Original subtitles

[dramatic operatic intro]

[singing opera: in foreign language]

Well, music was part of my childhood,

really from my earliest memory.

♪

So I've always been interested in

the scientific aspects of music.

♪

Being in the fMRI for an experiment

was incredibly fascinating.

It was long. I mean, I didn't. .

I don't think I really quite clocked that I was signing up

for spending two hours in the machine.

It was extraordinary because, in my case,

this experiment had me singing,

imagining singing and speaking.

And the most powerful of the three was imagining singing,

which surprised the scientists who were looking at the results

but, in fact, ultimately they said,

well, it was because you're a singer.

So singing a second nature for me, which is true.

And imagining singing took a little more effort.

It was interesting to see how this oxygen in the brain,

how that shows on the results with the fMRI,

because you can really see where the activity is.

I've created a network now of scientists

really everywhere that I performed.

I also loved the idea

of bringing a performing arts venue together

or entity together with researchers

in the same community and they begin to collaborate.

And so I'm a bit of a catalyst for that work

and certainly an advocate,

which, for me, is an incredible gift.

♪

For years, scientists have explored neuroesthetics,

the link between the arts and the brain.

Today, neuroscientists and architects

are working together to explore a new link:

understanding how the built environment affects the brain,

and how this knowledge can help to build

a more beautiful world.

[operatic singing slowly fades]

[jaunty orchestral music]

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♪

[John] When you're designing something,

you're inevitably thinking how you're using it.

You're thinking what's it like to have a party here?

What's it like just sitting here and enjoying a book.

[fire crackling]

You're designing it for

all these various different occasions,

what it's like in summer

when you can fling all the doors open.

And what's it's like in winter

where everything is shut in with a fire roaring.

As a human being, you know,

you are such able to connect to architecture.

So that architecture in a way becomes part of you,

like it's allowing you to be what you need to be there.

And it's very strange, is such powerful.

[Martha] In my 20s, I went to live in Paris

and I felt right at home there right away.

Why did I feel more at home in Paris and I'm not French?

What's going on?

We are beings that are always looking for safe space

and the visceral qualities of touch and smell and sight,

the audio components.

I think architecture

is something in-between natural and human beings.

Natural is unlimited

and is basically something that we don't fully grasp.

Architecture is able to be just something in the middle

on that limited unnatural, and limited human beings.

And it is able in a way to bridge the gap.

[John] Architecture is a sort of language

which allows us to be able to design buildings

and, through that, design cities.

They are places in which

we all can live together amicably, happily.

Each society has its own language.

I mean, you go to Middle East, you go to China,

you go to India and you can see there's

a very specific language of architecture

which exists alongside the spoken language.

And he's all part of the culture

and the traditions of that particular set of people.

[Anjan] Built environment is any environment we're in,

which has been manufactured by people.

For example, being in a beautiful place like

the Grand Canyon would not be a built environment.

That was still have an impact on you, but

a built environment would be like this room.

It could be a church, it could be a temple,

it could be a hospital, it could be a school,

it could be a museum.

Any environment that has built. . been built by humans.

We're surrounded by architecture.

And it's impactful.

Just think of it this way. There are probably buildings

that you go out of your way to avoid.

Likewise, there are probably buildings

that you go out of your way to see.

[Martha] Scientists, political researchers,

advertising agencies, they've all studied the brain.

Whether determining which color pops on a billboard.

to which buzzwords trigger a positive response

from future voters,

the potential to integrate neuroscience into the arts

has been studied for over a decade.

Architecture's really lagging behind a little bit

in terms of the research that's been going on

in the retail world in utilization of patterns

that generate empathic transference of emotions.

And it's really quite important.

It's about deciding, am I going to approach something

or will I avoid it?

I believe the brain is the most interesting organ in the body.

Neuroscience is the study of the brain,

its biology, its properties,

what happens to it in health and disease.

And it occurs at many levels of organization,

from the properties of individual cells

and structures within the cells

to large-scale systems

that give rise to things like language and emotion

and perception and aesthetics.

I got into neuroscience and architecture

around 2005

when this was just an emerging field of interest.

And that started with

the Academy of Neuroscience For Architecture.

And we were pioneering a new discipline here.

We thought, gosh, if we can get neuroscientists

thinking about the spaces they are working in

and spending most of their time in,

then maybe we can kind of pull something

out of that kind of what's familiar to them.

You know, the thing is that I'm an architect,

I'm not a neuroscientist.

And I've realized that, uh, architecture

needed to be, uh, complemented by something else.

[Anjan] It's estimated that in most developed countries,

people spend 90% of their time within the built environment.

And so it has a huge impact on how we operate,

how we feel, where we spend time.

And so in the context of thinking of the nature

of aesthetic experiences as influenced by our environment,

architecture becomes an important piece of that.

We are seeing a fortunate confluence

of, uh, several independent currents that have been, um,

running along independently and isolated from each other

and they're coming. . suddenly coming together.

So neuroscience becomes this beautiful venue to say,

wow, here's this emerging field

that is offering us ways to better quantify

some of the qualitative aspects of the built environment

that we've believed for so long

that maybe we could actually start to define.

[Meredith] And our brain is a pattern-making machine.

It likes to make sense of things.

[man] When the sun comes up and you feel the warmth of the sun

and the flowers open up,

that sequence is known as a pattern.

[Meredith] We know what beauty is not.

we know that when there's

conflicting sensory information coming in

and that might happen within one sense like vision,

um, where you have sort of one pattern

being expressed in a different one

and the brain struggles to make sense of what's going on there.

And that creates confusion,

that creates stress for the brain.

It has to work harder to figure out what's going on.

Um, a nice analogy is- is when we think of- of music.

If you have one instrument

playing in a pattern that's musical

that's pleasing, we like that.

When you have two instruments playing

and there are different patterns,

there are different music, then the brain is conflicted.

It's trying to decipher both of them.

When you have two instruments playing

and they're not patterned, you have noise.

That's really stressful.

We do have to recognize that neuroscience

is opening the door for us to better try and understand

why things in the past may be resonating today

with the things we did last week

in a building that just opened.

Why might it be working and why is it not working?

Are there triggers that can be read

through reactions of the body

that could help us make better decisions,

not in such absolute terms,

but kind of hinting in that direction?

[Martha] Humans have sought shelter

for thousands of years.

Early structures continue to challenge archaeologists,

ranging from prehistoric Stonehenge

to cliff dwellings discovered across the globe.

Fast-forward a few thousand years to temples, shrines,

and pyramids constructed from man-made materials

such as blocks made of sunbaked mud.

The architecture of the ancient Greeks and Romans

is still visible today.

Symmetry and mathematical proportions were considered

while constructing classical architecture.

Brick, dome grooves and mosaics

defined the transformational Byzantine era.

