Architecture and the Brain

RITA CARTER

This article first appeared as the foreword to  Architecture and the Brain: A New Knowledge Base from Neuroscience by John P Eberhard
(Published by Greenway Communications)

SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONS - from the first inklings of a discovery through to its practical applications – take time. Major changes in our understanding of the natural world typically begin like a late-night drunk tottering home by the light of a match. There are false starts and time-consuming detours, misread signs and lengthy periods of inaction
 
Neuroscience shuffled along for centuries before it took off. The scientific study of the human brain dates back to the ancient Greeks and a few philosophers of that time recognised that the brain was the organ of thought. But the notion that this unprepossessing lump of flesh could generate our entire subjective universe was slow to catch on. Unlike the heart’s vigorous pumping and the regular inflation and collapse of lungs, the subtle mechanisms of the brain were invisible and, until quite recently, unimaginable Even the most powerful microscopes gave no clue as to how the brain actually worked, so it was difficult to know how to study it. Anyone interested in human cognition and behaviour did better to study those subjects directly without worrying about their physical substrates, or even acknowledging that there were any.
 
In the 19th century, however, various heroic attempts were made to identify the physical location of mental phenomena. Franz Gall , for example, tried matching up bumps on a person’s skull (thought to reflect underlying “organs” of the brain) with their personalities. Phrenology, as his method was known, was nonsense, but the idea was not, in principle, so crazy - people with particular skills or exaggerated character traits really do have more tissue in corresponding brain areas. You wouldn’t know that, though, just by feeling their head. The researchers who discovered the first real correlations between brain areas and functions such as speech, understanding, memory and movement, did so by far more difficult means.
 
One was by opening up a person’s skull , prodding the underlying brain and quizzing the patient about the effect. The other involved finding the victim of a “natural experiment” – someone who had suffered brain injury resulting in a clearly manifested behavioural change – then waiting until they expired and examining the dead brain. The first avenue was open only to a few surgeons and the second only to those who were exceptionally patient. One of our longest and arguably pointless intellectual detours – Freudian psychoanalysis – probably came about because its originator found his original career as a neurologist such slow going.
 
Recently, though, neuroscience has found its feet and has been sprinting onward and upward at a breath-taking pace. The sudden acceleration and expansion of the field was sparked, in the early 1970s, by the invention of functional brain imaging technology. This made it possible, for the first time, to observe a living, working brain and to match its processes with the sensations, thoughts and behaviour of its owner.
 
The first smudgy pictures of working brains gave little hint of how far and fast this line of exploration would take us. Imaging machines got better, and their use proliferated like wildfire throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s. The corresponding growth of the Internet, and increasingly open access to others’ findings, allowed anyone with an interest to learn more about the brain in a few months than our forebears could have learned in a lifetime. Yet, right up to the Millennium it was common for commentators – even those who were themselves working at the cutting edge of neuroscience – to downgrade the its potential. They conceded that looking at how brains work might tell us something about the more mechanical aspects of human behaviour – what happens when we move a finger, say, or how we distinguish the sight of a face from the sight of a house . But it would never reveal the secrets of our more complex, essentially “human” faculties. According to the received wisdom, such things as the nature of human love, our sense of morality or appreciation of beauty are essentially mysterious, or at least too complex and subtle to relinquish their secrets through scientific investigation.
   
Increasingly, this view is fading . In the last few years neuroscience has provided intriguing clues to (some would say explanations of) experiences as diverse as empathy, religiosity, sexual attraction and aesthetic judgement. Very few people, in or out of the field, would now confidently declare that there is any area of human experience that will not eventually be correlated with the physical processes that underlie it.
 
Observing our brains in action has helped clear away some of myths and mysteries which previously shrouded the subject of human consciousness. In this respect the neuroscientific revolution has dovetailed with the cultural transformation begun by Darwin: where once we saw ourselves as something apart from the natural world, now we are forced to recognise ourselves as part of it: less divine spark , more awesomely complicated biological machines.
 
Science is not just about enlightenment, however. It also has the potential to bear fruit. No revolution can truly be said to have occurred until the knowledge it has delivered is put to use in some practical way.
 
John Eberhard was one of the first to envisage how neuroscientific findings could inform and enrich his own profession – architecture. In 1998 my book “Mapping the Mind” – a non-technical overview of brain research - was published in the US and I was delighted, shortly after, to learn that Eberhard had adapted it into a neuroscience course that he was teaching to students at the New College of Architecture in San Diego. I subsequently met some of these students when they were midway through the course, and had the satisfying experience of seeing how the relatively “raw” information about neuroscience that I had helped provide was being transformed, in their fresh and flexible minds, into a subtly new approach to design.
 
