Neuroaesthetics of Architecture: cognition of space

"When someone traverses a space, their brain produces an oscillating, rhythmic pattern," Hugo Spiers (neuroscientist at UCL) explains. "We tried to realize this abstract understanding into an everyday reality."

As for architecture, altering space can have a large impact on brain function. Changing the dimensions of an animal's enclosure causes grid cells to alter their scales accordingly, such that the periodicity of their firing, which is observed as the animal moves across a space, increases or decreases. Surprisingly, negotiating a corridor in opposite directions elicits completely different patterns of place-cell activity, so the same space is apparently encoded as two different places. A less surprising but still important finding is that the lack of easily recognizable landmarks causes disorientation. Spiers and his colleagues are now investigating how the brain encodes three-dimensional space. While recording neuronal activity as rats negotiated a spiral staircase, they found that place cells, but not grid cells, respond to changes in height. Thus, the brain seems to encode the vertical and horizontal dimensions in different ways.

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