images: screenshots from the installation film at the Neurotopographics website
Neuroscientist Hugo Spiers` work at UCL is concerned with the brain´s encoding of direction, location and dimensions of space.
Quote from the article by Moheb Costandi:
”As for architecture, altering space can have a large impact on brain function. Changing the dimensions of an animal´s enclosure causes grid cells to alter their scales accordingly, such that the periodicity of their firing, which is observed as the animal moves across a space, increases or decreases. Surprisingly, negotiating a corridor in opposite directions elicits completely different patterns of place-cell activity, so the same space is apparently encoded as two different places. A less surprising but still important finding is that the lack of easily recognizable landmarks causes disorientation. Spiers and his colleagues are now investigating how the brain encodes three-dimensional space. While recording neuronal activity as rats negotiated a spiral staircase, they found that place cells, but not grid cells, respond to changes in height. Thus, the brain seems to encode the vertical and horizontal dimensions in different ways.”
images: screenshots from the installation film at the Neurotopographics website
New knowledge of spatial cognition and the understanding of the neural bases of spatial perception can then inform architects and designers on the brain´s response to the built environment and assist in organising space in a meaningful way.
In a recent project, funded by the Wellcome Trust his collaboration with architect Bettina Vismann and artist Antoni Malinowski produced an installation called Neurotopographics, tracking the relationship between movement through space and the respective activities of the brain.
images: screenshots from the installation film at the Neurotopographics website
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