SECTION 4 - Design to Maximize Student Performance

NEUROSCIENCE FOR ARCHITECTURE

The mission of the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture is to promote and advance knowledge that links neuroscience research to a growing understanding of human responses to the built environment.

Neuroscience is the study of the brain, the mind, and the nervous system addressing how we think, move, perceive, learn and remember. As neuroscience knowledge increases, we are poised to understand how and why architecture affects human perception, and therefore experience. The connection of neuroscience and architecture is one that will provide an increase in evidence-based design knowledge including its potential implications to public health, safety and welfare. The vision of the Academy is to foster collaboration among neuroscientists and architects to explore, through scientific methods, the range of human experiences with elements of architecture, to organize and validate the evidence that results from this collaboration and to disseminate it to professionals and emerging professionals.

It is hoped that eventually, the results of the explorations made by the Academy will indicate potential ways to design the built environment to optimize human experience and performance in various specific types of activities such as learning in educational environments, healing in healthcare environments and productivity in work environments. It will also look for opportunities to explore the basis for aesthetic, social and spiritual experience in the built environment.

One of the first awards to the Academy was the AIA College of Fellows Latrobe Fellowship, which is given for research within the field of Architecture.  John Eberhard, the Academy's Latrobe Fellow spent two years building on his previous research into bridges between Neuroscience and Architecture, in order to build a basis of understanding within the Architectural profession of the breadth of emerging neuroscience research that will inform future architectural design.  The results of this investigation is summarized in the 2003-2005 Latrobe Fellowship report entitled A White Paper for the Profession of Architecture.

The Academy has held a series of workshops based on various building types to identify future neuroscience research that will better inform the design of these building types.  The building types have included healthcare facilities, educational facilities, sacred spaces, research laboratories, correctional facilities and facilities for the aging and people with Alzheimer's. 

Elementary School design was one of these areas of investigation.  A workshop on K through 6th grade teaching environments was held in February 2005.  Attendees included architects, neuroscientists and educators.  The workshop presented a set of premises that would underlie the topics to be discussed.

The basic premises were:

1. Brain development between five years and twelve years of age is significant and understood. Cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists are intrigued with how cognitive capacities change with age. They know that:
   1. Regions of primary functions (in the brain) mature first (e.g. primary motor cortex).
   2. Complex/Intergrative task regions mature later (e.g. temporallobe).
   3. The superior temporal cortex, which contains association areas that integrate information from several sensory modalities, matures last.
2. There is an intuitive, but not well documented, understanding that the architectural attributes of classroom spaces affect cognitive (learning) activity.

3. Neuroscience research is likely to provide evidence to support this intuition including the advantages of classrooms geared to stages in brain development.

4. Therefore, hypotheses are required to provide a research agenda that will bring together interdisciplinary teams to work together in creating the new knowledge needed.

The three day workshop concentrated on the development of such hypotheses within six areas of investigation:

• Spatial Competence - coding the location of things
• Audition - noise and reverberation
• Light - attention related difficulties, modulation of alertness
• Visual Function - good stereo-acuity and depth perception
• Color - perception and representation changes with maturation
• Wayfinding - understanding and description

These hypotheses are further discussed in the full report of the Elementary Schools Neurosciences Workshop (PDF - 1.24MB) on the ANFA web page.  With the development of hypotheses such as these, the Academy is pursuing its connections with the neuroscience researchers interested in developing work in these areas.

An effort is underway at the Academy to establish a database of existing knowledge that relates to the hypotheses established at the workshops. This knowledge database project is assembling neuroscience research results of relevance to architectural practice and evidence about the human response to built settings.  The product will be a broad searchable data-base that translates results from biological, medical, sociological and architectural findings.  The database will be expanded in the future to include new research and additional building types, and is one of the vehicles the Academy will use to disseminate information to architects and other interested professionals about evidence-based design knowledge.

The Academy was formed in 2003, it is a non-profit California Corporation with Corporate and Advisory Boards made up of Architects, Neuroscientists and others representing the interdisciplinary communications between the two fields.  The headquarters office is located in San Diego, California.

More information about ANFA activities can be viewed on the ANFA web site at www.anfarch.org

- Alison Whitelaw

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