Room to Think
Room to Think explores how the spaces we live and work in shape how we think, feel, and function.
Hosted by Lyssia Katan, Head of Brand at LiLi Tile, the podcast features conversations with world-class architects, designers, neuroscientists, psychologists, and cultural thinkers. Together, they unpack how light, layout, materials, sound, and spatial decisions influence stress, focus, creativity, and wellbeing, and share practical insights you can apply in your own home or workspace.
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Room to Think
The Aesthetic Brain
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In this episode, Lyssia sits down with Dr. Anjan Chatterjee, neurologist, cognitive neuroscientist, and founding director of the Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics at the University of Pennsylvania, to explore what actually happens in the brain when we experience beauty—and why some spaces simply feel better than others.
Dr. Chatterjee breaks down the science of neuroaesthetics and explains how our brains respond to people, places, art, architecture, and the environments around us. He introduces the aesthetic triad—the sensory, emotional, and meaning-based systems that shape what we find beautiful—and explains why beauty is far more personal than we may realize. What feels calming, interesting, or inviting to one person can feel completely different to another depending on memory, culture, experience, and personality.
The conversation also explores the three qualities Dr. Chatterjee’s research has identified in our experience of space: coherence, fascination, and hominess. They discuss why some rooms immediately draw us in, why others overwhelm us, and what actually makes a space feel like home. Dr. Chatterjee also explains how ceiling height, curves, openness, noise, and even the layout of an environment can influence the way we feel and behave, often without us consciously noticing it.
Most importantly, this episode offers a different way to think about design. Rather than following a trend or trying to create a universally “beautiful” room, Dr. Chatterjee encourages us to pay closer attention to our own reactions. How does this space make me feel? Do I want to stay here? Does it feel comfortable, interesting, or overwhelming?
Because when it comes to the spaces around us, the brain may be responding long before we ever put that feeling into words.
More Room to Think:
Dr. Anjan Chatterjee + Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics
Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics: https://neuroaesthetics.med.upenn.edu/
Psychology Today — Brain, Behavior, and Beauty: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/brain-behavior-and-beauty
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anjan-chatterjee-4131734
Room to Think
https://roomtothinkpodcast.com/
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What Neuroaesthetics Really Studies
Dr. Anjan ChatterjeeI think of neuroesthetics as a subdiscipline of cognitive neuroscience.
Lyssia KatanWhat actually happens to our brain when we see something beautiful?
Dr. Anjan ChatterjeeIt depends on what it is we are looking at that is beautiful. Space matters and it pushes our physiology into this state of vigilance. Neuroesthetics studies the nature of aesthetic experiences and why they matter. So when we are engaged with something beautiful, those areas get activated.
Lyssia KatanHow would you describe what you actually study and why you've given your career to it?
Dr. Anjan ChatterjeeOne thing we have found is that.
Lyssia KatanWhat if beauty is something your brain can feel and you're drawn to things purely because of their aesthetic? It's not shallow, it's science. Welcome to Room to Think. Today I'm sitting down with Dr. Anjan Chatterjee, a neurologist, cognitive neuroscientist, and founding director of the Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics at the University of Pennsylvania. We talk about what happens in the brain when we experience beauty and why the spaces around us can affect us in ways we may not even notice. Dr. Chatterjee breaks down the aesthetic triad, the three systems that shape how we experience the world around us, and what that can reveal about why one space pulls us in while another just feels off. Finally, we get into why beauty is so personal and what our reactions to a room can teach us about ourselves. You may find this episode beautiful in more ways than one. Let's get into it. Hello, Dr. Chatterjee. I'm so excited to have you on the show. Dr. Anjan Chatterjee is a leading neurologist and cognitive neuroscientist and the founding director of the Penn Center for Neuroesthetics at the University of Pennsylvania. His work explores how the brain responds to beauty, art, architecture, and the built environment, and what that reveals about the powerful connection between our surroundings and our minds. Dr. Chatterjee, it is an honor to have you on the show. Welcome to Rumethink. So for a listener who's never heard the word neuroaesthetics before, how would you describe what you actually study and why you've given your career to it?
