Implicitly, we know that the built environment has a direct impact on our health. But while Western medicine is able to identify the cause of over 8,000 diagnoses or symptoms of disease, the factors that contribute to health and wellness are less tangible. Tye Farrow, the first Canadian architect to have earned a Master of Neuroscience Applied to Architecture, is on a mission to change that. His award-winning projects, at the intersection of architecture and neuroscience, employ design tactics that prioritize both human and environmental performance to foster the conditions for optimal health. In an excerpt from his first book, Constructing Health: How the Built Environment Enhances Your Mind’s Health (University of Toronto Press 2024), Farrow explores the relationship between placemaking, mind health and human performance.

This October, at AZURE’s Human/Nature climate conference, he will lead a workshop that dives deeper into these concepts through project case studies, including his proposals for a mixed-use archipelago park inspired by Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons and a Montessori school in Toronto.

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Does the mind stop at the periphery of the skull? As we will discover, recent research shows that the mind extends well beyond this limit and through the boundaries of the skin and body, forming close interconnections with the surrounding environment. These relationships play a significant role in the health of our extended minds and inform the role architecture plays in enhancing mind health.

We commonly assume that thinking only happens inside the mind, as though the mind were disembodied. As we have seen, however, the mind is tuned in to the internal sensations of the body and senses the interoceptive messages the body communicates, the proprioceptive messages at the surface of the body and from its kinetic movement in space, and the exteroceptive messages of the surrounding environment in relationship to the body. While the brain is housed in the skull, its perceptual system, the mind, extends to include the entire body as well as past the edges of the body’s surface area. The mind perceives what is occurring around us and communicates this information back to the brain for interpretation and to determine next steps.

Andy Clark and David Chalmers, cognitive philosophers at the University of Sussex, first proposed the idea that the mind is embodied in a 1998 paper titled “The Extended Mind.” Contrary to the common belief that the mind stops at the “demarcation of the skin and the skull,” they argued that the mind extends throughout the body and beyond to the surrounding environment. They proposed “an active externalism, based on the active role of the environment in driving cognitive processes.”

Embreathment, an emerging concept in embodied cognition, is the use of one’s physiological breath during immersive experiences to enhance presence in the moment and body awareness, examples of which include body scan meditation and progressive muscle relaxation. This awareness can be used to reduce claustrophobia, anxiety, and other negative cognitions by enhancing agency, hopefulness, and interoception in situations where one’s ability to act is restricted, such as in medical MRI suites. Using breath awareness to increase one’s sense of calm and control has been shown to decrease one’s sense of the symptoms of anxiety disorders. We will explore the application of embreathment further in chapter 13.

The Extended Mind Thesis

Clark and Chalmers’s extended mind thesis was further developed by researchers in embodied cognition, a field that explores the role of the body in thinking. Exteroceptive situated cognition studies how our minds sense beyond our bodies and how the places we inhabit influence our thoughts. Distributed cognition studies how we think with and through others and how we maintain healthy social relationships with the people in our surrounding communities. We don’t just think in our heads; we think in and through our bodies by internalizing our social interactions and the surrounding built environment. This has important implications for how architecture and design relate to mind health.

Affordances

In 1966, American environmental psychologist James J. Gibson coined the term affordances, by which he meant the opportunities the environment provides or furnishes to the animal (and, by extension, to the human being). When we apply this to architecture, we understand that different building forms offer different natural bodily affordances – opportunities – by communicating messages through implicit suggestions of movement, actions, and behaviours. One way of doing this is by enhancing curiosity and encouraging the physical exploration and discovery of a space. Movement through a space also creates a reciprocal effect in our minds. For example, we visualize how we might climb a set of stairs, twist a door handle, move across a threshold, or walk down a curved corridor to discover what is around the bend. Some of the best experiences we have with built spaces involve much more than observing them from a fixed point. Great places nurture and encourage our bodies to explore them through haptic engagement – that is, touch – which allows us to mediate our lived experience with the wider world. As architect and author Sarah Robinson rightly observes, “We cannot touch without being touched in return.”

