Any time he has an airport layover, neuroscientist Satchidananda Panda pulls out his cell phone, activates the light-meter app, and starts collecting data. To passersby, it probably looks like he’s trying to get a better mobile signal. But he’s really adding to the array of more than 100,000 data points he’s amassed on light levels in different buildings. Panda, who works at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, is collaborating with architect Frederick Marks, a visiting scholar at the laboratory, to characterize light in the built environment and how it affects people.

Insights into how our brains process building contours and navigate spaces could some day help architects judge designs and fashion new ones. Image courtesy of Shutterstock/saiko3p.

But the collaborations between neuroscientists and architects, and their aims, extend far beyond the impact of illumination. “How do you build a space that optimizes learning in young children?” asks Thomas Albright, a vision scientist at Salk. “How do you build a hospital that optimizes healing? How do you build a work environment that optimizes efficiency? The hope is that neuroscience can provide some of the answers.”

The application of neuroscience to architecture remains in its infancy. No one has yet laid out all of the features necessary to design a building with direct roots in brain science, although architects certainly plan buildings with features meant to promote well-being. But Marks, a founding member and CFO of the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture (ANFA), believes it will eventually be possible for neuroscience and cognitive science to inform design with greater rigor. In the last couple of years, scientists have begun to accumulate data on how our brains process buildings and navigate spaces, by monitoring brain activity or even using virtual reality environments (1⇓–3). Although data thus far are preliminary, such collaborations could help architects judge designs and fashion better ones. “I think we are on the cusp of seeing a lot more interaction between neuroscience and architecture,” says Hugo Spiers, a neuroscientist at University College London.

Designed for Inspiration ANFA’s inspiration can be traced to Salk Institute founder Jonas Salk. While struggling to create a polio vaccine in the 1950s, Salk retreated to a 13th century monastery in Assisi, Italy. He later credited the town’s architectural and spiritual setting for inspiring his vaccine strategy (4). In 1992, while accepting an award for the Salk Institute buildings from the American Institute of Architects, Salk challenged the audience to apply knowledge about the human brain to their designs. It would be another decade before the movement would gain momentum. In 2003, the American Institute of Architects held its annual meeting in San Diego, a city brimming with neuroscientists, and that’s when a group of architects and neuroscientists set up ANFA. Research findings have already hinted at how the brain processes spaces. Certain neurons in the visual system respond to lines that are horizontal, others activate in response to vertical patterns, and still others react to the angles in between. Those neurons that pick up on similar contours tend to be most closely interconnected. Albright posits that this could explain why certain patterns, such as columns of churches or the near-parallel cables holding up many bridges, are easy for the brain to assimilate. According to fMRI studies, there seem to be three parts of the brain that light up when viewing a scene, compared with a face or other object, says Chris Baker, a neuroscientist at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland: the parahippocampal place area (PPA), the occipital place area, and the retrosplenial complex (RSC). Baker and others have begun to probe what each of those areas does. In a 2011 study, Baker and colleagues showed MRI subjects pictures of different scenes. The PPA seemed to respond with one pattern of activity to scenes that were “open,” such as a mountaintop, and a different pattern for “closed” scenes, such as a room or cave. Thus, this part of the brain seems to process the general layout and boundaries in a space, Baker concludes (1). As part of a 2011 study, researchers showed MRI subjects different scenes. The brain’s PPA seemed to respond with one pattern of activity to “open” scenes, such as a mountaintop, and a different pattern for “closed” scenes such as a room or cave. Reproduced from ref. 1.

Finding the Way The RSC seems to have a different function, according to the work of cognitive neuroscientist Russel Epstein at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. To explore 3D space perception, Epstein invited subjects to wander a virtual, video game-like environment. After that training in the video game, Epstein used fMRI to analyze the brain when he asked the subjects to remember specific locations in the virtual buildings. He and his colleagues observed activity in the RSC, which seems to determine how a person is oriented in a local space. The pattern of activity in this brain area varied depending on where the person imagined being in the virtual room—whether they were facing a door or a window, for example (2). “It’s one component of the larger neural system that allows us to orient ourselves in the world,” says Epstein. In another study exploring how people perceive spaces, Epstein investigated how the brain recognizes landmarks used for navigation. While in the MRI, University of Pennsylvania students saw images of the exteriors and interiors of campus buildings. Each campus building—even though the insides and outsides looked different—elicited unique patterns of activity in a person’s PPA, indicating that the students recognized those pictures as being from the same structure. “Maybe this area is important for recognizing landmarks,” says Epstein. In contrast, students from nearby Temple University did not show matching patterns for the exterior and interior of the same building because they weren’t familiar with the University of Pennsylvania campus (3). With more work, studies like this might be able to answer the kinds of questions architects have for neuroscientists, Epstein speculates. For example, what kinds of landmarks would be most useful to help a person navigate: statues, room shape, wall color? “I think there’s room for neuroscientists and psychologists to start to explain, this is the sort of environment where people would get lost, or this is the sort of environment where people would stay oriented,” he suggests.