Architecture evolved more swiftly as time progressed,

with noticeable style differences

defining the Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance,

and Baroque periods.

Rococo's elegance made way for orderly neoclassicism.

The 20th century saw an evolution of its own.

The asymmetrical shapes of Art Nouveau,

the elaborate ornamentation of Beaux Arts,

vertical lines soaring to great heights,

identified as neo-gothic architecture,

the sleek lines and Jazz Age ornamentation

defining the Art Deco era,

but everything seemed to change after World War 1

as the focus shifted to new and emerging technology

and modernism became en vogue.

[John] In the early 20th century, modern architecture,

as we call it today, was invented, I think,

for the best reasons.

People felt that they had all this industrial technology

and they felt, well, why couldn't this be used

to actually deal with a lot of the ills.

You know, there was such shortage of housing,

quality, that sort of thing.

Why can't we mobilize that industrial might

then we use it to solve humanity's problems?

[Tiziana] The idea of modernity comes also from the idea to,

not just build, uh, modern buildings,

but shape the life of the modern man.

[woman] We needed to rebuild after the war very quickly.

It was cheaper ways to build. We wanted to be mechanical.

We were entranced with the machines.

The amount of building that occurred in the 20th century

could never have happened, not in a short period of time

if it wasn't for that, but, of course, in doing that,

we lost a lot because all those techniques

that'd been developed for centuries,

all just got swept away and forgotten.

So the result was that things were being built,

which in retrospect now have ended up being

quite unsympathetic to human existence.

[Tiziana] And, of course, that idea to bring

the idea of modernity to everybody

made sense in a way to create something

that works for everybody universally,

but then later in the history,

it was easy to understand that that cannot happen.

♪

The Bauhaus School in Germany was considered at the time

and, still, today to be

one of the most influential schools of design

in the history of the world.

They revolutionized the way that architects

and planners and designers approach

the task of shaping the built environment we live in.

Modernism was about saying,

"There's nothing here of value.

Let's start with a tabula rasa. "

In education, that meant students come in

and they would say to them,

"I don't care what you learnt

from your parents or your grandparents

or what religious fash- faith you grew up in,

or what your intuition may be telling you

because that has no value. "

You should empty yourselves out of all of that

so that we can fill you up with the right stuff.

That makes no sense because if everyone was

emptied out and filled up with the same right stuff,

they couldn't innovate.

[Justin] A hundred years after the Bauhaus,

we are now at a pivotal moment in understanding the science

in a much more profound way and starting really a new era

in terms of how do we use information

about the human experience

to shape the places that we spend time.

[Martha] As architects embrace minimalism and function,

the term beauty all but disappeared

from conversation.

Beauty is a word that. . or a term that, uh,

many people don't like to use because it's so subjective,

but, at the same time, I think

beauty is a word that invites us to participate

and to- to consider, you know,

how is this potentially valuable to me?

You could argue literally forever, uh,

about an ind- an individual person's

understanding of aesthetic beauty,

but I think in the built environment,

you have to take it a bit more broadly

and profoundly than that.

[Melissa] When I walk into a place

and I immediately feel calm and serene

and I'm interested in staying there,

I think it's beautiful.

[Duo] Beauty is not dependent on the human things,

but anything that is described as "beauty"

is described through lens of being a human.

Beauty really is about the reason why we're alive.

[Tiziana] Beauty is being connected, for example,

to the idea of harmony and perfection of a building,

but at the same time,

some other theories have told that, uh,

beauty is connected to the functionality of the building.

If we think about the old saying,

"beauty is in the eye of the beholder",

that's not exactly true. It's not in the eye.

It's in the brain. Our experience of the world

is- is multi-sensory.

That experience of our senses coming together

and integrating happens in the brain.

Beauty is in the brain of the beholder

and our brains are more similar than they are different.

The question always is beauty of what?

And what the research suggests is that

if we're talking about beauty of faces,

people are really quite consistent.

People are consistent across cultures.

It turns out that infants will look at faces that adults

regard as beautiful for longer than faces not as beautiful.

This seems to be a core biologic response

to attractiveness in faces.

At the other end of the spectrum is artwork

and people are all over the place.

If you look at landscapes, people are pretty consistent,

not as consistent as faces.

And then if you look at architectural interiors

or exteriors, they kind of fall

in between artwork and landscapes.

And so one way of thinking about the built environment is

that it's a kind of manufactured landscape.

Right? So it kind of falls in between.

And the broad idea is that what we might refer to

as natural kinds, right?

So, faces and natural environments,

those are the things that our brains have really evolved

to fit with and so there's greater consistency.

[Justin] Every second, 11 million bits of information

come into our human mind through our five senses.

First of all,

10 million of that is coming in through our eyes.

So, of course, our other senses are important,

but humans, we're primarily a visual creature.

Of the 11 million bits per second,

only 50 of those bits are we conscious of.

So we are largely walking through our day,

walking through our night

experiencing the world unconsciously.

I hate to break it to you,

we evolved without buildings.

And the brains and bodies we have

arrived in a world expecting not to see buildings.

We're really about living in the wild.

[Nikos] Humans create what our neural mechanism

is hardwired to create.

And we create because we have evolved

to recognize patterns in nature for our survival.

[Donald] Mankind evolved in the Savannah of Eastern Africa

over millions and millions of years.

At that point, our brain structure was made up of

the brain stem and the mid-brain.

Those two components of the brain are

the emotional centers of our neurological structure.

Mankind learned that there were certain patterns

that were good for them

and certain patterns that were not good for them.

Those that discerned the patterns that were dangerous

and could take avoidance were the ones who survived.

Those patterns became ingrained in our DNA.

And if passed on from one human to another.

[Martha] How did the human brain become

the powerful machine it is today?

Typically, people think of the Pleistocene era

over two million years ago.

Much of the discussion has been around landscapes

and what type of landscape humans find approachable.

The first is referred to as prospect.

Humans feel a sense of safety

if they can see a considerable distance.

They are able to scan the horizon for any threats.

Well, a pattern that I like to refer to a lot is a broad view.

You can tell if bad weather's coming

or predators are coming

or even enemies are hiding out in trees.

If it's sparsely spaced trees and a big open view,

that's a pleasure-inducing pattern.

And the other has to do with sources of nourishment.

Whether that has to do with

the availability of fruits and vegetables,

whether that has to do with availability of animals

that one might be hunting at that period,

that there are sources of nourishment.

Those things seem to apply to natural environments.

And we think that they remain operational

within the built environment,

which is that people need to feel safe,

or whatever that constitutes safety in that setting,

and you need to feel nourished.

And we would speculate that nourishment can be thought of

in a more abstract way than simply,

can I get food and water?

Also nourishment for what it means to feel well,

to be well, which becomes, I think,

more of an issue in our contemporary society.

