Zak's Blog

Knowledge has long been primarily shared through lectures, books, and articles. Today, knowledge is shared and gathered largely through social media. This is surely not true for fields. However, from one of my LinkedIn posts, it’s clear that the interdisciplinary field of neuroscience and architecture has a vibrant social media profile. Over 2 days, the post gathered >150 comments expressing either interest or current work from researchers, advisors, and scientists! There were numerous young bright minds aspiring to become researchers too.

These insights promise a bright future for our field.

Judging from the posts, the majority serve to translate the science to architects, suggesting ways in which the conclusions can serve design goals. This is an important task for all interdisciplinary fields: communicating back to the constitutive fields. Unfortunately, researchers affiliated with a university are a minority. Nothing absolute can be concluded from the post—however, there seems to be a greater interest in the field from the industrial side than the academic side can provide. This situation is typically resolved by increasing the number of Ph.D. students and collaborations between universities and industrial partners. This will ensure a high level of scientific rigor and direct access to results for design implementations.

This is a golden opportunity for both architectural studios and grant holders to invest in a field that is highly motivated to produce practical results.

In other words, there’s a strong and interested market, motivated researchers and practitioners, and huge areas of untouched scientific territory for everyone to learn from. The possibilities are enormous, but they’re still waiting to be unleashed.

Find the original post here:

Det ligger i arkitektens natur at gå undersøgende til værks. Men uden en omfattende forståelse af de vidtrækkende implikationer af deres design risikerer arkitekter at bidrage til nedsat mentalt velvære. Det er afgørende for fremtiden at anerkende manglen på evidens for at arkitekter kan skabe rum, der bevarer planeten og fremmer mental helbred, skriver Zakaria Djebbara og Anders Barslund i dette debatindlæg.

Translation:

It is in the architect’s nature to investigate. But without a comprehensive understanding of the far-reaching implications of their designs, architects risk contributing to diminished mental well-being. It is crucial for the future to recognize the lack of evidence to enable architects in creating spaces that preserve the planet and promote mental health, write Zakaria Djebbara and Anders Barslund in this debate post.

Full reading: https://byrummonitor.dk/Debat/art9662679/S%C3%A5dan-g%C3%A5r-vi-fra-arkitektens-mavefornemmelse-til-videnskabelig-evidens

_{Djebbara, Z., King, J., Ebadi, A., Nakamura, Y., & Bermudez, J. (2023). Contemplative neuroaesthetics and architecture: A sensorimotor exploration. Frontiers of Architectural Research. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foar.2023.10.005}

A link to the full paper, right here!

Abstract. This paper takes initial steps towards developing a theoretical framework of contemplative neuroaesthetics through sensorimotor dynamics. We first argue that this new area has been largely omitted from the contemporary research agenda in neuroaesthetics and thus remains a domain of untapped potential. We seek to define this domain to foster a clear and focused investigation of the capacity of the arts and architecture to induce phenomenological states of a contemplative kind. By proposing a sensorimotor account of the experience of architecture, we operationalize how being attuned to architecture can lead to contemplative states. In contrasting the externally-induced methods with internally-induced methods for eliciting a contemplative state of mind, we argue that architecture may spontaneously and effortlessly lead to such states as certain built features naturally resonate with our sensorimotor system. We suggest that becoming sensible of the resonance and attunement process between internal and external states is what creates an occasion for an externally-induced contemplative state. Finally, we review neuroscientific studies of architecture, elaborate on the brain regions involved in such aesthetic contemplative responses, provide architectural examples, and point at the contributions that this new area of inquiry may have in fields such as the evidence-based design movement in architecture.

^{Charalambous, E., & Djebbara, Z. (2023). On Natural Attunement: Shared Rhythms Between the Brain and the Environment. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 155(105438). https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2023.105438}

Abstract. Rhythms exist both in the embodied brain and the built environment. Becoming attuned to the rhythms of the environment, such as repetitive columns, can greatly affect perception. Here, we explore how the built environment affects human cognition and behavior through the concept of natural attunement, often resulting from the coordination of a person’s sensory and motor systems with the rhythmic elements of the environment. We argue that the built environment should not be reduced to mere states, representations, and single variables but instead be considered a bundle of highly related continuous signals with which we can resonate. Resonance and entrainment are dynamic processes observed when intrinsic frequencies of the oscillatory brain are influenced by the oscillations of an external signal. This allows visual rhythmic stimulations of the environment to affect the brain and body through neural entrainment, cross-frequency coupling, and phase resetting. We review how real-world architectural settings can affect neural dynamics, cognitive processes, and behavior in people, suggesting the crucial role of everyday rhythms in the brain-body-environment relationship.

