There's an interesting article in the current edition of 360 Ezine "Unlocking the Brain for Better Architecture & Design" which reviews some of the work of the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture. The Academy was founded in 2003 and states that their primary goal is "to promote and advance knowledge that links neuroscience research to a growing understanding of human responses to the built environment."
Fascinating stuff, but my main surprise is that its taken this long for it to enter the mainstream. Perhaps this really is the coming of age of Neuroscience as other disciplines begin to form relationships with the body of evidence that has accumulated from the collective research programme.
“The enormous body of knowledge being created by neuroscientists is about to dramatically change what it means to be a professional designer. Architects will benefit from the new knowledge base made possible by neuroscience, but the real beneficiaries are future generations of school children, hospital patients, and office workers who will have their environments more carefully tuned to their needs and desires." John Eberhard
"Observations of how humans interact with their environment are based on informed suppositions and usually careful methodology. The limit of these methods is that we know a good deal about what happens during environmental interactions, but we don’t know why humans respond the way that they do. As a result of studies of the brain and the mind by neuroscientists with modern scanning equipment, it is possible to know much more about how humans experience their environment, about why they have such experiences, and about what might be done by designers to influence experience.We are still in the early stages of these developments, but the direction seems clear." Final Report of Latrobe Fellowship May 2005 (PDF)
Related Links: Architecture and the Mind, Neurosciene and the Architecture of Spiritual Spaces (PDF)
Image Courtesy: Axel Kirch
Story found via: elearningpost
Currently listening to: Till the Clouds Clear from Between Darkness and Light, Lamb
1:44:09 AM 
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