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Neuroarchitecture: Design for the unconscious mind
Professor Nick Tyler discusses his experiments at UCL’s PEARL laboratory uncovering the hidden impact of urban parks, bus stops and e-scooters on your brain and body
Get on a crowded tube train, and your brain may not like it. Surrounded by strangers, your cortisol levels shoot up to prepare you for fight or flight, stimulating the liver to produce and release glucose into your blood stream, in case you need the energy. Unless you run screaming from the train, your blood sugar levels won’t go down for a few hours – just in time for you to take the train again. And there’s nothing you can do about it – you don’t even know it’s happening.
“You’re dosing yourself with almost pure glucose twice a day for your working life,” says Nick Tyler, a UCL professor who investigates the ways in which people interact with the built environment. Scientific research has shown this kind of chronic stress leads to cortisol levels that can increase insulin resistance, worsening conditions such as type 2 diabetes.
That’s why Tyler believes we need to design the built environment – and the frequency of trains – not solely for the conscious mind, but for brain and the body impacts taking place out of sight.
As Chadwick Professor of Civil Engineering, Tyler works with a transdisciplinary team to study what that means for design – collaborating with psychologists, neuroscientists, architects and others to research the health and safety impacts of the built environment.
His immense laboratory in East London, PEARL, enables large-scale experiments, building whole pieces of city or tube trains and controlling the sound and temperature while measuring conscious and hidden impacts on humans.
“Your brain is constantly reacting to the built environment, trying to predict what’s going to happen next, taking in sights, smells and sounds at tremendous speed,” says Tyler. And not just from 5 senses, but at least 70, both internal and external, processing data from tummy rumbles to a bad smell.
We need to design for neurodiversity – that means the full spectrum of brains and lived human experiences
Experiments have included testing of bus stops, London busses and more. The people in the experiments wear a range of sensors helping scientists understand what is happening in the body, under the surface.
“There’s pre-conscious perception – which you don’t know you have,” says Tyler. “Your brain is processing something like 11 million bits per second, and 80 bits are what you are consciously aware of.”
“When we design only for what we’re consciously aware of, we’re missing a massive trick.”
Tyler also believes we need to design for neurodiversity – that doesn’t mean just designing in accommodations for the neurodivergent, because in Tyler’s opinion, there isn’t a normal or normative brain. We need to design as much as possible for the full spectrum of brains and lived human experiences.
As Tyler explains in his talk at the Festival of Place, now available to stream as a podcast, our perception is shaped by our lived experiences, and that is unique to each of us. “There are 8 billion brains on the planet, everyone is different, from one extreme to the other, and that is neurodiversity.”
Tyler’s mission is to discover how the built environment can work for everyone – and that is what they are trying to uncover inside the PEARL laboratory. Tyler describes his experiments with bus stops, zebra crossings, urban parks, supermarkets and e-scooters that have revealed safety gaps and failings.
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Tyler says if designers want to start learning about the impact of the built environment on the brain, the British Standards document “Design for the mind: Neurodiversity and the built environment” is a good primer. But ultimately consultation – talking to people – is key.
“We need to adopt a process of co-cultivation – a continuous process of talking to the community and learning from what we have and how to improve it. It’s a neverending but always improving process.”
What about the bus stop? Tyler has come to see them as a “phenomenal opportunity to make the ordinary public realm good for people.” With thousands of bus stops in towns and cities, these could be socially responsible gathering spaces that work well for the whole community. Tyler says adaptations could include unique chimes for each bus route, so that people with dementia and the blind can navigate more easily.
The potential for an inclusive built environment is there, but “we need to make conscious decisions about the use of space,” Tyler says.
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