In our research, we found another variable

that seems to be important with the built environment

that is not as relevant with natural environments,

is something we're calling hominess,

which is when you walk into a built environment,

do you feel at home?

Does it feel like you own the space or are comfortable in it?

And you can have very beautiful environments in-

which are still off-putting,

or at least doesn't feel quite homey.

And that's a piece that we are finding in our research

that seems to be relevant

in a way that was not true for natural environments

because the notion of hominess doesn't really apply

in that setting.

Trying to lay out a framework for us

to start to think and start to do research

and empirically start to measure that

so that we can do a better job of creating places.

Places that are meaningful to people,

places that connect with them,

that are beautiful, that. . that make sense to people,

that people are gonna care about.

And you have to operate on that unconscious level.

If you don't, then- then you have no chance.

All mammals have those three responses to fear,

fight, flight, and freeze.

[Justin] The autonomic nervous system

supplies the information to our brain to process.

So the nervous system is collecting data

and then feeding it to our brain for processing.

And then the autonomic nervous system

is bifurcated into two components,

and these are inseparable

but opposing streams of information.

[Meredith] We have two systems, sympathetic and. .

and the parasympathetic system that, uh, work together

and is measured in heart rate variability.

And the variability is a good thing.

If we didn't have variability, um,

that- that might be a. . a case where. .

a. . a person who has- has Alzheimer's has no variability.

So you- you want sort of that- that- that balance,

that exchange, that variation between the two systems.

The parasympathetic system is that which is calming,

and the sympathetic system is that which is

kind of our fight-or-flight response.

It's what happens when we're under stress.

We get elevated blood pressure increase in heart rate.

There are some very important health ramifications

to those two streams of information.

So the sympathetic stream of information is stress inducing.

It elevates our heart rate,

increases our blood pressure, it activates adrenaline

into our bloodstream, and also cortisol.

So adrenaline elevates our heart rate

and stresses out our cardiovascular system,

compromises our immune system.

And some researchers have even found

that it affects the length of our DNA,

which is affecting the length of our lives.

On the other side of the equation is

the parasympathetic reaction, which is rest and relaxation.

So this is actually a pleasure reaction

which lowers our heart rate,

lowers our blood pressure,

improves our cardiovascular system,

improves our immune system,

and our overall sense of health and well-being.

So certain architectural patterns can generate

a sympathetic reaction or a parasympathetic reaction.

Just like how the Greeks have different words

to describe different types of love,

Emmanuel Kant said there were different types of- of beauty.

Um, and I think neuroscience is starting to parse those out.

And so, for example,

we have a beauty experience

that has a outcome where we feel calm,

where we feel relaxed.

But we also have beauty experiences that excite us,

Where we have a heightened sense of pleasure.

Maybe it's attraction to another person,

for example, and that's very stimulating.

There's a variability between the sympathetic

and the parasympathetic

and I think even where beauty is concerned.

The parasympathetic response is more conditions in which

people want a calmer environment

and the sympathetic is where people want

a more exciting one, right?

So if you're designing a sports stadium,

you don't want the parasympathetic

to be in ascendance.

You want people to be excited there.

You don't want everybody to be kind of sort of chill

and not so excited about what's going on.

So, I think it depends on the context of what the building is

for what- what the effect you are trying to create.

Homeostasis is a very important concept

to our health and well-being.

And it's bringing the parasympathetic inputs

and the sympathetic inputs into a proper balance.

We can't live our life under stress 24/7.

We know that's bad for our health.

Likewise, living a life that's all rest and relaxation,

while I'd like to try it someday,

is not good for us either.

It also is important in architecture

that we have strong moments of awe

and interesting curiosity.

What I want the leaves to do is to make you feel

that you are responded to in them.

That they take what you feel and turn them into something

that's 3-dimensional and desirable.

The panopticon was a. . initially a prison.

And it was a prison where it was like

a star and right in the middle was where the guards were.

And then on the radii

that radiated out from the middle

was where the cells were for the prisons.

And there were supposed to be prison guards

in the middle watching you at any given time.

So the panopticon literally means many eyes.

So it was a way of conserving with your guards.

So you could just have guards in the middle

watching everybody.

Of course, the prisoners couldn't really see the guards.

So the idea was that they're watching the prisoners,

but the prisoners can't see them,

which meant that they really need

to have guards there ultimately.

And so it's this feeling of being watched all the time.

And that, uh, that idea of the panopticon

was then applied to other things as well.

And that feeling that we're being watched

led to a sense of paranoia and to fear.

[Martha] For generations, the built environment

that surrounds us has influenced feelings,

fears, and a sense of identity.

But why is it important to take evolution

and the human mind into account and instead,

build for the humans who inhabit these spaces?

There are different things that make different people happy.

Right? And so that's again, comes back to, you know,

architects needing to recognize

that there is no one type of user

or individual or citizen that experiences our work.

[Tiziana] I react to spaces,

especially when I'm in a building which I really like.

It leaves me a feeling that stands for some days.

It's really something inside me, I don't know.

But I just loved the feeling of some kind of buildings

that are just well-designed.

I think when we say we love a place

it's because when we're there,

maybe we feel connected to ourselves.

Maybe we feel connected with other people in that place.

Maybe we feel connected with nature in that place.

Maybe we feel connected to the past in that place.

Maybe we feel a connection with the future

or connection with a higher being.

Conversely, when we say we hate a place,

it is because we feel disconnected.

[engine rumbling]

We feel alienated and we feel isolated.

When we say we hate a place

it's because we don't feel any connection there.

[Tiziana] An architect is really more than

just a functional space because we consume buildings,

we don't experience building.

No one is asking you in the church to be silent, you know,

but you enter in this space and you act in that way

because the building is designed in a way

that you feel that that's appropriate for you to do.

And the kind of architecture is really an architecture

planned to guide rituals, human behavior,

and really allow an experience of the building.

Because you're creating something that's public,

it has to have the buy-in.

And that's how people feel that they belong to a place

and it belongs to them even though they didn't own it.

Person-centered design is something that I've been

interested in from my earliest education.

Um, as an undergrad I studied both science

as well as archaeology.

So getting into architecture was a natural extension

because it's just archaeology in reverse.

In- in my mind, it's about studying people,

and behaviors, and culture,

so that we can design artifacts to support what they're doing,

to support their culture, to support their behaviors.

Design always starts with the person

and trying to understand their goals,

how they're performing and support that

through artifacts, through environments

that we're creating and constructing.

[Hans] We are not succeeding

if the people who use our buildings

are not finding joy in these projects.

They are not feeling as if they are, you know,

somehow fulfilled, buoyed, uplifted by our work.

[John] You need that language so as to make sure that

you've got something in the first place

that everybody can subscribe to.

