Cubicles and Brain Death

One of my big fears while I was researching Bait and Switch was that I would never find a job. The other, which I hesitate to admit, was that I would find a job and that I would be forced to work in some kind of soul-crushing physical environment -- a cubicle or a windowless office. I’ve been in offices -- insurance companies, title companies, or just to visit working friends -- and felt this terrible weight of blankness and despair. Sure, I work in my own “office,” but it looks out on trees and my desk faces a poster-sized image of Eagle Nebula as seen through the Hubble telescope, which is space enough for me.

I felt my aversion was more than a little neurotic. After all, people work in standard-issue offices every day, and very few of them take up automatic weapons against their colleagues. A visitor to the forum on this website mentions the horror of his physical work environment, but only as seen through the eyes of his more free-ranging wife:

. . . my wife visited me at my work a few years ago, so I gave her a brief tour and then we went for lunch. She was honestly horrified at the environment -- a maze of cubicles -- she is of course used to being in an open classroom -- she felt sorry for me. She did not understand how I could ever put up with it. (The cubicles were actually nicer than most of my career).

But a recent article in the new pop-science magazine, Seed, makes me think that our office environments may be more damaging than I suspected. The article is about neurogenesis, the generation of new neurons within adult brains. According to longstanding neuroscientific belief, this is impossible: Neurons cannot regenerate, and we are stuck with the number we were born with, minus those lost to alcohol or Alzheimer’s. Princeton psychologist Elizabeth Gould has shown otherwise: Neurons can regenerate. The reason this hadn’t been observed before is that the animals studied lived out their short lives in plain laboratory metal cages.

Gould studies little rat-sized monkeys called marmosets. Put them in metal cages, kill them, and slice their brains for microscopy, and you find very little neurogenesis. But if you let them live in an “enriched enclosure” -- the marmoset equivalent of Versailles, featuring “branches, hidden food, and a rotation of toys” -- neurogenesis kicks in, along with an increase in the number and strength of synaptic connections.

Another scientist, Fernando Nottebohm, working at my alma mater, Rockefeller University, has found a similar effect in birds. Keep finches and canaries in metal cages and you get listless, tuneless, birds with equally dull brain tissue. Only when studied in the wild do the birds sing and, not coincidentally, generate a profusion of new brain cells.

Stress also inhibits neurogenesis, and the Seed article emphasizes the possible implications for the effects of poverty on human brain structure. Early trauma from, for example, separation from parents, could lead to lasting neurological deprivation. But the article leaves hanging the social implications of the effects of “boring” environments. Boredom may constitute a form of stress, but it is not the same thing. In fact, the home environments of the poor are often overly “enriched” through sheer crowding, at least compared to the spotless, largely empty, motel-like, interiors of the upper middle class.

My guess is that boring, nature-free, environments take their toll on well-paid office-dwellers and minimum-wage factory workers alike. Add stress to boredom -- the deadline is at midnight! lay-offs are coming! -- and you have a recipe for rapid brain shrinkage. I think I can prove this too, if only a few office-workers will step forward and offer up their brains to science.

Comments

[Robert S. Robbins]

I just lost some brain cells from reading your boring editorial.

[Jacqueline]

Barbara, I think you may be onto something here. I always had another theory about the structure of cubicles and whatnot in offices (white collar ghettos is more like it) of today. Namely, the cubicles serve to isolate one somewhat from one's officemates to discourage any fraternizing and "non-work" related discussions. I believe that the reason such is discouraged is because the management gurus know that keeping the working masses semi-socially isolated will help keep down the possibility of the workers from social interaction and all that such may bring about. Like you, my "office" is in my house as a self-employed property & casualty insurance agent. Unlike my better-paid peers at Erie Insurance Exchange, Blue Cross etc, I have the ability to look out my windows to see my lilacs and roses, the weather, and my husband's managerie of junk cars he once dreamed of restoring (a classic Crown Vic and a 1957 Chevy Sedan Delivery). I am able to talk to whomever I want to without fear of reprisal. I do not have to worry about someone reporting me to my boss for stopping to chit-chat with the UPS guy. I was once busted by the FedEx guy eating my breakfast at my desk and he said jokingly," Does your boss know about this?" to which I responded "Oh yes, and I have her permission - since I am the boss".

I do not feel as much like an undervalued cog in the wheel where many of my peers do. Therefore I believe this is why I dare to think more. Nobody is telling me I can't.

[Hattie]

I'm sorry you are so easily bored, Robert. Hope you find a job soon. Unemployment is Hell. Worse than cubicle life, really.

[Nige]

"After all, people work in standard-issue offices every day, and very few of them take up automatic weapons against their colleagues."

I love this line, I think it says it all. goning to be my new screen saver.

[Vicky]

I've always known my creativity dries up and dies on me when I'm in an office job - so I guess this is why. Maybe I really should think about Giving It All Up For My Art instead...

