Season 1 Rewind, Part 1: The Science of Feeling

In this special Season One Rewind episode, Lyssia revisits some of the most compelling conversations from Room to Think to explore the science behind why spaces make us feel the way they do. Bringing together insights from Dr. Sally Augustin, Dr. Esther Sternberg, Dr. Anja Jamrozik, Dr. Kati Peditto, and Professor Justin Hollander, this episode looks beyond aesthetics to understand how our surroundings affect attention, stress, comfort, health, and the way the brain processes the world around us.

The conversation breaks down what is actually happening when a room feels calming, distracting, overwhelming, or strangely uncomfortable. Dr. Sally Augustin explains why clutter can quietly consume our mental processing power and make it harder to focus, while also revealing why spaces that are too empty can create their own kind of stress. She explores how principles of biophilic design, including natural light, natural materials, greenery, views, and gentle sensory stimulation, can help create environments that feel more supportive to the human brain.

Dr. Esther Sternberg takes the conversation deeper into the connection between environment, stress, and physical health. Drawing from decades of research into the relationship between the brain and immune system, she explains how chronic stress can influence the body and why the places we spend time in can either contribute to that stress or help us recover from it. She also shares the personal experience that transformed her own understanding of healing spaces, when a period spent living more slowly in Crete, surrounded by nature, movement, healthy food, community, fresh air, and sensory richness, coincided with a dramatic improvement in her health.

The episode also explores the elements of a space that are easy to overlook because we cannot always see them. Dr. Anja Jamrozik explains why a room can look beautiful and still be difficult to inhabit when acoustics, temperature, air quality, smell, privacy, or the presence of other people have not been considered. She describes the mismatch that can occur when spaces are designed primarily through renderings and visual models rather than through the full physical experience of actually being there.

Dr. Kati Peditto offers practical ways to make everyday spaces feel more comfortable without undertaking a major renovation. From adding rugs, canvas, and other acoustic materials to reducing glare, adjusting task lighting, improving temperature control, and replacing fluorescent lighting, she explains how relatively small changes can reduce sensory strain and create a greater sense of personal control. These interventions can be particularly important for neurodivergent people, but many of them can improve comfort and cognitive function for anyone.

The conversation also looks at the surprising ways human perception may influence what feels familiar or reassuring in the built environment. Professor Justin Hollander explains how the brain is constantly searching for recognizable visual patterns, including face-like forms that may be deeply rooted in early human development. He explores how these unconscious preferences can appear in architecture, design, and even decorative details, influencing how we respond to a place before we can explain why.

Across these conversations, one idea keeps returning: we do not experience space only through what we see. We experience it through attention, emotion, sound, temperature, movement, memory, biology, and the nervous system. A room is never simply sitting around us. It is constantly interacting with the body and brain.

By the end of this episode, you may start to notice your surroundings differently, not simply asking whether a space looks good, but whether it helps you focus, relax, recover, connect, and feel like yourself. Because when you understand the science of feeling, you begin to realize that the spaces around you are shaping you all the time.

More Room to Think:

Dr. Sally Augustin — Our Prehistoric Brains at Home
https://roomtothinkpodcast.com/episodes/our-prehistoric-brains-at-home

Dr. Esther Sternberg — The Spaces That Heal Us
https://roomtothinkpodcast.com/episodes/the-spaces-that-heal-us

Dr. Anja Jamrozik — When Design Becomes the Problem
https://roomtothinkpodcast.com/episodes/when-design-becomes-the-problem

Dr. Kati Peditto — Designing for Neurodivergent Minds
https://roomtothinkpodcast.com/episodes/designing-for-neurodivergent-minds

Professor Justin Hollander — Designing Places That Feel Human
https://roomtothinkpodcast.com/episodes/designing-places-that-feel-human

Room to Think
https://roomtothinkpodcast.com/

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Transcript

Why Rooms Change How You Feel

Dr. Esther Sternberg 0:00

I was convinced that the brain and the immune system communicate, that they talk to each other. A space can look beautiful, but be actually really hard to inhabit.

Lyssia Katan 0:16

Have you ever walked into a room and instantly felt different? Maybe you felt calmer, a little on edge, and you couldn't really say why? Welcome to Room to Think. We're in between seasons right now. So this week I'm taking you back through some of my favorite moments of season one. This one's all about the science of it, how a space quietly works on your body and your brain. Let's

Clutter Attention And The Meadow Rule

Lyssia Katan 0:40

get into it. When a space feels calm and versus stressful, what's actually happening in the brain when it comes to physiology?

