Do you have trouble studying if you're not in your favorite, window-facing armchair on M level? Do you prefer to work on lab reports in a D-level cubicle but like to study Spanish at Starbucks?
It turns out, your study patterns might not be random; new neurological studies assessing our architectural preferences show that the brain may "favor" certain kinds of spaces depending on the task at hand.
Findings about the brain's responses to building layouts could affect the architectural planning not only of houses, but also of public spaces like libraries and hospitals.
It seems intuitive that our location can evoke strong behavioral responses: A church or a synagogue with 90-feet vaulted ceilings will probably elicit a greater sense of awe than a more modestly built place of worship.
But can smaller environmental changes (say, an 8-foot ceiling versus a 10-foot one) affect our ability to concentrate in our environment? Would we study more effectively if B level were better lit? Had higher ceilings? Had circle-shaped desks?
The News-Letter spoke to Hopkins researchers and students to find out if where we are really influences how we act.
In an informal survey, students were asked where they normally studied and if they preferred a certain location within this study area. Perhaps not surprisingly, all the polled students said that they had a favorite "mini-location" inside their usual study environment.
For example, it wasn't enough that one student studied on C level - she preferred to sit at the large center tables. While variables like where friends are studying, noise level and the location's proximity to caffeine no doubt influenced these preferences, some students' choices were dictated by the location's light level.
A review of recent neuroarchitecture research in Scientific American Mind reported that not only does light make a difference in our ability to focus, but also the wavelength of the light can have a profound effect.
The brain's central circadian "clock," the suprachiasmatic nucleus, receives information about light level via special photoresponsive cells in the retina. These cells contain a photopigment called melanopsin, which is selectively excited by blue, short-wavelength light. This short-wavelength light tells your body that it's daytime.
Researchers have suggested that we harness our neurological wiring by altering our buildings' wiring: buildings could be outfitted with electronic light sources (LEDs) that emitted short-wavelength light during the day. Blue light, in conjunction with full-spectrum fluorescent lights, might help keep residents alert.
Light level aside, regardless of where Hopkins students like to study, about half of the polled students preferred to work on different subjects in different locations.
While it seems a little ridiculous to claim that science majors should do all their work in the darker, lower-ceiling levels of the library and all the humanities majors should descend on M level, recent research suggests that a building's ceiling level can affect how we think.
As reported by Scientific American Mind, a 2007 study at the University of Minnesota assigned 100 participants to either a room with an 8-foot ceiling or a room with a 10-foot ceiling. Participants were then given a list of 10 group sports and asked to divide the sports up into their own categories (i.e. "sports I want to play").
Researchers found that participants in the higher-ceiling room came up with more abstract categories ("challenging sports"), while the lower-ceiling room occupants had more concrete groupings ("number of members on a team").
The study's main researcher, Joan Meyers-Levy, thinks that because we feel less physically constrained in rooms with elevated ceilings, we are encouraged to think freely.
Intuitively, we probably knew this already. Take, for example, two buildings: the old Hutzler reading room in Gilman (Hopkins's former center of humanities) and a neuroscience lab in Krieger.
Pretend the ceilings of these two rooms were switched. It feels a little absurd, doesn't it? A neuroscience lab with windows and high ceilings - not only is it impractical, but it doesn't seem to match the analytical, focused work going on inside the lab.
One could argue that many of the things we are learning about architectural preferences via brain research are things that a good architect already knows.
"We have long known that architectural details of the environment do affect how we represent space," Barbara Landau, chair of Hopkins's Cognitive Science Department, said.
"Going back to the classic book on architectures of different cities by Kevin Lynch [Image of the City], we know that different layouts do seem to affect how well we get around, how we feel about environments, how we can get our work done in these environments."
Landau continued, "Frankly, I believe that architects and marketers - when successful - are tapping into their intuitions about what works best for human beings and their processing of information. Connecting these with neuroscientific findings is still quite loose."
Though Hopkins scientists aren't directly studying neuroarchitecture, findings about human visual attention and spatial cognition have implications for the field.
Steve Yantis of the Hopkins's Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences studies human visual attention using both behavioral studies and brain scans. Though it's unclear how much attention we give our environment while focusing on other tasks, we do know that we have two general modes of perception.
Yantis explained: "[we have] a rapid but relatively shallow comprehension of the overall structure of a scene - sometimes called the perception of 'gist' - and a more detailed, focused scrutiny of specific objects, features and events in a scene - this is attentive perception."
It is our "shallow" comprehension of a visual scene that affects our behavior as we focus on other tasks. "I have no doubt that your experience of gist - say, whether a room is tall and bright and airy versus small and dark - would have an effect on your perceptual experience of the things to which you are directing attention," Yantis said.
"It would require careful experiments and a well-stated hypothesis to really flesh this out empirically, however."
While neuroscience has a lot to offer other fields like architecture and marketing, it's possible that it will spend a lot of time empirically proving what we already "know": If you're cooking a romantic meal for your date, dim the lights in the dining room; if you want to cram for a midterm, crank up the wattage.
In his book The Architecture of Happiness, Alain de Botton writes, "It is easy enough to recognize when a room is properly lit and a staircase easy to navigate but so much harder to convert this sense of well-being into a logical understanding of the reasons for it."
Neuroscience, sooner than later, will help us qualify our intuitions about our environment and allow us to build better spaces to live. Until then, call an architect.