But also you need to get across generational buy-in,

so that future architects

and future members of the community using it

all feel it belongs to them as well.

[Hans] And so, as we design,

we're also thinking in particular about,

will people who come to experience these spaces

that we help craft, will they come away with

a heightened or deepened sense of identity,

a sense of belonging?

Aesthetics is about all the senses.

And the visual tends to dominate

much of the discussion about aesthetics.

But when I'm talking about bridge aesthetics

because I was a bridge designer,

it's much more about being on a bridge.

The sense of slight nervousness that you feel,

the wind on your face,

the environment around you is moving,

there are boats moving.

[Colin] Humans are preponderantly visual animals,

we're a member of the. . the primate group.

And primates collectively almost entirely have brains

that are dominated by the visual sense.

Unlike most other animals,

we regulate our social lives by means of our visual sense.

So I know how you're feeling

based on the expression of your face.

I'm learning about the social context of my life

based on the visual sense.

It's not to say that. . that the other senses

aren't making a contribution.

If you walk into a room where there's a really bad smell,

you are likely to have a negative impression

of that room and a negative set of emotions.

We are actually reasonably good

at being able to process auditory information.

You can walk through a space with your eyes closed

and simply from the echoes of your foot falls

or even the sound of your breathing,

you can get some sense of the size of that space.

So we're doing space with our auditory senses

as well as with our. . our visual sense.

Why is it important to look at how

the built environment impacts people?

Well, because it has a big impact on us.

Long car commutes,

living in a small flat off a long corridor,

where you don't know who you're gonna meet

when you come out of that corridor

or where there are lots of intermediate space

that's neither public nor private.

Er, living in a polluted environment,

living in an environment where you're ashamed to live there,

living in an environment you find ugly,

living in an environment where it's noisy or stressful

or difficult to go about your quotidian business.

All these things are provably bad

for the amount we walk, our mental health,

and we can and should fix them.

This stuff matters.

[Nikos] Biophilia is the love of living things.

Human beings love plants, flowers,

we love our domestic animals,

we love other human beings on a primal level.

When we apply certain biophilic principles of design

to create our environments, then we connect to them.

Biophilia is this evolutionary perspective,

where, um, there's a suggestion

that people have evolved in nature.

And only recently since the Industrial Revolution

have we separated ourselves from it.

And so our bodies aren't able to adapt to

the new environments because it's such a recent phenomenon.

The first bit of research on biophilia

was very much in the health space in the early 1980s,

took two hospital wards.

One of the hospital wards looked out into a brick wall,

and the other looked out to attractive green space.

And they had enough data

that they're able to match patients from two wards,

of roughly similar age,

roughly similar socioeconomic status,

roughly similar levels of ailment.

And, again, you can probably guess where this is going.

Patients in the ward which looked out onto greenery,

they got better faster.

Fascinating, they stayed better for longer

than the patients who were in the ward that didn't.

And since then, there's been lots of subsequent research

that links, you know, greenery and what's not threatening

and places that you find beautiful

with better mental and physical health.

What always amazes me is why buildings

such as hospitals are designed to be such brutish places.

You'd have thought a hospital in particular

where people are feeling ill, feeling bad,

you really want to design them

so that they will uplift the patients.

And one of the things that we did

to the Defense National Rehabilitation Centre,

is that the client there came to me and said,

"Look, we want to design this rehabilitation center,

but we want to make sure that it's not just the medicine that

we're putting in there, but actually building a building

which is actually going to help, positively help,

rather than just be a nice place for people to be in. "

One of the things that we did was

to find a nice rural location.

We found Stanford Hall which was an old 18th century estate.

This was the first time that a client had come along,

who had actually acknowledged that the architecture

was actually going to help the people

who are going to occupy the buildings.

It's not the condition that we're relating to,

it's the person and the people themselves.

And it's really creating a sanctuary here

where the patients can find somewhere

within this whole complex

which is going to suit them best as individuals,

and at the same time provide, of course,

all that medical equipment

and to actually service their needs.

So again, it comes back to that whole idea

creating something which is useful, convenient,

but at the same time as pleasurable

and appeals as much as possible to the human senses

so that people can react to that.

Neuroscience is, I think, opening the door for,

er, architecture to become much more rigorous,

and also for people to change how they understand

the value of good architecture.

I think it is a real game changer.

We've been talking about this notion for years now,

the evidence-based design.

Beauty is not subjective.

What one individual person will say you can't predict.

Take a room of 10 or 100 or 1,000 people,

and you can predict growing confidence

how the strong majority of people

will respond to most places most of the time.

Evidence-based design, er,

actually came out of evidence-based medicine.

So using data and research to inform

how doctors practice medicine, clinicians practice medicine.

In our project at Sutter Roseville Oncology Center,

which is an outpatient facility for people with cancer,

some of the research activities we did

were to have focus groups with patients.

We built an exam room and a clinic out of cardboard,

and we brought people through that to test and see

what worked and didn't work.

We collect information at the beginning,

we collect their research to inform the design.

But we don't wait till everything

is constructed to test it.

We're always testing through the design process,

we're not just waiting till the end

and. . and you can't do much about it.

The Eating Recovery Center

treats persons with eating disorders.

I went into the neuroscience research

because I had hypothesized that there might be

an environmental correlate to the- the disorder

and- and that is indeed what we found.

For example, in persons with anorexia and bulimia,

they tend to overestimate their body size.

As a result of that, they also misjudge distances

between their body and another object

or a person or a wall or environment.

And so they have a different perception of space

or spatial cognition

than people who don't have the eating disorders.

It is important to mind that evidence from neuroscience

so that we could design the right spaces for them.

Some of the things we did was increase distances

almost by two-fold in the dining,

so that they didn't feel as cramped or as crowded.

In the human-centered design paradigm this is desirability.

And, and so for us we use user experience methods

to understand what people want,

and I think that's where beauty becomes really important.

So the fact that buildings are made by humans for humans,

but become inhuman and against the humans who are there,

become projections of the designer

over the rest of us as a statement of,

"this is important because I am important. "

The perception of beauty has been,

um, compartmentalizing our society.

The industry of creating art

does not create beautiful things,

and the industry of building architecture

no longer creates beautiful architecture.

So there has been a disassociation

from what the human body feels

to be beautiful in a biological sense,

from what is officially shown in the press as beautiful.

Though in making something that makes many people miserable,

that shows the perversity of the desire to control

over the desire to create.

[Nikos] We can go to the moon.

We have a roving robot with a camera on Mars.

Are we incapable of creating a decent office environment?

Are we incapable of creating a decent kitchen?

These are deeply ingrained prejudices in our society.

And even people who have not gone through architecture,

so they have picked up from the media

that this is the way things are supposed to be.

