Nervous Systems

Architecture borrowed the idea of the cognitive map from neuroscience in the 1960s and got it wrong. Today, as cognitive, biology-based technologies - AI, robotics, and virtual, mixed, and augmented reality - infiltrate life and reshape architectural thought and production, an expanding view of cognitive maps now emerging in neuroscience could provide insight to designers negotiating the socio-political, ecological, cultural, and technological into melded assemblies of matter and data in which human, more-than-human, and artificial intelligence commingle. We begin with the proposition that at the core of both architecture and neuroscience are energy and space.

‘Human beings are related to all other creatures on earth. We are the product of an unbroken chain connecting to the first life, which means that hidden beneath our stated motivations of what we do every day in industrial society, we are driven to pursue the same neurochemical brain rewards our ancestors pursued. This has huge implications for our behaviors, our economies and our futures. In reality we are just seeking the same brain rewards that led to success for our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Dopamine is a molecule that in animals and in humans, leads to motivation and action. In a materially rich modern world, the habituation to the action of consumption, leads to the wanting of things culture-wide being stronger that the reward we get from having them. This is a fundamental problem for an economic system that’s turning billions of barrels of oil into micro-liters of dopamine.’ (Nate Hagens)

Indeed, the climate crisis compels us to imagine new forms of human existence. The converging ecological, technological, and social upheaval we confront, however, is particularly immune to conventional modes of thought. Neuroscientist and architect are experimenters. Both think spatiotemporally across scales. Through an exploration of the worlds of sensing, motion, adapting and decision-making inherent to neuroscience, siloed imaginations may be released. In this class, a design and design thinking lens provide context for experimentation.

While architects engage in an energy economy usually confined to the thermodynamics of materials and bodies in space, bio-electrical events - encryptions of the external world inside our brains - encompass the broader reality that every encounter between a nervous system and its environment, every thought, action, or decision, is a transformation of one form of energy into another. We are continuous with the world.

This class does not take a positivist approach to design where science is used to justify what architecture should be or do. Nor is problem solving - fundamental to both architecture and neuroscience – our primary goal. The cognitive map was used by architects and urban designers as a metaphor decades ago, but it is not a metaphor. It is a model for dealing with uncertainty, risk, and change. At a time when new models for architectural thought and action are urgently needed our objective is investigative and speculative: to stake out an area of knowledge not previously recognized.

Provoked by weekly readings and media viewing in the first half of the semester, students will develop specific areas of interest and supplementary material will be provided to expand and focus individual work. Research material will be translated into diagrams establishing a class-wide lexicon. Research projects will continue to be developed in the remaining weeks for in-class critique and discussion and may take written and/or design form. We will see that ideas may in fact be inscribed in space, only not in the way architects imagine. Nervous systems situate thought and ideas along a gradient of abstraction, from physical to purely conceptual. As a discipline that operates at the confluence of space and thought, what new relationships could architecture activate? What new behaviors?