44 | New Scientist | 16 April 2022
Features
Better
by design
Neuroscientists are turning their hand to interior
design, helping us to create homes that don’t just look
nice, but boost our physical and mental health too,
finds David Robson
Y
OU might recognise the sensation from
visits to a friend’s house – the feeling
that a space is good for you. Perhaps it
is a sense of profound relaxation, as if you left
your worries at the door. Or you may have
found the perfect office space that leaves you
buzzing with creative ideas. Yet try to explain
why you felt that way, or recreate those effects
at home, and you fall short.
According to the ancient Chinese practice of
feng shui, there are rules of harmonious living
that affect the flow of energy through your
body, and many modern design gurus take a
similar line, dishing out guidance in lifestyle
magazines and Instagram accounts. They
advise on the shape of rooms, materials in
furnishings, colours on walls and organisation
of books – it may make your home look good,
but does it make you feel good?
While there is nothing wrong with going
with your gut when it comes to decor, there
could be a better way to make design choices.
A growing number of neuroscientists are
collaborating with architects and interior
designers. With carefully controlled
experiments using objective physiological
and psychological measures, they are
starting to systematically test the influence
of design elements on brain and body.
The work couldn’t be timelier. The rise
of remote working has meant more time at
home for many. Whether you want to boost
your mood, lower your blood pressure,
decrease your bad habits or ease the burden
of dementia (see “Dementia-ready homes”,
page 46), this research can provide evidence-
based strategies to optimise your living
space for your physical and mental health.
The roots of this work lie in a field called
neuroaesthetics. In the 1990s, neuroscientists
began to explore the brain processes
underlying our sense of beauty in art and
music. They have shown, for instance, that
the brain’s amygdala preferentially processes
blurred images, showing heightened activity
before we are even aware of what we are seeing.
This is thought to be due to the region’s role
as an early warning system, detecting threats
in the peripheries of our vision (which are
inherently blurry). The soft contours of
impressionist art trigger this pathway, offering
a hotline to the brain’s emotional processing
that bypasses our conscious preferences and
triggers an emotional response.
Over the next two decades, the focus of
attention expanded from fine art to design –
spearheaded by a conference at the faculty
of architecture at the University of Dresden,
Germany, in 2010. “We got to hang out with
all these architects and designers,” says
Oshin Vartanian, a psychologist at the
University of Toronto. “We left this
meeting with tremendous enthusiasm
that this was something to go after.”
Much of the initial research explored
the way our evolutionary history may have
shaped our reactions to certain indoor spaces.
According to one branch of evolutionary
psychology, which biologist E. O. Wilson
referred to as the “biophilia hypothesis”, we
are drawn to living things – such as the sight
of foliage and fruit or the sound of^ birds – and
that this tendency has, in part, a genetic basis.
This love of nature would have been adaptive,
since other organisms could be sources of food
or danger. Consequently, our brains still find LE
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