How our surroundings affect the way we think and feel

At some level, Colin Ellard believes, everybody knows that where you are influences what you do and how you feel. Certain kinds of shapes are instinctively more appealing than others. Humans have predictable behaviours in public spaces, and reap tremendous benefits from exposure to nature. But there's a lot more that we can learn from the field of psychogeography, which, Ellard explains, 'is the study of the relationship between the places that we move through in our everyday life and the effects that those places have on our minds'.

'It encompasses things like the ways that an urban streetscape might affect your feelings, your emotions, what kinds of things it might make you do, how it might affect the way that you pay attention to your surroundings, remember things and make decisions,' he says.

The term psychogeography emerged in Paris in the 1950s, when it was closely associated with the work of Guy Debord and his colleagues in the avant-garde Situationist International movement. In that context, the psychogeographer's practice involves drifting around cities, an act in which one must 'drop their usual motives for movement and action ... and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounter they find there'.

As a cognitive neuroscientist working at Canada's University of Waterloo, however, Ellard pushes this theory into the realm of experimentation. His research involves everything from measuring responses as subjects walk through real-life cities, to monitoring gazes and movements as people interact with simulated environments created with virtual reality tools.

'It's a wonderful time to be doing this work, because every day it seems there are new tools that are available for us to very precisely measure the relationships we're interested in,' he says.

'[We conduct] experiments right on the street where we can measure things like people's stress levels, their brain waves, their eye movements, to other kinds of experiments in our laboratory, where we can build virtual spaces, we can build virtual streetscapes, virtual building interiors, and get a bit more control over the relationship between person and place in order to study it.'

Some of our responses to our surroundings are influenced by experience, knowledge and culture, Ellard says. Others, such as responses to curves, are more intuitive—and may even be written into our genes.

'I think many people have had the experience of looking at a beautiful curved walkway or curvature in a piece of architecture and responding to that on a visceral level, as opposed to something that's very sharp and angular, that we might not feel as inclined to approach as we would something with curves,' Ellard says.

Another example is the concept of 'the duality of prospect and refuge' that often comes up in discussions of environmental psychology.

'The idea is basically that we like to be in positions where we have some feeling of protection, or refuge, but at the same time we can see what's going on around us; we have a vista in front of us,' he says.

'That's something that transcends even human beings. Any animal, if you look at studies of habitat selection, shows a preference for locations where they can see and not be seen. It makes biological sense in the way that you might consider having protection from predators, being able to see opportunities for foraging.

'It makes a bit less sense with human beings, because typically when we're enjoying a nice public square we're not worried about being crept up on by predators, at least not literally, and yet those same contingencies act on us, to push us towards locations where we have both prospect and high refuge. That has been seen in all different kinds of human cultures, and different kinds of people with different personalities.'

One part of Ellard's work that has drawn particular interest from city planners and architects is his research into how people respond to views of nature. It's a question with practical applications that go beyond aesthetics. 'Sometimes we think of the parklands in a city as maybe being like the dessert—get everything else right and then we can build these nice green spaces,' he says.

'But there's more and more evidence that exposure to those places has really profound effects on everything from things like our levels of cortisol, which is a stress hormone, to things like the way that we pay attention to the world, the way that we think, and the way that we feel.'

Ellard and his colleagues are working to unfold 'what it is about those natural views that produces these marvellous physiological and psychological responses'.

'We know that even a relatively modest exposure, like sitting on a bench in a small urban parkette, can have as profound an effect on your psychology as being immersed in a deep forest,' he says.

'The idea is to design cities in such a way that as many people as possible have ready access to these natural environments. Ideally, within about a five-minute walk of where you live, you should be able to get to some view of nature.'

At least some of these positive impacts are connected to patterns that are present in natural images, Ellard says, raising the question of whether a computer-generated park could have the same beneficial effect on public health as a real one.

'We've had some success doing that ... so there are prospects for being able to produce some of the health-giving effects of natural imagery without actually using nature,' he says.

'But my suspicion is that in the long run we're going to discover that the most economic and effective way of producing these kinds of effects is to include natural elements in cities.'

Sunday Extra is RN's live Sunday morning broadcast, looking to the week ahead and also incorporating Ockham's Razor, Background Briefing, and First Dog on the Moon.