Dr. Anjan ChatterjeeI think of neuroesthetics as a subdiscipline of cognitive neuroscience. And so to first say what cognitive neuroscience is, uh, it is trying to understand the nature of the human mind as implemented through the brain. And traditionally, cognitive neuroscience has studied topics like language or emotion or perception, decision-making, uh, attention. These are some of the traditional aspects of cognitive neuroscience. Uh, but within that, uh, there's this idea that our engagement in aesthetics is a core piece, a core piece of what humans do. Uh, and so it would fall within the purview of uh of cognitive neuroscience. And to be more specific, neuroaesthetics studies the nature of aesthetic experiences and why they matter. And aesthetic experiences can be of any number uh of things or encounters, we use the way our brain carves out the world as an organizing principle into people, places, and things. So we're interested in the aesthetics of people, why are some people look more attractive than others? What are the consequences of that? Places, which has to do with both the natural and the built environment. Uh how do we react to that? How does that how does how do those environments have an impact on us? Uh and things. Uh things can be consumer products. Uh we focus primarily on artwork. Uh, there's something fundamentally mysterious about art. Why, you know, I have uh uh a Japanese print behind me, you have some framed images behind you. Why do we care? Why that's not obvious why uh this should matter to us. We don't eat it, we don't have sex with it, uh, and somehow people uh seem to put uh impose a lot of value on it. So so those are the kinds of questions uh we address in the context of neuroaesthetics.
Lyssia KatanThat's absolutely fascinating. And I'm so excited to dive
From Brain Damage To Beauty
Lyssia Kataninto this with you. Now, you actually started as a neurologist studying brain damage. Was there a moment that pulled you toward the beauty and art and architecture?
Dr. Anjan ChatterjeeUh you're right. I started as a cognitive neurologist and was studying, again, within the context of cognitive neuroscience, how we understand uh the way our brain implements certain aspects of uh thinking, using, you know, as a model, people with focal brain damage. And this is something that goes back to the mid to late 19th century, where people started to observe that you can have damage to certain parts of the brain, and things like language can be affected or our motor control can be affected. And so there's been a long tradition of this. Uh, when I started to do this kind of work in the late 80s, early 90s, I was particularly interested in a particular syndrome where people can have brain damage, usually to the right side of their brain, and they act as though the left side of space doesn't exist. Uh, that can include their own body, they uh because their language systems are relative, relatively preserved, they can talk to you about it, but they might act as though the left side of their own body is not theirs. Uh you have these clinical phenomena where if and given a plate of food, they'll eat the right side of the plate, but not things on the left. They don't notice things on the left. And it's one of these counterintuitive uh phenomena that invites all kinds of questions. How is it possible uh that the brain organizes space and spatial attention this way? So that's what I was initially interested in. Then I got interested in the relationship between space and language. Uh and this is a kind of you can think of this as an analog to digital conversion question. So we think of language as symbolic. They're a set of symbols that we manipulate to convey meaning, uh, to describe the world. Uh, but most of our spatial representations are formed by our sensory systems that have an analog organization. Uh, you know, so things are on top of the world, you know, they appear top in our visual fields and so on and so forth. So there's a real question of how do we take that sensory information that's coming into the brain and convert them and that into a symbolic form. So those are the kinds of questions I was particularly interested in. This particular turn to aesthetics uh happened uh uh in a particular point in place and time. It was 1999, and I was I started my faculty career at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and in around then the University of Pennsylvania where I work now and where I was also a medical student, uh, was going to start a center for cognitive neuroscience. And so I was being recruited for that, uh, for that new center. And I had a couple of close friends in Birmingham, uh, where we would get together every Friday in one of these beautiful semi-indoor, semi-outdoor bars that you'll in my experience you only find them at Deep South. Uh, it was uh a courtyard with magnolia trees and uh you know broad iron furniture and architectural remnants just strewn about, uh very cozy place. Uh and one of my, I said with these two friends, uh we would get together most Fridays and just review the week and you know, sort of bring in the weekend. And one of them asked, because they knew our little little club was going to uh dissipate because I was going to move, uh, posed a hypothetical, which he said, imagine yourself 10 years in the future and look back and think about what you would regret if you had never done that uh with respect to your work. And I thought I had been interested in how we think about space, how we communicate about space. Uh as a child, I was always interested in drawing and uh you know that had those kinds of interests. And I thought, well, if I didn't try to incorporate aesthetics in my work life, in my as part of my investigative program, I would regret it. Uh and at the time, there was almost nothing written about it. So but it was also a chance to, uh, as I was moving to a new institution, also to think about, you know, what how do I want to organize my research career? And so pretty much that that was the point to which it started. 10 years is a nice length of time because you don't have to do anything right away. You can kind of gradually incrementally move in that direction. You know, you've got a North Star to orient yourself, uh, but like there's no rush. Uh there's no immediate rush. So that's that's how that happened.
