Zak's Blog

Zakaria Djebbara, PhD
Associate Professor

Affiliation
Head of Brain, Body, Architecture Research (BBAR) @ Aalborg University
Berlin Mobile/Brain Body Imaging Lab (BeMoBIL) @ Technische Universität Berlin

Member
Board member of Lundbeck Foundation Investigator Network
Member of The Young Academy
Member of Architecture & Behavior Network

Editor
Editor at Brain and Environment

I am the head of the BBAR (Brain, Body, Architecture Research), an internationally oriented research group dedicated to understanding how built environments shape human experience, cognition, and behavior. BBAR focuses on architecture not as a static object, but as a dynamic system that interacts continuously with the human brain and body. The group is today among the most productive and efficient research environments internationally when it comes to generating empirical knowledge about architecture’s effects on cognition, perception, and neural dynamics.

I am a member of The Young Academy, an interdisciplinary academy of outstanding early-career researchers and the younger counterpart to the Royal Society of Science and Letters. The Academy brings together scholars who challenge disciplinary boundaries and contribute actively to society through research, public engagement, and policy dialogue—an ethos that closely aligns with my own view of science as a cultural, ethical, and societal practice rather than a purely technical one.

I was trained as an architect, but I do not believe in disciplines as starting points. Nature does not recognize scientific silos any more than it recognizes national borders or the clock’s segmentation of time. What matters are questions. Methods should follow questions—not the other way around—and they should always be applied cautiously. For this reason, philosophy is central to my work. Understanding the ontological and epistemological assumptions of a method is not optional; it is a prerequisite for using it responsibly. Without this reflection, methods risk producing answers that appear precise while quietly missing the phenomenon they claim to explain.

A core methodological foundation of my research is Mobile Brain/Body Imaging (MoBI), which combines mobile EEG with bodily measures such as movement, physiology, and eye-tracking, often embedded within Virtual Reality environments. Much of my time is therefore spent analyzing brain data in close relation to bodily dynamics and environmental variables. A central methodological effort in my work involves developing new ways of quantifying space from the bodily perspective—for example, by linking eye-tracking, movement trajectories, and VR-based spatial metrics directly to neural dynamics. In this sense, my work is deeply embedded in cognitive and computational neuroscience, while remaining grounded in architectural questions.

A central motivation behind my research is social sustainability, which I consider the most urgent form of sustainability today. Without changes in culture, behavior, and everyday experience, it is difficult to imagine any lasting reduction in our collective footprint on the world. Architecture plays a crucial role here—not by persuading or instructing, but by shaping behavior implicitly, through the structures, rhythms, and affordances of daily life.

My research focuses on how the built environment affects us without our conscious awareness: how it modulates attention, learning performance, movement, walking pace, direction, and even affect—often before we have words for what we are experiencing. I am interested in the automatic responses elicited by architectural environments: how they emerge, whether they can be changed, and how they might be responsibly used in design. Ultimately, my aim is to understand how these processes quietly color our experience of the spaces we inhabit.

The themes that currently guide my work include

• (1) rhythms between brain, body, and environment and their mutual entrainment;
• (2) time perception and temporal dynamics;
• (3) the role of environments in inducing contemplative states;
• (4) the thalamus as a key modulator of cognitive and perceptual processes; and
• (5) computational phenomenology—an emerging direction that combines phenomenology and enactivism with active inference and Bayesian approaches to cognition.

Across these themes runs a shared question: how architecture participates in the dynamics of mind—not as a backdrop, but as an active constituent of experience.