[John] When you design something

which is completely alien, completely your own,

and somebody says, "I don't like it"

and you say, "Well, you don't understand it,

that's why you don't like it", What can they say?

They usually just give up and that's the problem.

Working within something which is traditional

allows people to engage,

allows people to become part of it

and allows people to feel comfortable talking about it.

[Nikos] When you look at science fiction films,

sometimes you see things that are alien

and you know they cannot be alive.

It doesn't look like something that,

that can be alive even on Mars.

We have an intrinsic connection with what is alive

and what is beautiful.

This is the design disconnect.

We get. . we get into lots trouble for this.

So there are three or four bits of research

which show with pretty high level of confidence

a predictable difference between what, if you like,

professional designers and everyone else

prefer or generally say they prefer.

The first study I'm aware on this

was done by my uncle David Halper.

He was actually experimenting on what impact

repeated exposure to the same image has on your preference.

That was what he was trying to do,

but he actually ended up with different findings.

He was using faces and using buildings.

And he was doing on students because students are cheap.

And he showed, for different faces, to lots of people,

and he showed different buildings to lots of people.

Faces, you know, he got the response,

I guess he was expecting.

Buildings, he realized that the responses

were [indistinct] into two completely different subsets.

Subset Group A, whose favorite building was that

and your second favorite building was that

and whose least favorite building were those.

And there was Group B where it was literally the opposite,

completely averted.

So that got him puzzling so he had. .

he had further look at these two sets of students.

He found the Group A was the architecture students

and Group B was everyone else.

And then he looked even further and he realized that the longer

people had been architect students, the more divergent

they were from the rest of the student body.

The Hamilton Building of the Denver Art Museum

was really groundbreaking at the time it was built

because we had the technology to create

these new forms, these crazy angles.

And because this was new,

these forms hadn't been experimented with before

at this scale.

It was also a new experience for the museum goers,

for the people experiencing these crazy angles.

Some people began to report a feeling a sense of dizziness,

especially when they were going up the stairs.

What's happening there is a. . a disconnect

between what your- your eyes are telling you,

the visual information that you're getting,

which is these angles,

which is telling you that your position is not upright,

but your inner ear cells

where gravity is pushing down on them,

is telling you that you are upright.

So your brain is confused.

Am I upright? Am I not upright?

And the result is this feeling of dizziness.

The Hamilton Building though, if you look at the interviews

with the architect Daniel Libeskind,

he wanted a provocative piece for the city of Denver.

And certainly the intent of all art is not to be beautiful.

And in some cases it does intend to. . to provoke

or make people think differently.

There are other buildings that have been designed,

some of them intentionally to disorient you

like there's a building

called the Upside Down House in Poland.

And even while they were constructing that,

the workers had to take a break very frequently because

they would feel dizzy, they would feel disoriented

and it was really upsetting their systems.

Analogy is music.

So, in. . in Britain, there are, uh,

two main stations that play "classical" music.

There's one called Classic FM, which music aficionados

are a bit snooty about because, you know,

it's a bit predictable, a bit of Mozart,

bit of Puccini, bit of Williams,

you know, it's stuff you've sort of heard before.

Then there's Radio 3 which is no doubt

much more interesting if you're into your academic music,

which plays far more experimental music,

it plays the classics as well,

but it's out there pushing the boundaries.

And the difference is this,

your music taste or my music taste doesn't matter.

It's our music taste. Listen to what we like.

Listen to. . we go to the concerts we want to go to.

But what we build in the built environment does matter,

and it has an impact on the well-being

and the health of our fellow citizens.

So if people who have come to have divergent tastes,

no criticism, from the rest of the population,

if they're controlling what we build,

then we need to correct for that.

[Martha] So, how do we build for humans?

And how can neuroscience help us do this?

For years, advertisers have been utilizing technology,

examining how the brain reacts

to one color or font over another.

Why not apply these tools to the built environment?

[Colin] So we have tried as much as we possibly can

to adopt scientific methods

to understanding that relationship

between the built environment and human psychology.

And we've used

a range of different kinds of tools for that.

One of the cornerstones is what's called self-assessment.

We ask people when placed into a particular kind of setting

to reflect on how that setting makes them feel.

The other thing that we've ventured into

is the use of biometrics to explore the relationship

between human psychology and built environment.

I wanted to see how people actually use nature

within our urban environments.

I can actually study how people can be happier

and have higher levels of well-being and health

based on reducing people's stress levels

and improving attention

and then also looking at people's mood.

One big development in the field is, uh,

not only the miniaturization of some of these hardware sensors,

but also the fact that now they're wireless.

One of the monitors that we use goes on your wrist

just like a regular watch.

It measures your heart rate through your skin.

And we have two sensors that measure

your skin conductance

and basically these two electrodes

pass an electric current,

1/1,000 the amount of what you'd get

if you touched a doorknob and got shock.

The faster the electric current goes,

uh, the more sweat is on your arm.

And so that's going to show heightened sense of arousal.

One of the areas will be

a naturally restorative environment.

You're surrounded by trees, you've got a heavy tree canopy,

have this sense of being away from your everyday environment.

And then there's a street corner, high traffic,

was rated as least restorative urban,

really boring, plain buildings in front of us.

So lots of noise and not very interesting environment.

And then the last environment is this little courtyard.

The brickwork around the area

is really interesting to look at.

There's always lots of people walking through.

And there's some little hanging plants.

So not a lot of nature by just a little bit.

It's much more interesting environment to look around.

So we can see whether people were really stressed out

or rather they're really excited.

And so from there we can then determine what that signal

is looking like for the skin conductance

while as for heart rate,

you can measure the interbeat intervals

when your parasympathetic nervous system is active.

So you're resting and digesting situation,

then you're gonna have more heart rate variability

because your heart rate doesn't need to be so consistent.

While as when you're in a stressed-out state,

your sympathetic nervous system is gonna be more active.

And what we find is that you get much less

heart rate variability because your body

has to be very consistent because it needs

to make sure that when there's blood

that needs to go to your muscles

so you can run away from a bear

or something like that, you have that.

So when we're looking at that heart rate variability,

we're able to tell whether people are resting

or whether they have that, um, stressed-out

fight-or-flight kind of response.

So, traditionally, uh, biosensor research

has been very cumbersome, complex and costly as well.

Now it's easier to actually plug and play

all of these sensors and hardware together

so that the researcher can focus on

what's really important.

If we want to take this into the real-world,

we use something like these eye tracking glasses.

They have a tiny little array of

an infrared light emitters and, uh, cameras

and are able to track where I'm actually looking

in the scene in real-time.

[Justin] Eye tracking is powerful for our research

because it helps you understand

what is called pre-attentive processing.

In those first 3-5 seconds that you see an image or a scene,

it's that unconscious that's revealing itself.

And if you track a person's eye,

you'll know what they're fixating on

and that'll tell you what they are interested in

and attracted to look at an unconscious level.