Lyssia KatanWell, I think that's a great question to we should all ask ourselves because 10 years does feel like a long time, but looking back, it feels like a blink of an eye.
Dr. Anjan ChatterjeeWell, I've done I've asked I've asked that same question to myself now three times, and it's it remains a very useful question.
Lyssia KatanYeah, they say uh people overestimate what they can do in 10 years and underestimate what they can do in a year or so, or maybe the flipped version, and we don't realize how quickly it can pass. And having that North Star is very helpful.
A Childhood Place That Still Calms
Lyssia KatanSo you mentioned your childhood. Was there a space from your childhood or your life growing up that you can now explain scientifically, but that first really hit you as a feeling?
Dr. Anjan ChatterjeeYeah, I was asked this question on a live show I did in New York uh not too long ago. And particularly because of what I'm thinking about now, there are certain childhood experiences that uh come to mind. Uh so this would have been when I was around five or six years old. Uh I uh I was in India at the time. Uh before that, we had lived in Boston, we moved to Boston when I was one, moved back when I was five. Uh and my grandparents lived in South India, state called Kerala, which is uh absolutely gorgeous subtropical place. Uh and we were uh going to visit them for a few days. Uh if there was uh uh a small village, a rural village, and my uh grandparents' home was uh on uh a small hill, a kind of sloping area that led into these rice paddies. Uh, there's no electricity, so there's oil lamps, uh, there's no running water. Uh there's water was drawn from a well. Uh my grandfather was the school teacher of this village and had a lot of books, many in English, so that was exciting for me to have all that. My grandmother was this very warm woman who did not speak a word of English. Uh and but there was something about the place that was inviting, comfortable, calming. Uh, and I also remember uh in the evening, sometimes going out into the rice patties where uh you know your audience might not know what a rice paddy is like. Uh there they tend to be flat. Uh they uh you need a lot of standing water there to grow rice. But in between that are these raised uh mud pathways that you can walk. And I would like to go out in the middle of that, sit by myself as the sun was going down, uh, and you know, starting to see the little the houses on the the hills around it, uh just start uh, you know, all these oil lamps and different places would start to come on as the light would change. And the combination of that house, the presence of my grandparents, the close connection to nature, the kind of beautiful light. Uh I think all of those things is something uh really in retrospect, uh it's it's an experience that um it's very easy for me to evoke, even though it's been many years ago. Do you go back there often in your mind? Not so much. Uh it was only because I've been writing about some of this and thinking about this and our relationship to nature, the built environment, uh, that uh that uh it's in the context of thinking of that, that that uh some of those memories and that one in particular uh comes up. You know, 10 years ago, if you'd asked me, I'd probably a different answer.
Lyssia KatanHow big of an importance does the emotional aspect of it play, knowing you feel safe with your family or grandmother, and it's a place you're you're free to run around as a child, especially.
