Emerging research suggests city life is hard on the brain.

Investigators believe the need to continuously process multitudes of fleeting but compelling stimuli can impair mental processes like memory and attention and leave us mentally exhausted.

However, retreating to nature, a calm environment or performance of yoga or meditation can help relieve the stress.

In some ways, it is helpful to have a nervous system on alert. Dr. Sara Lazar, director of the Massachusetts General Hospital Laboratory, says that “on a busy city street, it’s probably more adaptive to have a shorter attention span.”

Some people might say the stimuli that bombard us daily in city life are just a distraction, but Lazar said they could contain vital information, so we have to pay …

Five neuroscientists go on a rafting adventure to see how the brain reacts when in a natural environment.

Todd Braver emerges from a tent nestled against the canyon wall. He has a slight tan, except for a slim pale band around his wrist.

For the first time in three days in the wilderness, Mr. Braver is not wearing his watch. “I forgot,” he says.

It is a small thing, the kind of change many vacationers notice in themselves as they unwind and lose track of time. But for Mr. Braver and his companions, these moments lead to a question: What is happening to our brains?

Mr. Braver, a psychology professor at Washington University in St. Louis, was one of five neuroscientists on an unusual …

For people who have difficulty staying on task, intensive meditation may help.

So say researchers from several campuses of the University of California, who had 30 participants attend a three-month retreat during which they practiced meditation for about five hours a day. Researchers then periodically tested the participants’ ability to stay focused when confronted with a boring visual task.

That chore was spending 30 minutes merely identifying long and short lines that flashed on a computer screen. Participants were given this test at the beginning, middle and end of the retreat and again five months later. The study also used a control group of 30 people who were familiar with meditation …

The International News: U.S. researchers say meditation training may help people get better at focusing.

Researchers at the University of California, Davis, asked study participants to periodically take a demanding 30-minute computer test of how well they could make fine visual distinctions and sustain visual attention in which they intently watched a screen of lines to find and respond with a mouse click to the occasional shorter line.

The study, published in the journal Psychological Science, finds the participants got better at discriminating short lines as the meditation training progressed.

This improvement persisted five months after the retreat, particularly for people who continued to meditate every day.

“Because this task is so boring and yet is also very neutral, it’s a kind …