It's a window into the unconscious.

And so one of our early ideas was,

let's take Boston City Hall because it's been the building

that had issues with the public with its reception

for over 50 years.

What we realized is that

people have a very hard time looking at the building.

They'll tend to look at other people around the building,

or they'll look through the building

because there are some areas in the building

where you can see light through the building

but don't really want to look at the building.

Whereas when you eye track the Old State House,

the 1713 buildings is a 10th of a mile away,

people instantly within one second

are looking right at the center of that building.

So some buildings are designed by design are easier

for our brain to take in unconsciously

without our conscious awareness.

[Justin] Eye tracking is only part of the story.

What we need to be very aware of is

just because someone's eye fixates on,

let's say a window,

that is suggesting an unconscious level,

that is where they want to look.

But it could be because they're scared of that.

And he wanted to look at it because they're afraid

and that's a trigger of flight response.

I think we need to do more robust scientific studies

that show how important eye tracking,

but also the other aggregated biometric measures

are to reframe architectural experience.

[Martha] In addition to tapping into new technology,

architects are taking a closer look

into the structural elements and patterns

repeatedly used by generations of humankind.

Our firm has been looking at a pattern

that has recurred worldwide.

We'd like to refer to it as a three-by-three pattern.

We started to notice that it wasn't just a western pattern.

It occurred on every single continent.

We actually traced it back to 5000 BC in China

which is pretty remarkable.

Why would this single pattern be recurring in every culture

on every continent

through almost the entire length of recorded time.

There are major examples of this pattern being used

to establish the geometry a famous points of architecture.

And these are spots that are revered by mankind.

♪

So I'm looking at the three-by-three geometry

for architecture, we refer to it as

left, center, right, top, center, bottom.

And basically the key idea here is that

there's a center with boundaries

and the geometry doesn't have to be rigorous.

♪

The center can be quite large and boundaries can be small,

can also be asymmetrical.

♪

We exalt the architecture and we protect it.

And the reason is because it's pleasure inducing and that

pleasure inducement is caused by the three-by-three pattern.

We are born looking for this pattern

and we go to great lengths to try to reconstruct it.

So when it's there, we will relax.

When that main idea is very clear

then everything else tends to fall into. .

to place pretty easily and harmoniously.

And that doesn't mean that there can't be

beautiful anomalies or deviation within that pattern,

uh, because a lot of times there are,

and actually you can celebrate them more easily

if the foundation is solid.

Three-by-three pattern can be used in any style.

Whether traditional, neoclassical,

Georgian style or contemporary,

or deconstructivist,

the human brain is just simply looking for the pattern.

I think there's genetic basis

to our ability to recognize shapes.

And I think the. . there was a very famous experiment

from last century called Lorenz looking at seagulls

and the way the newborn chick

could recognize particular colors,

could recognize patterns, could recognize the shape

of a hawk, so we have a genetic basis

for shape recognition.

When a child is born

65% of their neuronal structure

is dedicated to face recognition.

Darwin theorized that a child has to find a face

in order to survive.

From some of our research,

we know that people are attracted to symmetry.

In fact, symmetry can sometimes trump

some of the other values that we might manipulate.

It's more interesting to understand the symmetry

as something of parts that are balanced

from one part to another.

And there are connections between parts

and connection between parts to the whole

so that the visual weight of each single element

is contributing to the composition

to give you the sense of balance.

[man] There's something called the figural primitive;

two dots for an eye,

a vertical line for a nose,

and a horizontal line for a mouth.

We are born looking for that.

And it turns out we're looking for it everywhere.

Our whole lives we're looking for that.

There's a reason most old buildings look face-like.

Because it turns out more of the human brain is hardwired

to see and look for faces, than most anything else.

We're face a textbook a world.

So today you've got the chance to draw the picture of a house.

You can use felt tips or crayons,

it's up to you.

You can draw your house however you want.

♪

♪

Last year, I gave 19 talks.

I said before each talk,

draw a house as if you're a five-year-old.

Everybody drew a square

often with a pitched roof, they're not always,

and then two windows that suggest eyes

and then a door that looked like a mouth.

I was like, "What's going on here?"

They were drawing a face. "

The sociopolitical components of architecture

historically, right,

and what they say and how they may still be relevant today

is something we cannot deny.

And so the urge to focus

more and more elemental components of architecture.

And I think that's where proportion comes into play.

Proportion is- um, is one of the parameters

that has to do with the understanding of

the built environment from dimension and size

to when we perceive the external environment.

We try to grasp or understand some different components

of those elements.

And one of them is, for sure, size and measure.

[Hans] The sensibilities of how our bodies feel comfort

as we progress through a building,

move in and out from one space to the next,

that sense of shifting perspective.

Those are things I think they are more sensible for us

to lock in on, then actual aesthetics of the past.

Today it's very difficult to define proportion

because it's one of those words with the. . the lost meaning.

We use that word but we don't really know what it is.

But if you. . we try to just go back

and give even just a grammatical definition,

proportion is nothing more than the relationship

one-dimension to another in one single object.

[Hans] We see in our own children how differently

they perceive the environment today

as a result of the different elements that their brains

are reacting to and what somebody

may like and may not like.

What's appropriate and what's inappropriate today,

whether it's with how we dress to work or go to school,

but also what type of architecture in its formality

or lack thereof is appropriate.

These things are so dramatically shifting today

that we have to. . we have to always be careful

about what we choose to take from history

and apply it moving forward.

So what I'm trying to do is to approach proportion

in a 3-dimensional way, right,

because space is 3-dimensional.

But I need to add on the top of that perspective distortion

because what happens in the space is that we look at things

and they are constantly distorted.

I'm using the blocks which are the morphotheek.

Morphotheek is made of 120 pieces,

and each of them has a different proportion.

But when you start moving those objects

in different angulations you will see that

the object becomes less clear to you in terms of proportions.

And that's what in this specific moment I'm interested

in trying to understand our cold place,

two objects in different perspective or situation.

So let's see.

And now, the subjects will react

in terms of discriminating one proportion to another.

[Martha] In addition to proportion, there are

other mathematical tools found in nature

that are often applied to architecture.

The patterns in nature have very specific characteristics,

have definitive number of possible patterns

that are very few, that we see in nature.

Fractals show up,

first of all, everywhere we look.

Even if we look at our face, eyelashes

are essentially a fractal. It's the repetition

of something that's beautiful.

[man] Fractals are one of the patterns that we theorize

that mankind evolved with.

[man 2] Fractals is repeating patterns.

We see them in cauliflower and trees.

So the idea of these naturally occurring

repeating patterns is something that we are just drawn to.

[woman] Your brain is organized as fractals,

neurons make fractals.