Dr. Anjan ChatterjeeYeah, I mean, I had the good fortune of running around all the time as a child without any adult supervision, uh, which I do think is um unfortunate and a loss that many kids in America don't have uh uh or don't have easily. I'm sure there are rural parts of the US where that's still true, but at least most of the areas that I live in has not been true for a while. Um I think that sense of safety, uh a kind of calmness, a kind of beauty is important. Um there's a restfulness to it, and maybe part of the reason it comes to mind is uh because the relentlessly manic lifestyle that most of us, or I can speak for myself, but many people live in where we're rushing from point to point. I mean, when you and I were uh when you first invited me to talk about this, it was a good month before I could even find the time to take to speak with you. And it's just a measure, and this is in the summer, so this is just a measure of at least my lifestyle, which is uh not uh it's not an outlier for many people, uh, that we in some ways have forgotten how to be present, uh, that in every moment we're thinking about what we just did or what we have to do, and our attention gets distributed both in space and time, right? At the same time, you might, you know, or one might get a bunch of notifications on the phone. Uh, you know, it's hard to go to a restaurant and the number of people that are actually seem to be just present with whoever they're having dinner with and not looking at their phone or being distracted is quite extraordinary. So putting all that together, I think there is a way in which the experience I think the nostalgia for that is uh a kind of a kind of state that I and many people wish to be able to return to. Not all the time. Uh I'm not ready to retire, but uh but uh a way in which we can carve out in our lives uh time and space uh to enjoy those moments.
Lyssia KatanYeah, that's certainly something I agree with. And do not disturb is one of my favorite features on my phone. It's just peaceful walking away from it. Because even just having the phone on the table is some kind of connection to your brain that you have to look at it. Sometimes distracting. I have to hide it under a pillow or something.
The Aesthetic Triad Explained
Lyssia KatanSo you wrote uh a book called The Aesthetic Brain. I have to ask. What actually happens to our brain when we see something beautiful?
Dr. Anjan ChatterjeeSeveral things happen in the brain. And it depends on what it is we are looking at that is beautiful. Uh so before getting into back, uh, it's worth talking about uh a general informal model that we have been talking and writing about, uh, which is called the aesthetic triad. And the triad has one component which has to do with the sensory and motor qualities of whatever it is you're engaged with. The second is the are the emotions, and with beauty, it's typically pleasure and reward, you know. But what are what are the emotions that is part of that encounter? And the third part of the triad has to do with semantics and knowledge and meaning. Uh, and to some extent, that's what do we bring to bear on the experience, right? That has to do with our personal backgrounds, our education, our culture, and so on. So if you think about it in those three terms, if you are looking at, say, a beautiful person, or you're looking at a beautiful landscape like the one I described in the patty fields, turns out that in our visual cortex, there are different parts of the brain that are tuned to different kinds of things. So there's an area called the usiform face area. So this is a part of uh part of our brain that is tuned to processing faces. There's a different area that is tuned to processing places uh for objects, and then different attributes of objects. So color has its own little area, movement has its own little area. Uh and so when we are engaged with something beautiful, uh, those areas get activated, but in a domain-specific way. And what I mean by that is if you're looking at a beautiful landscape, your face area isn't going to be activated, and vice versa, right? So that's domain-specific. The same would be true for music, which would be an auditory cortex, although we don't study music, uh, or perfumes, which would be our olfactory cortex and so on. But then it looks like a lot of our emotions, uh, and particularly around beauty, uh, they're deep in the brain, uh in the front of the brain, uh, and there are certain regions that uh uh encode pleasure uh of in a way that is not domain specific. So the pleasure one might get from food, from sex, from just the pleasure of looking at something uh that is gorgeous is going to engage those same systems. Uh and then finally, if you have some knowledge about what you're looking at, that other parts of the brain that encode our memories and some of our knowledge systems will be engaged. So uh there was a classic experiment done over 15 years ago looking at architectural facades and looking at people who were trained in architecture. Uh, I think there were architecture graduate students versus students who were grad students but not in architecture. And the response to our beautiful building facades were such that the architecture students had a little more of a response in their reward systems, but also part of their uh parts of their temporal lobe where memories are encoded or were also activated in a way that they weren't for. The other people. So it's a long-winded answer to your question to say it always depends on beauty of what, when you have the simultaneous neural activity of some part of the brain that is processing that information specific, whether it's faces or places, and reward systems, um, to first approximation, that's the core beauty response. And then if you know something about the topic, and it can be because you have expertise, it can be because you have some contextual information. For example, if it's a particularly beautiful painting and you know something about the artist, you know something about the historic context in which it was made, uh, that information, which not everybody's going to have, also uh comes online during the experience of
Why Beauty Varies By Person
Dr. Anjan Chatterjeebeauty.
