When this week I had the privilege of speaking with the brilliant Dr. Satchin Panda, the preeminent circadian rhythm researcher, our conversation began on a surprising topic: the effect of our environment on our thought processes. Satchin works in the Louis Kahn-designed Salk Institute, one of the most magnificent buildings ever. His point, however, was not that the building was wonderful to look at, but that it was specifically designed to foster creative thinking, and that it is highly effective at doing exactly that. Satchin actually belongs to a fascinating-sounding organization called the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture, a particularly obscure-sounding group, whose next meeting in September I hope to attend.
There is a certain ego-driven delusion that some of us, including myself, tend to hold, which says that we are strong and the environment around us is really of little consequence, as compared with our abilities to focus and create on demand. The delusion says the environment doesn’t really matter that much as compared to our human strength – this is wildly untrue. Covid has had many of us working in less than ideal spaces: the garage, a spare closet, a basement, just because we had to. Studies have shown that in similar neighborhoods, some with trees and some without, the treed ones have a lower rate of violence. Set and setting matter, powerfully so, but we often think we can just suck it up and it will be fine. The field of architecture is often discounted into a value-per-square-foot discussion. For pretty much anyone other than architects themselves, the whole field is a bit of a bore with buildings being pretty or less so, and whose value is in their utility. The makers of the cathedrals of Europe would say otherwise, that setting, not just shelter, are the whole point of the endeavor.
Our thinking, our values, and our ambitions are the product of our environment, in much the same way that our feelings about our own physiology hugely impact our actions. Our research shows that if one feels good about one’s physicality one will behave in a way to cause better health outcomes. Today, as I look out the window of a hotel in the Financial District of Manhattan, there are tight streets, giant buildings, and a feeling of compressed energy. This gets manifested in a more or less non-stop information input of meetings, dinners, connections, and learnings. When I am in the mountains of Utah, it is the converse: wide spaces, the fierceness of nature, and more expansive thinking. These are, admittedly, extremes, and not everyone’s jam, but everyone it seems can benefit from a version of this on-off cycle. It is how our whole biology is designed: inhale/exhale, eat/digest, run/sleep. The wisest of us have figured out a way to use our environment, whatever that may be, to enhance our life.
Onward and upward,
David