And they realized that you couldn't have

the 100 billion neurons that you have in your head

with the trillion connections unless it was fractal.

No other geometric shape

would permit the amount of connections.

[man 3] And so we theorize that fractals

lead to a parasympathetic reaction

because we understand that it's safe and pleasurable.

[Nan] And I think that we need to get back to that beauty

that is inherent in nature

and is part of nature's intelligence

to remind ourselves that we too are part of nature.

[Nikos] Those organic forms

we unconsciously consider beautiful.

We see the beauty in an insect

unless it's- it's a type of insect that's gonna bite us.

We consider a lot of mammals very beautiful,

even threatening animals; lions and tigers,

if they're in a cage.

[low growling]

Out of an infinite possibility of geometries,

living things take only a very small spectrum

of possible geometries. This is incredible.

The question about the restorative properties

of nature is one that many people believe

and have a strong intuition about,

which is that if we spend time in nature

that we feel calmer and we feel more restored.

And as someone who likes the wilderness,

I find it quite restorative.

And the kind of nature-liking people vary.

For me, the desert in the Southwest

are where I feel the most at home.

I feel like, ah, like, I can breathe over here.

It's, like, big open spaces, clean lines.

Having said that, trying to get

decent scientific evidence for that is very hard.

And this is where I think

people's backgrounds might matter.

So if you're a child who grew up

in an urban environment like Philadelphia,

maybe nature is threatening, it's scary,

like, you don't know what creatures are out there.

Nature itself varies considerably.

The built environments vary considerably.

So if you actually wanted to construct

an experiment to test the hypothesis,

what are you comparing?

What kind of urban environment are you comparing

to what kind of natural environment?

And it becomes a very complicated proposition.

[Nicolas] Street trees are interesting one.

Street trees are no-brainer at one level.

If in doubt, plant street trees

is a good thing to say to a city council.

Interestingly actually, they're not statistically

a big differentiator between the best

and slightly less good areas because. .

they're not enough to save a really bad place.

So if you've got a really ugly streets

whether you have too much space to walk in,

ugly buildings, and false traffic,

planting a bunch of trees isn't necessarily gonna save it.

[Meredith] There's widely diverse variables in nature,

but they're all being attributed to

as if they were the same thing,

as if it was this common stimulus nature.

The outcomes are also very diverse,

but again, they're kinda being lumped together

as good, beneficial.

And I'm not demonizing nature.

The evidence is very robust that nature is good for us.

But without understanding

what about nature is causing a certain effect,

as designers we can't do a lot with that information.

[Martha] Today's architects are taking it

upon themselves to extend their education

and seek out new angles to analyze their work.

Many professionals are translating

their newly acquired knowledge into the classroom.

But what I find is young people are actually fascinated.

And they have no real biases about architecture,

what it should look like, really.

And they're just fascinated about learning

and there's an opportunity for them

to take the lead and use this technology

to start to find better environments.

I'm a dual degree student between the schools

of architecture and forestry at Yale.

So I'm really interested in how this applies

to green architecture in particular

and how these new findings from neuroscience might inform,

um, the future of green design.

Neuroscience is one way to help articulate students

about what great responsibility

they will have in their future professions

for the well-being of people who use their buildings,

who walk by them or spend hours and hours, uh, years,

er, within the- the framework of- of their spaces.

And so the more we can introduce

real-time ways of measuring response, right?

So VR, for example, right?

Is a very quick way in which you can start to help students

understand what they've designed

as they virtually move through the space and say,

"Oh, my gosh, this is what I wanted,"

or, "Oh, my gosh, I didn't realize,"

or "Oh my word, that's terrible. I need to redo this. "

It's not just about diversity and inclusion

of different kinds of people,

and their different traditions and ways of seeing the world,

it's also about diversity and inclusion

of intellectual and artistic traditions,

and seeing the value in each one

and thereby be innovative in a positive way,

in a way that supports humanity,

that inspires humanity,

and allows us to continue to thrive.

So the way that I met Dr. Chatterjee

was actually through my mom.

I had realized that something deeper was going on with her,

potentially neurological.

She kept asking me the same questions over and over.

So I connected with Dr. Chatterjee,

and he contacted us and said,

"You need to come back for follow-up. "

And at that follow-up appointment,

he diagnosed my mom with what we found out to be

early onset Alzheimer's.

My passion was always within the healthcare industry

and I thought, what a wonderful way to honor my mom.

Let's build a memory center

and let's take it a step further

and make it this really idiosyncratic place

where it's purpose-built.

We're thinking more about design.

We're thinking more about the experience for the individual

while- while they're there and we're thinking about

the experience for the family while they're there also.

And I just found myself in this really unique opportunity

where I could create my own space

and do something really im- impactful and meaningful.

An access point.

And the you can even. . you can even put. .

It grew into well, what can we do with Dr. Chatterjee,

beyond just the provision of care for my mom?

We're not worried about them getting lost,

that they'd always get oriented back.

They can keep walking, which is really nice. I think. .

He was really intrigued by this idea of building

from the ground-up, a memory care enter

and what that would actually look like.

I don't think either of us really knew.

I've added EwingCole and decided to bring them on.

And the project's evolved from there

and morphed into what it is today.

Working with a neuroscientist is new to me.

Having somebody like Dr. Chatterjee who. .

who, you know, understands the nuances of space

and the impact to memory, uh, it's just incredible.

To get a further level of detail

and understanding from him,

we can really create specific instances of moments

that will help these people

that are impacted daily with loss of memory.

And we will actually have a research office

and a bedroom there

so that if someone from my lab wants to be there for a week,

we can do that.

What we're thinking of doing is, uh, collecting

quality of life measures on the residents there,

but also two other things,

which is quality of life measures on the caregivers

that how do people feel about having their loved one

be in this place.

For the residents, we're always thinking about

safety is paramount. But then beyond that,

how can they live life in a more homey setting.

Something that feels less institutional, more organic,

more connected with the world around them,

and allows them to make decisions

without really consciously knowing

they're making the decisions.

We might want to look at their activity.

We know that movement is good for people.

How much are they moving?

Especially in the setting

where they have free range of the place, right?

We're- we're not gonna have any barriers for them.

What is the impact of that?

And to be honest, there may be other things

that we haven't even thought about

because there is no precedent for this.

And we're taking somebody out of their homes.

So how do we make them familiar with- with their new house.

The plan is kind of derived

from that notion of a central courtyard

and organizing it around it.

But doing it in a way that if somebody could get lost

but always find their way back.

A lot of interest has been within that.

The internal circulation of the courtyard

so that it gives people a place to move and kind of wander,

get lost, but then come back home.

So when I bring Dr. Chatterjee in,

when I bring Kevin in, or these guys at EwingCole,

or even the engineer, everybody has a different opinion.