Essential to this approach is the notion of interaction between the built environment and the people who use it. This is not itself a new idea - the effects of the environment on behaviour have been studied formally by architects for a quarter of a century, and informally, one imagines, since our ancestors first fought for the cave with the best view. But until now environment-behaviour studies have depended on observing how people react to the built environment after it is built. In other words, architects have had to intuit the effect of their design, then find out later if they got it right.
 
Neuroscience allows that process to be reversed. It has revealed our subjective responses to the material world at a much more profound level than that of conscious likes and dislikes. Knowing about these largely unconscious reactions give architects the wherewithal to make better predictions about the effect of their designs, and to assess the effects in a much more detailed way.
 
Take , for example, the visual effect of a building. As Eberhard points out in this book, buildings have a very direct effect on our emotions. They can be depressing or uplifting, soothing, or surprising, welcoming or forbidding. Architects have always known this, and the best of them have had a pretty good idea about which particular features of the building produce these effects. What they have not known – what no-one until now has known – is why certain visual effects produce particular subjective experiences. What is that shape, that colour, that curve, that angle, doing to our brains? What is the process that turns the sight of one façade into a feeling of pleasure and the sight of another into anxiety? These questions are not purely academic because knowing why a particular stimulus produces a certain effect often points to how that effect can be enhanced or diminished.
 
Consider the way that we respond to the sight of other people. If we see someone dancing, our own toes start to twitch and if we see someone smiling at us we feel a sense of relaxation and the urge to approach them.. The reason for these responses might at first seem extremely obvious: we have learned what it feels like to dance, so the sight of someone else doing it “jogs our memory” and prompts us to do it ourselves. Similarly we have learned to associate smiling faces with pleasant social encounters, and therefore the sight of one leads us to anticipate another such encounter. In fact, brain research has shown that none of this elaborate cognition has to take place in order for those effects to occur. Our reaction to a dancer or smiling face is “hard-wired” into the brain and takes place even before we are conscious of the sight, let alone had time to think about it.
 
The physical mechanism that brings about our swift social symmetry is called the mirror neuron system. Mirror neurons are dual-effect brain cells. On the one hand they fire in response to the sight of someone else doing something, and they also  produce – or start to produce – that very same action in the person who is making the observation. Hence, when you see someone smiling , the mirror neurons which respond to the sight of the expression also start to contract the little muscles around your mouth and eyes which put a smile on your own face. This, in turn, feeds information back to other areas of your brain which generate the state of mind appropriate to the expression. So, through an entirely mechanical process, two people’s states of mind come to mirror one another. Neither has to have a single conscious thought.
 
The fact that all this happens unconsciously suggests that our brains can produce quite significant changes of mood by processing just one limited part of a stimulus rather than the whole context-rich scene.. The effect of a smile, for example does not depend on us recognising and liking the person who is smiling - we respond to the expression (albeit very briefly) even if it is on the face of Hitler. Similarly we might feel a few dance steps coming on when looking at an entirely abstract piece of art . Marcel Duchamp's famous Nude Descending A Staircase (1912) for instance, has been found in some people to stimulate mirror neurons in the area of the brain which is concerned with motion. As far as the brain is concerned the angular lines that make up the painting are interpreted – as the artist obviously intended – as a moving human.
 
As Duchamp, and many other artists have demonstrated, you don’t have to know about mirror neurons to know that certain patterns and shapes produce empathetic reactions in an observer. But now we do know it is easier than before to see what further research needs to be done in order to use the mirror neuron mechanism to reliable effect in building design. One avenue of research, for instance , might be to discover precisely which features of a motion-inducing image (such as Duchamp’s nude) stimulate mirror neurons and then to design architectural features derived from those features. Something similar could be done with an expression such as a smile – is it the angle of the mouth; or its width in relation to the rest of the face, or some other feature that – as far as the brain is concerned - makes a smile a smile? Having extracted the salient information, architects might then incorporate these features into their designs in order to achieve the effect of a “smiling building”.
 
I doubt very much that neuroscientific findings will never usurp intuition and inspiration as a guiding principle within architecture, and that may be just as well. But this book, and its author’s continuing dedication to the cause of introducing brain science to his profession,will, I am sure, soon establish it as an important tool. After centuries of alienation, art and science are starting to converge in all sorts of fields and John Eberhard’s initiative within the architectural world reflects the new spirit of openess and curiosity that has brought this about. It also marks the beginning of the second era of the neuroscientific revolution – the one in which brain research emerges from the laboratory to become a practical tool for the enhancement of our day to day lives.

© Rita Carter 2007 - ritacarter.co.uk