Lyssia KatanAnd I'm curious to know though, how much of beauty is subjective, besides for if you're specifically, uh, for example, my dad loves tile. He he works in the tile industry. So any tile we see anywhere, or if it's laid really beautifully, he'll like he'll say, Wow, what a beautiful tile or what a beautiful installation. And before I was trained in tile, I would say, I mean, it's a floor, it's fine. But he would say, Wow, it's stunning. So, how much of that is knowledge or how and how much of that is collectively as humans, we've decided this is something beautiful and we respond accordingly.
Dr. Anjan ChatterjeeA good part of that is knowledge. You know, I imagine that many of your clients don't necessarily start out uh thinking what you think is beautiful is beautiful, right? So if it was it was so uh if it was so common, you know, you probably wouldn't have a job. Um that you know, everybody would react the same way to the same things. So I think there's a lot of variability. One thing we know, uh, and as I mentioned in my message to you, you know, rather than thinking about whether there are universal responses, it's easier to think about this as uh how much variability is there? So a notion that a future response is universal means that every single person in the world is going to have the same response to whether it's a flower or a tile or a face. And that's just implausible. You know, it just people people vary. Having said that, we always think about variability as uh as something to be explained, right? What's the what accounts for the variability? The uh we know that people are more consistent in their response to beauty and natural kinds, and that means spaces and uh and natural landscapes, but less consistent when it comes to human artifacts. So this can be art and architecture, tile would be included in that. Uh, and so the question always is well, what accounts for that variability? You've already mentioned some, which is prior exposure. You grew up around tiles. We know that people who have had more exposure to art uh approach art differently. Uh, some of it has to do with uh with education, uh, people who have had some context in which to understand what they're looking at. The classic example in art is around abstract art, uh, such that you know people who have had very little exposure to art don't get why anybody cares about Mark Rothko or Jackson Paula. Like, why what's the big deal? So those are the kinds of things that you try to understand what's the nature of variability uh and people's power exposure. There's another uh there are a couple of other important differences among people that also seem to have an impact, uh, which is how curious people are. Uh early in this conversation, you mentioned something about being quite curious. And it turns out that people who are more curious are willing to engage longer and more deeply with things that are not obvious. Uh and so certain kinds of challenging encounters, whether it's art or visible spaces, people who are curious are are not turned off right away. Uh and then the other is something related called openness to experience, which is some people just want the same thing over and over. They eat the same and narrow set of foods. They, you know, when they go to vacation, they like to go to some place that's very familiar, uh, versus people who are open to diverse experiences. Uh and people who tend to be open to diverse experiences also, on average, have uh a broader and in some cases a richer experience, richer aesthetic experience.
Lyssia KatanSo it's not just that we get bored quickly and we want to see something new, it's that we're open.
Dr. Anjan ChatterjeeI mean, novelty is a really important feature. Uh and it uh but it has uh you know there are two sides to this, which is we orient to novelty. Novelty engages our attention. Uh and but the other, there's also this idea of familiarity can be comforting, but familiarity also breeds contempt. Uh and so there's a a well-known uh scientist in the mid-20th century, uh, from between the 1950s to about the 19 to the 1970s, named Daniel Berline, uh, who really talked about uh an inverted U-shaped curve around complexity, which is that if things are not very complex, they don't they don't interest us very much. And if they're too complex, it becomes chaotic and uh it becomes chaotic and uh overwhelming. And so there's a kind of sweet spot. Now what where that sweet spot is can vary from person to person.