So listen to them, integrate them,

let everybody collaborate,

and you end up with something really beautiful at the end.

[Martha] Technology is quickly developing,

helping humans to understand the brain

as they never have before.

Though the marriage of architecture and neuroscience

is just emerging, these new explorations

allow the start of a beautiful conversation.

Well, there's this paradigm shift happening.

It is happening, about really understanding

how humans work and what we need,

and it's going to impact architecture.

I think we've always known that architecture

has some strong relationship with people's well-being.

I think we understood intuitively

the importance of beauty

before we had neuroscience to prove it.

But what's helpful now is that for the skeptics

and for the people who need science to prove something,

it's almost like we're evolving to this higher level.

The urban environment matters

for our mental and physical health.

We need to empirically

care about that and understand about.

And the exciting thing is we are starting now

to have that public debate.

I think all of that, as exciting as it is,

is still at a stage where it's very much in its infancy.

There is a tendency for

the promise of biometrics to be over-hyped,

that we might think that it's simple and easy

because of the ubiquitous availability

of simple technology for measuring these values,

that it might work.

What we know from having worked with this kind of equipment

for about 10 years, is that there's a glimmering

of a possibility that it might actually

turn out to be useful to help us

characterize the human response to a setting.

But in most respects we're not there yet,

but we're trying anyway because you have to start somewhere.

I think it's important to say that when you decide

to work in between neuroscience and architecture,

and you already want to work

in the middle of the two fields of studies,

you really need to accept at one point

that you need to learn something, uh,

some new body of knowledge

that comes from neuroscience in my case.

We're at this evolutionary point in our history

where as a civilization,

we are asking those deeper moral and ethical questions.

We really are trying to get beyond the silos

of our disciplines.

To what extent can findings in my field

contribute to the design of places that can actually

enhance psychological sustainability

while supporting high density?

We need to respond to the people

who are going to be using these places.

And we need to study these people

and we need to analyze what's going on in their head.

And we needed to make that

a big part of the design process going forward.

And we need to take the responsibility as architects

who are willing to work with neuroscience

and architecture to really work in the middle.

We should not pretend to wait for neuroscience

to give us answers.

Clearly, architecture has ramifications on our health.

And we need to understand what are the forms,

what are the ideas,

what are the repetitive patterns

that support proper health and well-being?

My theory is that if you design to health and well-being

and you do it properly,

then it will lead to a recognition of beauty.

We're doing humanity a disservice,

particularly in a time where we have

all of the information we need

to prove that these things we're creating

directly impact how we feel,

how we eat, how we read.

It's not just creating something,

it's doing a service for people.

You respond to the patterns and designing

in the patterns through your visceral responses,

your. . your biological responses to the possibilities

offered by designing using the patterns.

And the result is a wonderful experience

that you feel biologically.

You feel subconsciously.

This has nothing to do with style

because our subliminal brain

doesn't care what style we're working on.

Its only cares is,

is it a pattern that will generate a pleasure response?

[Meredith] One of the things I hear from designers

since I got into this field is this concern

that the research is gonna dominate

to the point that design becomes prescriptive,

and they won't have that ability to be creative

or to have the freedom to design.

[Colin] It's a really complicated question

as to how far one should take evidence that pertains

to people's innate or intrinsic responses to environments

with respect to codifying the principles of good design.

So if, for example,

it's discovered that. . that round doors are the best doors

for psychology and doesn't make sense to make code and say,

"Okay, from here on, all doors shall be round. "

There are so many different ways

to think about that question.

As a scientist, I might say, well, of course,

if I discover that round doors are the best doors

for human psychology, then why on Earth not?

Why on Earth not do that and always have round doors?

Further to that argument, I might also say that

if you think about what a building is,

the objection to having round doors forevermore

might be that codifying a principle like that

takes away from the creativity of the designer

to make whatever design they want.

The counter to that is,

although building may be a piece of art,

a building is not just a piece of art,

it's a piece of art that needs to be used for humans.

There's a social responsibility to design a building

in such a way that it's good for us.

But overlaid on that is so much variability

that has to do with experience and culture

that you could never come up

with a way of codifying all of that.

Um, nor would you want to.

Um, the richness of architectural experiences

that we have to allow that kind of variability.

We have to allow the artistic impulse as well as

having the grounding in good science

to build a successful building.

I think it would be a mistake to think that neuroscience,

the kind of research I do is going to tell architects

what the right answer is, right?

That I think would be just a. . a mistake

to even think about it that way.

However, I think what we might bring to the table,

uh, for example, is, uh,

what our very early research suggests is

that there are these three-dimensions,

coherence, fascination, and homeliness

that we think varies independently,

that we have some evidence that our brain is responsive

to these three parameters.

When you're designing something,

you should take those into consideration.

I think the idea is that we can maybe offer some principles

that then becomes part of the architect's toolkit

that they can then choose to use

based on what they are trying to accomplish.

What is important is really trying to understand, uh,

how neuroscience in the. . in the specific case can help us

to be more aware of what are the necessities

all by this human beings.

[man] Anybody who's in a design profession,

whether it's architecture, urban planning,

urban design should be quite familiar

with a lot of the ideas that we've been discussing.

I think there's rising awareness

of the importance of this stuff.

It's a game changer for the profession

and for our communities.

And the quantification that neuroscience offers,

I think is- is here to stay for architecture.

We are at a point where we can't remain in our silos.

We need to have expert knowledge

as designers, as architects,

but we also need to work together with other people

who have the expert knowledge

in their field and in neuroscience,

in cognitive science, in computer science.

It is important to move past neuroscience

and architecture to neuroscience of architecture.

So I think whereas we get better

at understanding those neuro-signals,

the goal is that we will be able to then,

uh, start to do experiments in the field. Right?

You say, "Okay, someone walks into a gaudy cathedral,

what are the neural signals that are coming out of that?"

And that's something we have not been able to do,

but hopefully, in the next five years,

we'll become part of our armamentarium.

It really is, I think, our mandate

and our privilege to intervene in the built environment

in a way that supports people to thrive.

Not only to survive.

[Colin] It's important to build for people

because what else is the built environment for

other than to support the activities

and emotional lives and successes of human beings.

What else is there?

[Nikos] The tipping point will occur

when a client goes to an architect and they will say,

"I heard about this biophilic design and neuroscience

and patterns from somewhere I read

on the Internet, can you do it?"

[woman] There's this paradigm shift in understanding

that we now have the tools to really see

how things impact us, how buildings impact us,

and we'd be foolish not to look at.

It is the same as hearing a great piece of music

or going into a museum and looking at great art,

I have the same gratitude

and extraordinary moment of appreciation for beauty

that I have when I'm in a beautiful building.

[woman] It has to work, it has to support health,

has to support well-being,

but also has to be loved and desired

by its users and then has to be beautiful.

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