23 prevailing assumptions about Biophilia and the application of biophilic design principles to architectural design. Beyond Kinship — “I am nature” Biophilia is defined as a love of or kinship with living systems. This definition presupposes an elemental separation between the observer and the object of observation, united by a complex and largely fragmented, cognitive process of observation. Yet, our high-level experience speaks of no such separation. In fact, elevated human experience has long been one of unity, a unity in which the individual and nature are experienced as synonymous. Therefore am I still A lover of the meadows and the woods, And mountains; and of all that we behold From this green earth; of all the mighty world Of eye and ear — both what they half create, And what perceive; well pleased to recognise In nature and the language of the sense, The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul Of all my moral being — William Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey (1798) Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mound myself? — Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854) Until now, these lyrical and deeply sincere confessions have often been interpreted as metaphor, the subjective experience, born of sensory and emotional phenomena, of a unique sensibility, exhorting our kinship with nature. Now, however, such eloquence can be understood, not as a subjective and embellished recollection, but as a multisensory, cognitive phenomenon, which is as real as the neural networks that gave rise to it. What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night, It is the breath of the buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset. — Chief Crowfoot, Alberta, Canada (1830-1890) The discovery of mirror mechanisms (MM) — a process that generates neural electrical activity in the brain whenever we initiate a motor action, or observe a similar motor action performed by someone else — has confirmed that observing the world is a complex, multisensory process. Researchers have discovered that specialized motor neurons encompass many more cerebral regions than just the visual brain proper. Italian scholars, Vittorio Gallese, a neuroscientist, and Alessandro Gattara, an architect, note that vision is remarkably multimodal, also incorporating motor, somatosensory and emotion-related brain networks. In their contributing essay to the thought-provoking book, Mind in Architecture, edited by Sarah Robinson and Juhani Pallasmaa, Gallese and Gattara argue that five decades of research have shown that motor neurons — the nerve cells responsible for generating our body’s movement — also correspond to visual, tactile and auditory stimuli. They note: “Any intentional relation we might entertain with the external world has an intrinsic pragmatic nature; hence it always bears a motor content. The same motor circuits that control the motor behaviour of individuals also map the space around them, thus defining and shaping in motor terms their representational content.”2 In other words, by design, our brain is an environmental simulation organ. Our brain models and emulates what we observe — whether it’s the undulating texture of a palm tree’s trunk or gravity’s pull on the body when we watch a rock climber inch toward a crevice on a vertiginous cliff. Our mind is a virtual reality chamber. Photo by Omid Armin (Unsplash) The same mirror mechanism that connects the frontal and posterior parietal cortex (the portion of the brain responsible for sensory integration) and its multimodal motor neurons (those neurons that incorporate various sensory inputs) are activated when we move through space or grasp objects in space. The same mechanisms are also stimulated when we observe the movement or actions of others. Our brain literally mirrors or performs the same motor actions we observe. As such, it’s more accurate to speak of cognitive perception not as an abstract function but as an action-oriented perception. Given that all cognitive function is wired to mirror or embody what we perceive, what does this reveal about our relationship to space? In her book, Making Space: How the Brain Knows Where Things Are, Jennifer Groh, a professor at the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience and the Department of Neurobiology at the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at Duke University, notes that higher cognitive faculties, such as focused attention, memory and planning, share the neural infrastructure that our sensory and motor faculties use to navigate
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy ODQxMjUw