Lyssia KatanVery cool. Very, very fascinating to hear. And you can see that in different types of games or different kinds of uh even things like Legos, right? If it was so simple, it wouldn't be interesting and kids wouldn't play with it. But if it was so complicated, again, nobody would play with it.
Dr. Anjan ChatterjeeDo you have kids? Is this how you're speaking from personal experience?
Lyssia KatanNot yet. I have little cousins though, and I have seen certain games they are absolutely fascinated by and almost to the point where it's keeping them engaged and and ones where it's it's too complicated and they just don't even want to touch it. It's frustrating almost.
Dr. Anjan ChatterjeeYeah, so just as an editorial side note, I don't have kids either, but kids are inherently curious, right? They want to explore, they they're curious about things. And unfortunately, I think a lot of our school system uh sort of beats it out of them. Uh, that there's a kind of exploratory quality. This is true of all models of creativity, which is that there needs to be a time to explore, kind of whether you're brainstorming, trying out different things before you uh bear down, uh, and converge on what you make out of all of that divergent thinking. Uh, but our schools really lean into the convergent, you know, get the right answer and get uh and this question-asking exploratory piece that is really important. Uh, I think we, again, this is the other side of education that we we drum it out of our kids.
Lyssia KatanYou're absolutely right. We actually had an artist on the show, uh, Hollis Callis, uh, in the first season, and she said how she gives herself time to play. And very often, like you mentioned, we're rushing from one thing to another, and we don't even have the time to play and explore and and stay curious unless we actively make it a point in our lives.
Dr. Anjan ChatterjeeYeah, so true.
Coherence Fascination Hominess In Rooms
Lyssia KatanSo you've shown that our brains are constantly responding to the physical environment, whether we're noticing it or not. What are we all feeling in a space, but we're not quite naming?
Dr. Anjan ChatterjeeYeah, so when it comes to spaces, I have to give you a little background to the story to so it makes sense to your listeners. Uh we had been involved in uh a study that was published in 2013 as an international study. So uh the main uh the lead author was a good friend of mine named Ocean Barcanyon. Uh he's in Toronto, Canada, and he and I actually wrote about the aesthetic triad, which I mentioned before. Uh he did a study, uh, and this was involving people in Spain, in Denmark, uh and me in the US, where had collected a bunch of images of architectural interiors uh that were curated by uh or selected by designers in Denmark. Uh and the first study was asking a very simple question, which is when people respond to beauty in architectural interiors, does it engage the same kind of reward systems that we were talking about before? And the short answer is yes, but it had never been demonstrated before that our reaction to spaces um tap into those same pleasure circuits that are fundamental to our survival that people uh engage in with more basic and fundamental needs and pleasures. So that had been done, and there were a couple of papers around that uh that were uh came out of that data set. Uh those data were collected in uh in Tenerife, Spain. So it was participants over there. So a few years later, I had a graduate student from Cambridge. He was getting a PhD in architecture in Cambridge, his name is Alex Colburn. Uh he wanted to do some empirical work, which is not typical of what people do to get a uh to get a degree in architecture. So he spent close to a couple of years in my lab, and we decided to look at this systematically, and we combed the literature to see what kind of questions, whether it's environmental psychology or the little bit that had been done in the psychology of design, what kind of questions people ask. And so it came up with a survey of 16 dimensions. We used the same images that were used in the original study and crowdsourced it. I think we had around 900 participants, uh uh responding to each of those images based on those 16 questions. Now it turned out there was also another uh young man who was in who joined our lab around that time, and there are these relatively new statistical methods that he had never used in my lab. And his name is Joan Kennett, he's in Israel right now. He had uh did what is sometimes referred to as exploratory graph analysis or semantic network analysis. These are just fancy words, but basically it says you take all of these questions and the way people answer them, uh, you can cluster their responses into some core components. So, from that, what we found is that there were three major components that fell out, which we call coherence, fascination, and hominess. And this I in the map, this idea of valence, and valence is the most basic question, do I feel good or do I feel bad? was right at the center of that map. And just so people have a sense of what we mean, uh coherence is kind of uh a sense of legibility. How organized is