Can Architectural Features Help Your Brain?
Image: Icefields | Dreamstime
When traveling through space you use certain cues to help you navigate. Your senses help determine things like orientation, distance and direction. During navigation, many moments arise for decision-making and your brain is a key player during this process. Within a building, architectural features send signals during the navigation process. The brain uses sensorial cues to help you travel within an environment – providing you with enough information to find your way.
In the interesting article entitled Getting Lost for Better Architecture, occupants are said to navigate, interact and then form “cognitive maps” in order to understand location within space. This article describes how researchers tested human subjects by having them travel through a virtual building while recording their brain function. Ties were made between what the subject saw and their brain response to those signals.(1)
Such research is fascinating because findings reveal how humans experience space. For instance, this research uncovered that humans use the “angle of incoming sunlight” as a primary cue for navigation. Of course, within architecture this cue is often eliminated.(1)
You might wonder how occupants interact within their environment to find such navigational cues. For this, it is important to understand what goes into the mental mapping of an architectural space – forming a mental image of that space as it is experienced. Of course, a mental map is also a consequence of occupant decision-making during that experience. For this, we can also use virtual reality – to uncover how the decision-making process works within architecture in real-time.
Although the applications may seem endless, such research will definitely give architects greater understanding into how the human perceives architectural features. Findings are sure to be quite enlightening.
(1) Nelson, Bryn. Getting Lost for Better Architecture. MSNBC Dec. 15. 2008.
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Check out what others are saying about this post...[...] Maria Lorena Lehman placed an observative post today on Can bArchitectural/b Features Help Your Brain? | Sensing bArchitecture/bHere’s a quick excerptCan bArchitectural/b Features Help Your Brain? The “Extended Mind” Evolves With bArchitectural Design/b · Using Sound to Influence bArchitectural/b Experience · Experiencing bArchitecture/b Using Mental Time b…/b [...]
[...] Sensing Architecture» Sensing Architecture placed an observative post today on Can Architectural Features Help Your Brain?Here’s a quick excerptImage: Icefields | Dreamstime When traveling through space you use certain cues to help you navigate. Your senses help determine things like orientation, distance and direction. During navigation, many moments arise for decision-making and your brain is a key player during this process. Within a building, architectural features send signals during the navigation process. The brain uses sensorial cues to help you travel within an environment – providing you with enough information to find [...]
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[...] Can Architectural Features Help Your Brain? [...]
[...] The architecture which surrounds you influences your thought, and subsequently your behavior. Understanding this relationship between the environment and your mind is important – particularly if you are a designer of such environments. Your brain is not only hard-wired to interpret certain spatial characteristics in certain ways, but your mind also plays a role in how you make decisions based on those interpretations. All in all, architecture is a type of “food for thought” where your designed surroundings impact not only how you perceive that world, but also how you interact within it. [...]
[...] Movement by an occupant allows for a type of sequence, where they can capture architectural stillness through a series. (1) As sight, sound, smell, touch and taste senses are activated, movement helps occupants piece together that stimuli. [...]