Dr. Sally Augustin 0:47

When a space is cluttered, for example, a lot of our mental processing power, our ability to pay attention, et cetera, is siphoned off and not available for the task at hand. But what I'm about to say also can't be determined via experimental research or anything like that. But, you know, something that makes sense is um all goes back to um, you know, our really very early stays as a species. We would um have needed to continually survey our environment to make sure danger wasn't approaching. And actually, you find out when you test people, you know, we are always looking around wherever we are. You know, we're not necessarily consciously aware of that, um, but but we are. And when um a place is cluttered, you know, visually cluttered, as we're discussing at the moment, spaces visually cluttered, it's it's harder for us to review our environment. We have more things we have to check out and decide if they're dangerous or not, etc. And um so you know, we only have a certain amount of uh uh our brains can only do so much at any one time. And if they're trying to decide if something you're looking at is dangerous or not, they're not like coming up with um a cool new advertising slogan or um uh you know developing some sort of spreadsheet sheet that you need it, et cetera. At least you know their full attention isn't focused on that um slogan or that spreadsheet. So, you know, uh what we can say now is that clutter distracts us from the task at hand. It all relates to the amount of attention you know we can pay to any uh at any one time, but just as we are stressed by too much going on around us visually, we're also stressed by too little going on around us. And um so you know, what we normally think of is is clutter is uh a negative, you know, extra books and you know, tchotchkis and stuff like that. That that that that will stress us out, but so will uh being around none of that stuff. You know, that is again, that isn't the kind of environment in which we began as a species. You know, a lot of um what uh is important in my world can get really uh boiled down to you're trying to create a meadow on a lovely spring day. When we were in uh long, long ago, when we were in a meadow on a lovely spring day, we had um uh the mental capacity not only to be creative, which we've been talking about, but um to socialize pleasantly with other people, um uh to um do all sorts of things that require concentration, focus, etc. And um uh when uh we're not in a pleasant environment of that sort, you know, you know, we're distracted, negative things happen. So when we think about this meadow on a lovely spring day, we're really thinking about what people in my world call biophilic design, which is um creating spaces that, for example, are filled with um glare-free natural light and natural materials and at least like uh about one plant in every sight line across an environment. You don't want uh too many plants because that's stressful, that amps up the visual complexity as we've been talking about. You know, um nature sounds when they're played very, very quietly, are um great for people um uh feeling less stressed and for their cognitive performance to improve, for example. So, you know, if you if if you think of a meadow on a lovely spring day, you'd get a lot of cues as to how you should design for people today. And not only some of the sensory things I've been talking about, but also things like people like to feel safe and secure, but they enjoy having a view out over the world around them, much as we would have, for example, uh sitting in a tree long ago. This seem this could be why humans seem to have a drive to sleep on uh in the second story of a building when a second story exists that recreates uh that experience. Or when you go into a restaurant where people can um uh seat themselves uh and there are booths, you find that the first uh booths that get taken are those with a um uh a view to the door of of the um of the restaurant because uh you know, long, long ago it would have been very handy for us to feel secure, like in a in a booth, something protecting our back, but have a view out over the world around us and an ability to determine if danger was was was approaching. So when in doubt, I think lovely spring day in Chipmunk.

Finding The Noise Sweet Spot

Lyssia Katan 6:25

So really those visible elements are key, but the invisible elements, especially the ones you speak about, like noise and scent, how can those be taken into account when designing a space?

