How Neuroscience verifies Design Patterns, Biophilia, and the - PowerPoint Presentation

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How Neuroscience verifies Design Patterns, Biophilia, and theMathematical rules for Healing Structure

Nikos Salingaros, Neuroscience & Measuring the Experience of Place, Stockholm, Sweden, September 22 - 24, 2017Slide2

Evolution hard-wires usHuman and organismic evolution adapted us to recognize and seek specific patterns and structures that are essential for our health and wellbeing. Special mathematical patterns originally triggered the evolution of our neural system to profit from them.

Therefore, our normal neural responses instinctively privilege those patterns.Slide3

Our internal patterns influence usOrdinary people try to add to the healing effects of the environment, using their intuition. As already argued by Ary Goldberger in 1996, what we create reflects the structure of our brain.

But this is only true for unselfconscious creation, which relies upon direct human feeling and feedback. Slide4

Special mathematical patternsFractal scaling = similarity under magnification; Similarity at a distance = symmetries; Convex spaces;

Vertical symmetry axis;

Complexity that is organized via symmetries, etc. Slide5

Higher-level patternsChristopher Alexander’s “15 Fundamental Properties” are geometrical and scale-free.Alexander et al.

’s “Design Patterns” exist on the architectural and urban scales.

Design Patterns combine geometry with social function, as discovered in healing environmentsSlide6

Biophilia: two distinct componentsThe healing effect from intimate contact with living biological forms, views from windows onto plant life and human beings, and urban spaces that optimize encounters among users.

Mimicking in our created structures the mathematical processes that generate biological forms — organized complexity produces ornamentation. Slide7

Research objectivesPropose experiments that confirm or disprove the human need for specific geometries and mathematical organizational principles in our world.

Discover those principles.

Confirm special geometrical preferences in our environment that were derived much earlier using mathematical arguments from information optimization.Slide8

Fight-or-flight responseIndices of our physiological state and cerebral responses ought to show either healing or fight-or-flight responses to objects, spaces, and environments. Performing these measurements should be straightforward (except for one serious complication, explained below). Slide9

Pool of experimental subjectsIt is important for key experiments to identify the neurological responses of common people as a baseline.Only after that is established, test the complex and contradictory responses from the modified brains of trained architects. Slide10

Traditional and vernacular architecturesBefore the dominance of modernism and its political design ideology, traditional architectures were laboratories for neurological testing. The healing results are embedded in historical and vernacular built forms.

“Design Patterns” are discovered as the design foundation of those structures. Slide11

What do we expect to validate?I can predict to a great extent what unbiased neural response experiments are going to validate. Healing architectural typologies include traditional and vernacular buildings, and Classical traditions of every country and culture such as African, Chinese, Greco-Roman, Islamic, Japanese, etc. Slide12

Confirmation bias is a problem!Neuroscientists rely upon architects to help them structure experiments that measure human responses to environments. But architects already state the “correct” finding; hence confirmation bias invalidates those experiments.

Many studies where neuroscience is applied to architecture suffer from confirmation bias. Slide13

Cognitive dissonanceWhenever experimental results threaten to invalidate architectural icons, cognitive dissonance forces some individuals to protect the status quo by interpreting the data in a biased manner.

As a result, some authors claiming to treat the topic of neuroscience and embodied architecture are intellectually confused. Slide14

Inviolate architectural iconsMost authors uncritically accept the exalted status of “famous” architects, and twist scientific results to boost those — and only those — favored architects.Conclusions are made before any scientific data is gathered.

This biased approach sabotages neuroscience experiments.Slide15

Architects react with mixed valencesIt turns out that buildings by famous architects (modernist, postmodernist, or deconstructivist) that architectural culture supposes to be paradigmatic positive examples elicit, in fact, strongly

negative

responses.

The response of architects will mix a

negative

valence from their neural system with a

positive

valence from their training. Slide16

Spotting the mixed valenceThere are markers for interpreting if a neural response has locked opposite valence.Experiments performed in neurolinguistics.The brain is confused by contradictory signals, and responds in a way typical to schizophrenia.

Signal activity lasts far longer than a single-valence response.

Involves increased cerebral activation. Slide17

An old mystery explainedNeuroscience research should finally clear up a decades-long mystery: why the architectural tastes of common people and trained architects tend to be opposite.Michael Mehaffy and I termed this effect “Architectural Myopia” (2011).