Neuroarchitecture: The impact of design on the unconscious mind

Thinking about your next development? Finding the right piece of land shouldn't be guesswork. The national planning portal gives you powerful land insights, revealing off market opportunities, verified ownership data, and planning intelligence. Make faster, smarter decisions from day one with The UK's trusted home of planning. Discover more at planningportal.co.uk. Hello, and welcome to The Developer Podcast, where we talk about how to make cities worth living in, which often has to do with the spaces between the buildings as much as the buildings themselves. My name's Christine Murray, editor in chief of The Developer and director of The Festival of Place. Get on a crowded tube train, and your brain may not like it. Without you realizing, your cortisol levels shoot up, preparing you for fight or flight, and those levels won't go down for a few hours. Even if you aren't aware of it, your brain is constantly reacting to the built environment, trying to predict what is going to happen and prepare you for it, processing information from sights, smells, and what you hear at tremendous speeds in ways you're not aware of. From the neurotypical to the neurodiverse, Professor Nick Tyler, director of the Center for Transport Studies at UCL, believes we need to design the built environment for the brain, a practice known as neuroarchitecture. I invited Nick to present some of his findings at last summer's Festival of Place in a session chaired by my good friend Emma Meyer, a former journalist, now behavioral scientist. If you love this podcast, you should definitely join us at the next in person festival of place on the June 10 in London for talks that will feed your brain and inspire your practice. Now over to Emma. So in this afternoon's session, we're gonna be looking at this idea of neuroarchitecture. So that is designing for neurodiversity and accessibility and inclusion. My name's Emma Meyer. I'm gonna be chairing this discussion and conversation, this afternoon. I am a behavioral scientist, so that means I spend my time looking at human behavior and well-being, what influences that, what we might be able to do to change and improve it. So that involves looking inside people at their psychology, their past experiences, those sorts of things, and their brain body connection, but also means looking at the environment, and a lot of it involves looking at the environment, and that space and and connection and the influence that it has, both social environment and also physical environment. So, I'm really excited to be, have the opportunity to to have this conversation and to hear from, from Nick, our speaker for today. So, I'm very pleased to introduce Nick, professor Nick Tyler from UCL. He's director for the Center of Transport Studies, and he's also the founder and director of PEARL. Now PEARL is the People, Environment, Activity, Research Laboratory. And for those of you who haven't come across it, I suspect many of you will have, but for …