Dr. Esther Sternberg 6:40

Sure, absolutely very important. So one of the things we found in our the first paper we published with the in the GSA study, the Well Built for Well-Being studies, we found that people in the open office design settings were more, they moved more during the day, they were less stressed at night, they slept better at night, less fatigued the next day because they were moving more. When we published that first paper in 2018, there was a hue and cry in the internet of people saying they hate their open spaces. They hate their open office design. Why is it that they hate it? It's because of the noise. Noise is the single biggest stressor in any space in open office design. And we actually did find that, well, we know that when when noise, when noise is too loud, it actually damages the ear. Many studies in, for example, emergency rooms or intensive care units have found that the noise level can be over 90 decibels, which is the the the loudness of a motorcycle firing at close range. Uh and that damages your ear, that's extremely stressful. Um but we also found that when it's too quiet, your stress response is higher. And there's a sweet spot for noise level, about 45, 40, 45 decibels, where the relaxation response, the well-being response is optimal. The brain's stress center, the hypothalamus, is important in susceptibility and resistance to autoimmune inflammatory diseases like arthritis in rats. And when you can prove that connection in rats, the scientific community begins to believe it. And so that became an important piece of the science of the mind-body connection. In the 1980s and 90s, there were a few of us around the country, around the world, who were studying different pieces of that puzzle. How does the brain send signals to the immune system? Well, it turns out there's lots of nerves that actually innervate immune organs. How does the immune system send signals to the brain when you're sick? Well, there are molecules from the immune system that cross the blood-brain barrier and change how the brain functions. I mean, we all know that. When you're sick, you want to sleep a lot, you lose interest in uh in the outside world, you you lose your interest in all of your appetites, in uh food, sex, uh, you curl up and you go to bed. That's because those immune molecules are making your brain do that. So there's a wealth of information now since the 1980s, 1990s, that there really is a brain immune connection, and that keeping that connection intact is important for health.

Stress The Immune System And Illness

Dr. Esther Sternberg 9:30

If that connection is broken, you get disease. So I'll start with what happened to me. So I was studying the brain immune connection and discovered that stress was important in illness. And about eight years later, I went through a period of extreme stress in my own life. My mother was dying of cancer, my father had just died of a seven-year illness that included Parkinson's and dementia, and uh I was under a lot of stress at work. I testified before Congress on a very controversial issue on which the institute director of my institute was on the other side. So I was under a lot of stress in a lot of domains. Um I had just moved into a new house, which is another huge stressor, and my mother died. And um I was in Washington, D.C., in my new house, writing what was to become my first book, uh The Balance Within, The Science Connecting Health and Emotions. And my new neighbors uh knocked on the door, they saw me writing on the deck, and they were Greek, and they brought me all kinds of wonderful Greek food, tzatsiki, dolmares, musaka, which by the way reminded me of my parents' cooking, my mother's cooking, because they were from Romania and the food is very similar. So they said, Are you a writer? And I said, I don't know, why do you ask? And they said, We've always wanted a writer to stay in our cottage in Crete. And I said, I'm a writer, and I went with them to Crete. I was so I had developed during that period of extreme stress, I had developed inflammatory arthritis. I mean, how ironic is that? An arthritis doc discovers that the stress center is important in susceptibility to arthritis, I go through stress, I get arthritis. It is not a coincidence that I developed the arthritis at that point in time. What happened when I went to Greece was that I felt so much better after I was there for only 10 days or two weeks, that when I came back, my doctor said, What did you do? You don't have to go back into hospital because I was going to get liver biopsies, more knee biopsies, be on an experimental drug for arthritis. And my doctor said, You don't need to go into hospital. What were you doing? Well, what I was doing was, and I didn't fully appreciate this until I moved to the Andrew Wilde Center for Integrative Medicine 13 years ago in Tucson, Arizona. I was inadvertently or without realizing it, practicing the seven domains of integrative health. I was sleeping healthily every night, sometimes under the stars. I was in a wonderful green environment. I was outside in nature, I was breathing fresh, clean air. Um I was uh surrounded by the grandmothers of the village and my neighbors who were all feeding me wonderful healthy food, a healthy Mediterranean diet. Um, so I had the support of all of these friends and uh villagers. Uh I was began to move every day. I had been very sedentary. I'd been in Washington. I had been eating French fries and hamburgers and cheeseburgers every day for lunch, and sitting in front of a computer. And so I began to slowly walk and eventually climbed to the top of the hill above the village where there was the ruins of a temple to Asclepius, the Greek god of healing. And uh I would sit there for hours, not realizing time would go by, and I'd look out at the blue, blue Mediterranean and the white stucco buildings and the uh fuchia buganvillia, and I'd listen to the birds and the sheep and the goats and the wind, and I'd be breathing in this wonderful air with the aromas of the lemon and uh orange trees and eucalyptus. And I didn't realize actually until very recently that I was meditating. That's what meditating is, it's being in the moment. Um, so I was practicing these seven domains of integrative health, and that's really what made me. I had an aha moment in the middle of that period there, which by the way, uh my computer blew the first day because I had the wrong connection, so I couldn't write. So my neighbor said, What are you doing? You're supposed to be writing here. And I said, Well, it's actually was better because this way I was able to really immerse myself in the village life and in the life that where they live by the seasons and the sun, and uh it's a very healthy way of life. Uh I was able to slow down. And that's really what helped me heal. And I realized halfway through that time there that if I continued doing what I was doing in Washington, D.C., I would continue to get sick. And if I did what I did in Greece, tried to bring a little bit of Greece with me back home, uh, I would continue to heal. So I planted some uh jasmine trees on my deck in D.C. I planted herbs and so I could sit in the evening and smell the fragrance of the flowers and the herbs and be quiet and take moments out during the day to just relax. And I went back to what I had been brought up on, a healthy Mediterranean diet, because that was what my mother cooked, and I went back to that. And uh every time that I do get overstressed, I I do try to throttle back and get back into that mode. So thinking about what was it that helped me heal there? Um, that's what contributed to the my second book, Healing Spaces. It was what I saw, what I heard, what I smelled, what I did, what I touched in that space. Um and and I'm became really very aware of how physical environments can help you heal or can harm you.

