset to Kansas as neuroscientists announce that, in fact, it is city living that can dull the wits—at least when it comes to finding one’s way in the world.

所以，当神经科学家们宣布，城市生活实际可能会让头脑变得迟钝（至少就寻路而言）时，请听听从萨默塞特到堪萨斯州传来的欢呼声吧。

Growing up in a city, a vast global survey has found, has a lifelong negative impact on a person’s ability to navigate. When looking for a half-remembered restaurant in a poorly-lit side street, it seems Country Mouse would be a more useful companion.

一项大规模的全球调查发现，在城市中长大会对一个人的寻路能力产生终身的负面影响。当你在一条光线昏暗的小巷中寻找一家记忆模糊的餐厅时，“乡下老鼠”或许能更轻易地找到。

In the new study, posted to the online repository bioRxiv, scientists led by Antoine Coutrot at Nantes University in France and Hugo Spiers at University College London describe how they used a dataset gathered from 4m players of a computer game called “Sea Hero Quest”, which tests way-finding skills by asking players to memorise a map showing the location of checkpoints and then measuring how well players can steer a boat to find them, guided only by their mental map.

在这项发表于 bioRxiv 在线资源库的最新研究中，以法国南特大学的安托万·库特罗和伦敦大学学院的雨果·施皮尔为代表的科学家们描述了他们是如何利用从电脑游戏“航海英雄”的400万名玩家那里收集到的数据集展开研究的，该游戏通过要求玩家记住一张显示出检查站位置的地图，然后让玩家凭借着心中的地图驾驶一艘船去找到这些检查点，从而测试玩家的寻路能力。

The game was released in 2016 and all players have since been asked for basic information about themselves, including their age, gender, home country, and whether or not they grew up in a city.

这款游戏发布于2016年，它要求所有玩家提供自己的基本信息，其中包括年龄、性别、国籍以及是否在城市中长大。

From that database, Dr Spiers and his colleagues examined a subset of 442,000 players from 38 countries: those who had answered all the questions and who had played the game until they reached the later levels. He found that the strongest indicator of a high score was a player’s age—older people performed relatively poorly, which chimes with what researchers know about age-related cognitive decline.

施皮尔和他的同事对来自该数据库的38个国家的44.2万名玩家进行了研究，这些玩家回答了所有的问题，并且一直玩到了游戏后面的关卡。他发现，对获得高分影响最大的因素是玩家的年龄，年纪大的人表现相对较差，这与研究人员所知的认知能力的下降与年龄有关是一致的。

But the benefit of rural living was strong enough to offset some of that. Data from American players showed that a 70-year-old who grew up in the countryside had the navigational abilities of an average 60-year-old across the dataset.

但农村生活的好处是能够抵消一部分影响。来自美国玩家的数据显示，在农村长大的70岁老人与60岁普通老人的寻路能力相当。

The gap between the navigation skills of rural and city people was largest in America (about six times wider than for Romania), and the researchers think they know why. They gave each country a complexity score by analysing how the streets were laid out in its largest cities.

美国的农村人和城里人的寻路能力的差距是最大的（是罗马尼亚的近7倍），研究人员认为他们知晓其中的缘由。他们通过分析各大城市的街道布局，对每个国家的城市复杂度进行评分。

And they found that countries dominated by simple layouts of grid-based cities (most common in America and Argentina) dragged down navigation skills more than growing up in a city based around more complicated networks of streets, such as Prague.

他们发现，相比布拉格这样街道网络复杂的城市，在以简单网格布局的城市（在美国和阿根廷最为常见）为主的国家长大的人的寻路能力更差。

The study does not show why cities have this impact on people growing up in them. It cannot rule out that an external factor, such as the effect of air pollution on a developing brain, might play a role. But Dr Spiers says that the brain’s navigational abilities probably weaken in the less challenging city environment because they are not being used as much.

这项研究并未说明为什么在城市中长大会对人产生这种影响。这并不能排除外部因素可能起到的作用，比如空气污染对大脑发育的影响。但施皮尔说，在不太具有挑战性的城市环境中，大脑的寻路能力可能会由于没有得到充分的利用而被削弱。

Although cities may appear more elaborate, they also feature more clues to help residents find their way, such as numbered streets. As many city-dwellers on a visit to the countryside can attest, one field tends to look much the same as another, so there are fewer external landmarks to help guide the way.

虽然城市可能看起来更为复杂，但城市中提供了更多能够帮助居民寻路的线索，比如编了号的街道。正如许多前往乡村游玩的城市居民所证明的那样，一个地方和另一个地方看起来没两样，而帮助他们指引方向的路标也更少。

生活在纽约的年轻人（居住在城里的人更容易变路痴）(2)