🚨NEW PAPER🚨
"On natural attunement: Shared rhythms between the brain and the environment"

Our new (open access) paper, in collab with the fantastic Efrosini Charalambous, reviews the rhythmic relationship between brains and buildings.

A short 🧵(1/6)https://t.co/63FF65GbD9

— Zakaria Djebbara (@ZakDjebbara) October 29, 2023

Find a copy here!

In this new Commentary paper, I share my thoughts on Maselli et al.’s paper “Beyond simple laboratory studies” and suggest that we need more (and richer) ways to quantify the relationship between organism and environment.

Cognition and behavior are the adapted results of environmental perturbations, which we today are (almost) in full control of by way of architects and designers. Environmental features thus hold great importance in understanding behavior and quantifying these features could thus be the next milestone for sophisticated models.

Thanks to Julio Bermudez for organizing a fantastic symposium earlier this year. It was a pleasure to give two talks (Empirical results and Methods) to a group of highly intellectual researchers. Find more about the symposium and the recordings below:

https://www.building-spiritual-understanding.net/symposium

https://www.youtube.com/@juliobermudez6823

^{Wang S, Djebbara Z, de Oliveira GS, Gramann K. Human Brain Dynamics Dissociate Early Perceptual and Late Motor-Related Stages of Affordance Processing. BioRxiv 2023. https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.09.07.556516.}

Find the preprint for free here.

Abstract.

Affordances, the opportunity for action offered by the environment to an agent, are vital for meaningful behavior and exist in every interaction with the environment. There is an ongoing debate in the field about whether the perception of affordances is an automated process. Some studies suggest that affordance perception is an automated process that is independent from the visual context and bodily interaction with the environment, while others argue that it is modulated by the visual and motor context in which affordances are perceived. The present paper aims to resolve this debate by examining affordance automaticity from the perspective of sensorimotor time windows. We replicated a previous study on affordance perception in which participants actively moved through doors of different width in immersive 3D virtual environments. To investigate the impact of different forms of bodily interactions with an environment, i.e., the movement context (physical vs. joystick movement), we used the identical virtual environment from Djebbara and colleagues (2019) but displayed it on a 2D screen with participants moving through different wide doors using the keys on a standard keyboard. We compared components of the event-related potential (ERP) from the continuously recorded electroencephalogram (EEG) that were previously reported to be related to affordance perception of architectural transitions (passable and impassable doors). Comparing early sensory and later motor-related ERPs, our study replicated ERPs reflecting early affordance perception but found differences in later motor-related components. These results indicate a shift from automated perception of affordances during early sensorimotor time windows to movement context dependence of affordance perception at later stages suggesting that affordance perception is a dynamic and flexible process that changes over sensorimotor stages.

We had a wonderful time at this year’s Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture (ANFA). The progress is seriously fast with tons of young researchers in the making. Dylan Chau Huynh presented a few of his ongoing projects on working memory and architecture, and Lars Brorson Fich on the new results from the lab on stress, biophilia, and architecture.

Also very proud of my students, Mille Boye, Christina Lomholt, and Tsila Yaloz for presenting their work on navigation strategies using Virtual Reality. Our group from AAU CREATE Department of Architecture, Design & Media Technology was well-represented.

The NfA is growing, and it’s a delight to be part of it.

Into naturalistic paradigms and neuroimaging?

The 5th International MoBi Conference will take place in beautiful Piran, Slovenia, June 2-5 2024! There will be data analysis workshops and various mobile body and neuroimaging presentations! Sign up here: MoBi2024

^{Djebbara, Z. and Kalantari, S. (2023) ‘Affordances and curvature preference: The case of real objects and spaces’, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, n/a(n/a). doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/nyas.15038.}

Open access right here: https://nyaspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nyas.15038

Abstract

Chuquichambi and colleagues recently questioned the prevailing belief that a universal human visual preference exists for curved shapes and lines. Their comprehensive meta-analysis demonstrated that while curvature preference is widespread, it is not universally constant or invariant. By revisiting their dataset, we made an intriguing discovery: a negative relationship between curvature preference and an object’s “affordances.” Taking an embodiment perspective into account, we propose an explanation for this phenomenon, suggesting that the diminished curvature preference in objects with abundant affordances can be understood through the lens of embodied cognition.