Design Mismatches People Actually Notice

Lyssia Katan 15:54

Are there any elements of your research that you wish the world could hear?

Dr. Anja Jamrozik 16:00

I'd say like the subjective experience is your experience, is one. So really trusting how you feel and checking in and also checking in how people are feeling. So if you're designing a home, how are all of the people in the home finding it? How are people in an office finding it, like really taking that seriously? And then I think the other one is if you design for everybody, you design for nobody. So really understanding who it is that is served by a space and what they're doing because you can't anticipate every use and every person who may inhabit the space of really focusing it on those people who will be there and what they're doing in there.

Lyssia Katan 16:38

Are there things like invisible elements that we don't realize, or besides the obvious invisible elements that we don't realize or put into our spaces to kind of mold our behavior?

Dr. Anja Jamrozik 16:49

Invisible factors like other people in the space, or um especially noise, I think that's one where it a space can look beautiful, but be actually really hard to inhabit because of noise. Um uh temperature would be another one, like thermal comfort. Um, and of course, yeah, air quality and air circulation is another one. So all of these and smell as well. Um, probably things we don't see through a screen, especially when designing.

Lyssia Katan 17:18

What were some of the most surprising mismatches that you found between the way that a designer creates a space and the way it's actually used and how people actually experienced it?

Dr. Anja Jamrozik 17:28

I think the biggest mismatch came from designing for the visual and having 3D models to guide the design. And then the reality was the physical experience was quite different because you have all of these other cues that people use. One really common one was noise, especially with um acoustics of glass um partitions. So I found that designers often want to let light further into the building, which totally makes sense. Like you were trying to put light deeper, and so you create use uh glass walls, which then creates like horrible echoes for people who are in this in the the kind of uh Glaston space, um, as well as a feeling of being watched in the space. So that was a really common mismatch. Another one was kind of contrast spaces that were often like dark to create some sort of contrast with a light space, like for example, like a very dark core or maybe like around the elevators or a dark space. And those spaces ended up not being used quite often because people don't want to be in like a dark, small space. Um, and then the third really common one was humans, like other faces. So we know from research that people get really distracted by having faces around them, like even cartoon faces. So if you are trying to concentrate and there's like a face in front of you, um, as is typical, if you tried are trying to keep like a workspace very open and like the tables very open, you are facing another human being and that can be really distracting. And so I think it's really about what is the activity that people are intended to do or you're trying to encourage people to do in a given space. So, like let's say that a space is really for collaboration, like a meeting room or like a brainstorming room. Like, of course, like you want people there, you want people to be seeing each other. But if you are trying to create like a small workspace where someone is really trying to do focused work, like having another person right across from you can be very distracting.

Low-Cost Home Fixes For Focus

Lyssia Katan 19:32

How can a listener recreate a sensory space in their home? And what are the elements that are really important? And what are the ones that are not not so critical?

