Not many city dwellers were likely shocked by a new study, published in Nature, which seems to show that our brains function differently than those of our rural cousins when we’re under stress. Living in cities appears to be changing us.

Rural and urban study subjects were hooked up to a brain imager and given a timed math test with questions rigged to produce failure, all while receiving negative feedback through headphones as to how poorly they were doing.

People who lived in cities and those who had grown up in them showed significantly more activity in the amygdala and cingulated cortex, parts of the brain that process stress. (As a city slicker who grew up semi-rural and profoundly non-mathletic, just reading about this ordeal made my amygdala sweat).

Previous studies have indicated that city folk are at increased risk of anxiety, schizophrenia and mood disorders, and it’s been forty years since Desmond Morris documented the uneasy transformation of a species wired as tribal hunter-gatherers into urban driver-shoppers in The Human Zoo. His title came from the striking number of parallels between the behaviour of modern humans and of animals in captivity.

Every time you’re cut off on the Queensway or trying to sleep through a car alarm, you could be forgiven for wondering if living here is driving you slightly bonkers.

Perhaps, though, that study shows we’re not just more vulnerable to stress but more attuned, accustomed to cranking up our systems to deal with challenge. I find visitors from my hometown are often overwhelmed by driving in the city, maybe because their reactions haven’t been amped up to urban voltage with a daily stream of annoyances and petty crises.

For Andrew Fainer, acting CEO of the Canadian Mental Health Association’s Ottawa branch, a major threat to mental well-being is that most urban and material of problems, homelessness.

“Housing is a huge, huge issue for people,” he said “And a big, big part of our work is getting people housing because how can you be well if you don’t have a place to live?”

Evidence suggests all is not bucolic splendour outside the city, either. A Champlain LHIN survey released this spring found the highest levels of youth stress, depression and binge drinking in the region in the rural areas of Lanark, Leeds and Grenville.

Still, taking no chances, I’m off to the cottage. See you crazies next week.