The movement of our bodies through the spaces we inhabit, together with our haptic interaction with environments, influences how we think and feel about ourselves. It spurs imagination, memories, and past associations in our minds and increases awareness. Paraphrasing French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s description of the paintings of Cézanne, Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa describes the task of architecture as the need “to make visible how the world touches us.”

Place and Space

When we discuss perception and the importance of our bodies moving in space in the act of perception, it is important to differentiate between the terms place and space. Space is a Descartian concept based on mapping Cartesian coordinates of objects in space, in which the relationship of one object to another never changes but is fixed and defined. It is locational, geographic. Place, on the other hand, is the phenomenological experience of space, in which the perception of objects in relationship to each other, and to one’s own body, is continuously in flux due to ever-changing conditions. Place gives space cultural and personal meaning – it is informed by human learning, memory, and emotional experience. Space exists independent of us and our interpretations, whereas we make place.

James J. Gibson, who developed the concept of affordances, was also an important thinker in the realm of visual perception. He explored the relationship between people and their surroundings, based on their perceptual cone of view linked to perspective and geometry. British landscape architect Clifford Tandy expanded on Gibson’s work in the late 1960s when he developed the concept of the isovist, which is the volume of space that is visible from a given point of known location in space by an individual. The isovist is one approach that can be used to describe spatial properties from a beholder-centred perspective.

Multimodal Bodily Experiences

Our perception of the places we inhabit, however, is not just based on visual perception. It is multimodal. The bodily experience of moving through a space affects all our senses. How we relate to an environment – and make sense of it – is a direct result of how we experience the world. How do we connect on a behavioral and biological level to our surroundings? The neurophysiological discovery in 1996 by Vittorio Gallese and Giacomo Rizzolatti, called neural mirroring, has shown that we model, or feel into, the same behavior or feeling we observe in another person. For example, if someone smiles, we are wired to reflect or mirror that same action back. Similarly, when we look at a painting with pronounced brushstrokes or a sculpture with prominent carving marks, our mind mimics the movements of the artist at work. The same is true when we watch the movements of a dancer or athlete.

Primary, Motor, and Metaphoric Affordances

Even as we perceive the materials and physical elements used to construct a building, we also connect with the human intentions of its architects, engineers, and builders that can continue to radiate for centuries. We physically manifest the sense of astonishment and exaltation we feel in the Pantheon in Rome through a tilted-back head, wide open eyes and mouth, and expanded chest cavity, which simultaneously reflect the thoughts, desires, and intentions of those who conceived and constructed this iconic building nearly 2,000 years ago. We sense all this because of the way the Pantheon’s design invites us to interact with and use it. In neuroscientific terms, this is known as the primary affordance of an object, whereas what it communicates can be both a motor affordance – a door handle that offers clues as to how the hand should push, pull, or turn it – or a metaphoric affordance, such as a lofty dome that communicates upward motion but doesn’t result in an immediate action beyond drawing our eyes and heads up toward it.

Affordances encourage an embodied simulation or experiential understanding of what we should do with an object or place through the motor and perceptual actions they prompt. In so doing, this also contributes to a sense of connection with our environment, expressed as a sense of coherence within us.

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More information about AZURE’s Human/Nature conference – including our full roster of speakers, descriptions of talks, as well as the agenda — is available via our dedicated website. Tickets are on sale now!

Human/Nature plenary panel sponsors are Ciot, Formica and Architek.

Workshops are sponsored by TAS, Arper and Mitrex, and the social gathering sponsor is Urban Capital.

The conference is presented in partnership with George Brown College / Brookfield Sustainability Institute, MaRS, Lemay, Flash, GFI Investment Council Ltd., Instituto Italiano di Cultura Toronto, and Small Change Fund.