So it turns out that there’s more research to back up the foolish dreamy notion I had once upon a time. There’s a neat article on Science Daily today that draws a relationship between the evolution of cities and the evolution of the mind.

Of course, I don’t really believe that this is any more than us noticing an imaginary relationship that works more as a metaphor than some direct tie between cities and minds, but it’s a cool concept, and one that I’m fond of.

Ultimately, the research behind this article is talking about the interconnectedness of constituent parts of the whole. In both brains and cities, you have to have those bridges that join the various parts of the object into a whole, and more so, as they scale up in complexity, they require much more interconnectedness.

Again, I don’t imagine there’s some bizarre tie between how actual cities grow and how natural selection has directed our brains, I just think it’s a cool little analogy.

Jim