Dr. Kati Peditto 19:41

It doesn't have to be an extremely expensive intervention in your home, um, if you're homeschooling, right? Um, or if you're creating your own home office. The first, usually cheapest intervention is going to be acoustic material. If you have hardwood floors without a carpet, if you have walls and ceilings, um especially high ceilings, put some acoustic material on your walls. Um, even just a painting or a canvas on the wall and a rug on the floor is going to dramatically dampen the reverberation in the space. And it might not even be something that you're fully conscious of. I don't think the average person, I hope the average person isn't super tuned in to the reverberation in their room. But once you dampen it, then you start to realize what was going on in the first place. It doesn't have to be loudness to be a sensory challenge. Reverberation or echo can also be really, really disruptive. So that's that's an easy, like low cost, get a rug on Facebook Marketplace and put it on your hardwood floor. The second thing is visual input. Where are your sources of glare? Can you put a little bit of glazing on a window so that your workspace or your computer screen is not um causing visual fatigue? Again, this is not just something that is beneficial for neurodivergent folks. It's just good for anyone who works in an office. Um, this is something that's going to improve your cognitive function, regardless of whether you consider yourself neurodivergent or not. Um, but it's often something that we don't take stock of until we sit and look at where glare is happening in our spaces. Um temperature control, lighting control, those are things that you may or may not be able to adjust without expensive intervention. But you can still put task lighting on your office desk. I have a teeny tiny little space heater next to me. Small things that give you a sense of personal control, whether it's in your home or in your office space at your work, you know, your workplace, right? Um, you're often not going to be able to have personal control over the HVAC in your office, but there are little things that you can do to provide that sense of autonomy back. Again, a great example of an intervention that doesn't have to be expensive and benefits folks, even if they don't identify as neurodivergent. Fluorescent lighting. I know we all joke about fluorescent lighting and overhead lighting, but it's real. I can promise you it's real. There is a subclinical subconscious flicker to fluorescent lighting. Individuals who are neurodivergent, often autistic individuals, are much more sensitive to that flicker. But even individuals with a temporary impairment, like a traumatic brain injury, a concussion, are very, very sensitive to that flicker. LEDs solve that problem. Um LEDs are really cheap. They're even cheap to replace your um, you know, your overhead lighting, but it's also an easy fix if you put it in your task lighting as well. I know that sounds like an urban myth. It is not. Fluorescent lighting does have a flicker. You can see it if you uh take a video of an overhead light. And it impacts your visual system, even if you can't consciously process

Why Faces In Buildings Comfort Us

Dr. Kati Peditto 23:40

it.

Lyssia Katan 23:40

You argue that people don't experience space abstractly, they experience it through perception, attention, and emotion. What's one insight from the book that most changed how you personally look at everyday environments?

Professor Justin Hollander 23:52

There's like this interesting idea that has a lot of credibility in the scientific community that when we look around, and I'm not talking about just at a building, when we look around anywhere as a human, we are looking for essentially two dots for an eye, a line for a nose, and another line for a mouth. It's called the figural primitive. And it's like that template is burned into our mind before we're even born. And so uh this uh neuroscientist Eric Handel wrote about how when we're born, we're looking for that. And frankly, that's our that's our mother. We're looking for that two dot two dots for the eye, the line for the nose, the line for the mouth. And then when we see it, that gives us comfort. That means that we found our mother and we can be safe. So we're always looking for that, not just as babies. And so when you look at a lot of traditional architecture, you see that. You see that same free girl primitive. Um you know, Ann likes to call it call it face a texture. Like the idea that faces are in a lot of designs. Um, I believe you do work with uh tiles. I actually I see it all the time in tiles too. Tiles that are designed to have that kind of face-like orientation. It makes us feel comfortable when you see it. And so that's pretty powerful. There actually are some real well-known within uh particularly in cognitive science, psychology, neuroscience, uh, rules about the how we should shape our built environment, the places that we live in. And they didn't teach that to me when I was uh in my my design studies.

Key Takeaways And Closing

Lyssia Katan 25:42

That's the part that still gets me. None of this is in your head. Your space is working on you all the time. And once you can see it, you can actually change it. Thank you so much for spending this time with me on Room to Think. If you enjoyed this episode, feel free to follow the show, subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who you think would really appreciate a more thoughtful approach to their space. You can find more Design Meets Psychology insights on social, in our community, and definitely in upcoming episodes so you can build a better life by design. I'm so excited to share season two with you very soon. Thanks again for listening. I'll see you next time.