What is Neuroarchitecture?

Multisensory reality

Today we live in environments that subject us to a great deal of over-stimulation and we seek the calm of the senses.

Neuroarchitecture is a sub-discipline that seeks to understand the relationship between the nervous system and the built environment. It is a perspective that seeks to ensure the physical and emotional health of the inhabitants. In other words, it studies the relationship between the brain and the space around us.

Have you ever noticed how you feel when you enter a room? What emotions does it arouse in you? How does it make you feel?

To understand this awakening of the senses we have to talk about the language of the body and thus understand how it works and how it relates to the environment. The communication that our body has with the external space conditions our integral wellbeing: physical, cognitive and socio-emotional.

If we manage to understand this invisible dialogue, we will be able to understand how to help it in its internal processes with design strategies that promote positive cognitive stimulation. In this way, we will be able to create spaces that enhance the well-being of those who are going to live in them, facilitating balance, boosting concentration and creativity, among others.

Have you heard of embodiment?

Embodiment is a brilliant ability of the human body. It is the ability of the mind to transport our corporeal reality into our environment.

Through our nervous system we create a perception where our experience of the world comes into play. For example, colour is sensory and subjective. Therefore, when we enter a room it can arouse different emotions depending on its colour, and these emotions will be different for each person.

Space must be understood as an extension of our body, so there is a part of the study that must be subjective and unique, where the modus vivendi of each person comes into play.

Through architecture, the aim is to understand the body’s reaction to external factors and to analyse their impact on the development of our nervous system. Many other factors are involved: noise pollution, volatile toxins, contamination from poorly insulated electrical circuits, exposure to radiation from 4G and 5G telephone antennas, and also the passage of underground currents and geophysical disturbances, where geobiology intervenes. This is a science that studies the energies emanating from the earth and our environment and how they influence human beings.

Neuroarchitecture is the part in charge of studying other types of phenomena, such as the built environment and the impact it has on our central nervous system, made up of the brain and spinal cord.

The pace at which the activities around us are happening is also echoing in us. Therefore, the constants that define spaces are not so much the materials or dimensions as the frequency of sensory stimuli.

How does the brain work?

The brain is a complex system that has a seemingly simple goal: to keep us alive and connect us to the world.

It translates the stimuli that arrive from the outside through our senses (our sensory receptors), which are responsible for collecting information, so that each of them is subsequently processed in the corresponding brain areas and transformed into motor responses.

Among the functional units of the brain is the limbic system: the one in charge of reason and emotion. It is the part that allows us to speak, perceive and understand. It is like the cinema screen where the film of our life is projected, all tinged with emotion.

One of the main tasks of Neuroarchitecture is to understand how the brain works. In the body, several tasks are performed simultaneously, each of them responding to different needs and stimuli. Therefore, their functioning is also different. The body must be listened to and understood as a whole in order to interpret and help it. To do this, the architect must work hand in hand with other professionals.

This is what we call an ‘integrative’, holistic or 360° vision, from which many disciplines are derived today: integrative medicine, integrative therapies, integrative design processes, etc.

These disciplines understand the human body as a living and changing complex in which several factors intervene at the same time, including physiological and emotional factors.

Connecting neurosciences, architecture and user allows us to build environments that take into account the progress of our brain, body and emotions.

We only remember with emotion

We only remember what we have experienced with emotion. The brain transports us into the world. Every part of our body connects with the space generating emotion and what we finally experience consciously as positive or negative.

That is why from Neuroarchitecture we study the physical and emotional link with the built environment. We design spaces that take into account the aspects with which the brain feels comfortable; in this way, we manage to trigger physiological reactions linked to well-being.

In short, we believe that putting people at the centre of design is the way to an architecture that takes care of us.