[Sharon]

I was a software engineer for over 20 years, and spent the last 10 of those in cubicles. (Before that we used to get offices.) I recently switched careers and now go to school and work part-time in a library, out on the main floor next to the public computers. A few months ago I interviewed at a publishing house that needed contract help to index their on-line collection. They worked in very small 4-person "pods." It was positively claustrophobic. I never went back. I hope I never again have to work in such a deadening environment.

[Madeleine]

I worked for 2 months at a government job. The pay was low, the health benefits great and the isolation, loneliness and boredom were crushing.

When a job with less pay and far less job security opened up, I jumped at it. Wow! the benefits aren't much but am I glad I made the move. It has made all the difference.

[anonimouse]

Government work can drive any productive person to insanity. Just think of our tax dollars going to waste on all those can't be fired for doing nothing civil servants. Of course, you do get a raise every year regardless of your performance (with low expectations, achieving goals is easy for a civil servant).

Not to say that public companies don't waste money, but they get punished.

[Paul]

I worked for many years in cubicles, as they shunk smaller and smaller. I used to joke that a prison cell was bigger than my work cubicle. In fact, when I used the washroom, I always used the handicapped stall, because it was bigger than my cubicle.

[Chuck]

I'm jumping into the conversation a little late, but felt compelled to respond to anonimouse's comments regarding "can't be fired for doing nothing civil servants." I worked for the Internal Revenue Service for over seven years; I currently work for a Fortune 200 Insurance Company. It's been my experience that civil servants actually work harder than corporate employees. Of course there are federal employees who "do nothing", but an equal number of "do nothings" are found in the cubicles of Corporate America. In the corporate world, a lot of time and effort is wasted trying to "justify" one's job. All of this busywork provides a false impression that these workers are actually productive. Civil servants should be given the same respect as any employee of a large organizaton. Some are productive, some aren't, but the idea that corporate employees are more accountable just isn't true.

[surdofly]

Those cubicles ARE getting smaller. One year temping in a Swiss investment bank in London I was seated beside two fulltime Auto CAD operators, one a fully qualified architect. Their sole function : go from top to bottom (basement carpark upward, skipping the oak panelled corridors of power of course) of all company buildings, floor by floor, tweaking and maximising floor plan designs to fit more people into the same ammount of space.

[Sher]

I nearly teared up when I read the first paragraph. I share that same dread paradox: will I ever find a job vs. will I get hired at a claustrophobic office.

I work as a temp sometimes to compliment my regular part time work as a church secretary. (This is what my college AND university educations have gotten me. I have ended up in the very job I described to my mother as "hell on earth" when I was 16.) anyway...
Some of the offices I've been sent to temp in are just so... so... festering? blank? pointless? boring? Pick your adjective.

It's good to know I'm not alone in feeling like I'm crazy for NOT wanting those jobs. I too look at the people who do them and think, "now, is there something fundamentally wrong with me... or is it them? Or is it just that this world needs both types of people?"

[AF]

I was a Software Engineer for about eight years. When I was getting ready to quit, I said to somebody that I knew this was an exaggeration, but I felt like the job would bring on my early death. And it would be death through some sort of starvation - I couldn't put my finger on it, because I was decently paid.

Then I went to work in small newspapers for very close to nothing. The offices were messy and well-worn, had bulliten boards overflowing with old photos and articles, papers stacked in all corners of the room. These offices had life.

So glad to hear about the bird and marmoset studies, I wasn't crazy.

[mark]

Thoreau said... "Birds do not sing in caves."

Great article, Barbara.

[bh]

I'd like to get at the correlation between the points made in this post and those made in some of your other writings about the decline in both wages and hirability/accessibility for the college-educated job-seeker since the 1990's. I am a 25-year old, debt-free (thanks to scholarships), financially independent person with a BA from a very highly praised university, and since graduating in 2003 I have worked a variety of jobs that fall quite cleanly in one of two very undersatisfying categories:

One job is for a potentially stimulating or creatively/intellectually engaged organization, usually a start-up with no money and other young employees, low-earning ($10/hour or less), under the table (neither the company nor myself is reporting income taxes because we simply can't affort to), no benefits.

The other job is a slightly higher-earning ($15-$20/hour) administrative job with full benefits, attached to a major company or state-funded umbrella (like the state university where I work now), excruciatingly boring, often in a cubicle, bound by senseless bureaucracy and wasted potential.

In the first kind of job, the concession is financial exploitation of your talents. The nagging, anxious refrain of "I went to school for this?" follows you around all day long as you push the bankrupt dreams of other demographically similar, college-educated people and collect $170 a week in cash, praying that you won't get hit by a bus on your bike ride home from work because you could never afford a trip to the ER on this salary (much less a monthly pass for the subway.)

In the second job, the one that rings truer to this cubicle manifesto, the concession is the incessant boredom and the lack of challenge, coupled with the squelching, windowless atmosphere. Sure, I have health care now, but should I have to block my brain's regenerative capability and rob myself of intellectual engagement as a price for a "more secure" bike ride home?

