Your brain at work.

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--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 my website mentioned 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."

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 if only a few office workers will step forward and offer up their brains to science.

Barbara Ehrenreich is a columnist for The Progressive. Her latest book is "Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream." Her website is www.barbaraehrenreich.com.