At this point, with the slew of convincing journalism devoted to the ever-worsening situation for people like me, and the fact that the formative set of years that have overseen the development of my political conciousness have been resided over by both George W. Bush administrations, I see absolutely no light at the end of this tunnel. I went on graduate school interviews this year where department chairs at top university programs (I mean like top 4 or 5 in the country) were actually advising me NOT to go into my chosen profession, and to stick with my current university research job and just hang on to my benefits, for the love of god. It's much safer for me there.

And here is where I think the two problems coincide. It is not merely that cubicles are boring and BA's are worthless; it is that people like me are literally being encouraged to shirk intellectual growth for the "stability" of a cubicled death.

In both the financial actions of the job market and the implications of professional intellectuals at top universities (whose tenures have aparently cost them their belief in human potential and love for their subjects) the clear message is "be safe, stay inside, don't grow."

It's awful that this fear of falling has crept in so far, into the university and everywhere else. What is my incentive, when my heroes are telling me I should stop now, accept mediocrity and be thankful for it?

[Deborah]

The entire problem could be solved with Universal Health Insurance. We could all then stretch ourselves intellectually and perhaps compete again.

[Robin]

Has anyone seen the new toys-in-a-box at the chain bookstores, marketed as "Pimp My Cubicle?" It's basically desk toys and computer décor, but as a connisseur (conniseuse?) of desk toys, I definitely recommend it for beginners who seek to stave off brain-shrinkage through nomadic cubicle interior design.

[Patti]

The marmosets with the "enriched" environments still get killed and have their brains sliced up.

[Damon Barfield]

I have been in the office furniture industry for over 20 years. I design office layouts and sell office cubicles.

Visit-
http://www.cubiclesales.com

Most of my clients are happy with their cubicles as opposed to the 1960's desks, lined up in rows and columns of 5 or more, they have been sitting at for the past five years. Now they have a place of their own with shelving, storage, and privacy.

I think most people want to be alone so they can be productive and get their work done. When they are lonely or wish to speak to someone they just step outside their cubicle.

[Jonathan]

Neurons being regenerated. That's a pretty fundamental thing to have been missed for all these years.

Here's something to consider. Much of our understanding of biology and medicine comes from experiments involving animals held in the bleakest conditions of unhappy captivity. You have to wonder the extent to which that's skewed our understanding across the board. It's like trying to arrive at a balanced understanding of human organisms by studying only concentration camp inmates. It's a measure of the erosion of our basic common sense that any of this comes as a surprise.

[Ron]

I've worked in IT for 16 years, and always hated the dehumanization symbolized by cubicles. Then I left to start an internet retail business with my wife. It has been wonderfully freeing in every way. Could it be the only answer is to leave behind the false sense of security of large corporations? Start your own small business; or at least find a good small business to work for. It is the way life used to be before the industrial revolution and the way it could be again. Large corporations don't even offer job security anymore. Why do we continue to allow them to dehumanize us?

[Barbara Saunders]

Several years ago, I volunteered to deliver Thanksgiving meals to elderly people living in "the projects." I was struck with a feeling of familiarity as soon as I entered the gates of the grounds. It was just like my office -- bleak, gray, purposely ugly.

I believe this is intentional, actually. A mind-numbing and ugly physical environment combined with enforced sedentary days leads to moral numbness towards the work and apathy towards one's own life. I quit my job soon after.

[L K Tucker]

You are missing a key piece of information. Cubicles were the outcome to solve a problem with the physiology of sight and open plan office design.

Herman Miller Inc. introduced the 'Action Office 1' in 1964 but by 1968 they had to modify that first design. They introduced the 'Action Office System' and the first cubicle.

Why? Knowledge workers using that first prototype had begun to have mental breaks.

Cubicles block side or peripheral vision for a concentrating worker preventing Subliminal Distraction exposure.

Crowded business offices could not exist without Cubicle Level Protection.

[DP]

Wow, bh, your post in 2006 is quite eloquently stated. It does seem that everyone pushes the "safe" cubicle existence on us. I am a Software Engineer and I have worked in a cubicle for far too long. I've worked in large and small companies, government and private corporations. I always do an excellent job wherever I am but I always leave after I do a few large projects for a company/department because I can't stand sitting in the same cube for over a year. Every place I have been always gives me a good reference and wants me to stay but they never realize ,before it is too late, that creative people want more in life than four gray walls and an array of computer screens. It wouldn't be so bad, but the baby boomers currently in charge seem to expect that we constantly sit at our desks and produce code. They don't realize that most of the time we are so horrified from being in an office that we get nothing done during the day besides getting software requirement specifications from coworkers (that doesn't take all day). Most of our breakthroughs come after we've had time to walk around, relax and think. After that, the real work is done on a remote connection from home. It seems that every place has exactly the same mentality when it comes to office space and employees. From what I've read of these posts, the most unsatisfied people in cubicles have creative jobs as well. I don't think it's true that sitting in a dull office environment alone causes brain damage because we are often stimulated by the work we do. However, we do hate cubicles because we are creative people that don't need bosses or the typical office environment to do our jobs effectively. Don't stick us in cubes or mandate specific times when we are supposed to produce code. Give us some freedom or I'm just going to go start my own company and compete with you (I'm going to do that anyway).