a space? You come in a space, it seems organized, you know what's where, where you need to go, so on and so forth. Fascination is related to the amount of information and informational complexity there is. Like is there stuff there that you're intrigued by, you want to explore? Uh, it's drawing you in. And hominess is that basic sense of do I feel at home here? Right? Does it does it feel personal? Do I belong here? And each of these can vary independently of the other, right? You know, most people have been in beautifully appointed uh dining rooms or hotel rooms, but you might not necessarily feel at home there. Uh so you know, so I think so. All of a sudden we had these, we had discovered these three components, and we realized that we had an opportunity because we were using the exact same images that had been used in the original study. Right. So that's why describing the first study was important to get to this point. We went back to the data now that had been collected eight years before in uh in Tanerif, and all of what we had with Alex and I collected was here in the US. Uh, but we re-analyzed the data with these new three components, which we did not know about at the time. And lo and behold, within visual cortex, there were different parts of the visual brain that was responding to each of these components. So the upshot is that it's as close to a double-blind study as an experimentalist can do, because when we collected those data, we did not know that these components were even relevant. Certainly the participants would have no way of knowing because nobody knew they existed. And yet the response to those specific components was in their brain. Uh, at the time, we just didn't know to ask the question. And so one implication of that and some other work we've done in Beauty and Faces is that uh we we think that our brain is a lot of the time. I mean, it's hard to say all the time because we haven't studied people all the time, and that would be impossible to do. But our intuition is that we are frequently responding to the built environment uh in even if we're not aware that that's
When Fascination Becomes Overload
Dr. Anjan Chatterjeehappening.
Lyssia KatanSo, real quick, I wanna I want to break them down, starting with coherence. Is there a point where maybe a space is too coherent? Does it go on both sides of the spectrum where you almost feel uncomfortable, it's too organized, it's almost too buttoned up?
Dr. Anjan ChatterjeeThat would get us back to this question about individual differences. Uh so one thing we have found is that architects value coherence more than everyday folk. Now, whether that's I've asked architects this, and they uh we don't know the answer to why that is. Is it the case that people who are very spatially organized are more inclined to go into architecture? Is it something about their education that really promotes this way of thinking? Uh so we don't know the answer to that, but we do know that architects value coherence more than other people. Uh and I, you know, I would suspect you probably in your own life know people who uh you know can't work at a desk without everything precisely in place. Uh, and for other people, it would just drive them crazy. So uh we do think there are those are likely to have individual differences. Uh, you know, but this is where you start asking the question is why is person X tend to prefer a very organized space versus another, and how that relates strictly to fascination, because fascination has this kind of informational complexity. There we have uh we've also found that uh people who are on the autism spectrum tend to be uh tend to react differently to the same areas that neurotypical people do with respect to fascination. And our intuition, we haven't tested this directly, but our intuition is that for people on the spectrum, that information uh crosses over to the other side of being overwhelming. And rather than inviting approach, inviting this desire to explore, it becomes repulsive and they want to get away.
Lyssia KatanInteresting. So does it create some kind of stress response where it's too fascinating? It's almost chaotic?
Dr. Anjan ChatterjeeThat's what we think. I mean, so that's the observation. We haven't actually found, we haven't tested stress directly, but that's the intuition. You know, there are places, uh, I know in I've been to a few uh museums in Europe where uh they have so museums are high in fascination, right? You're going in there because there's a lot of cool stuff you want to look at. And most of us find that museums can also be exhausting after a while, right? You need to you need a break. Well, there are these uh museums in Europe that have separate, like adjacent to some of the galleries, these spaces that are marked for people on the spectrum, although anybody can use it, where you just go in and there are low stimulation places, you just chill out and kind of uh kind of recharge yourself before you go back in. So uh, you know, but it brings up uh another question, uh, which is when we're talking about architecture design, uh I think sometimes people expect one space to do too many things, right? You want everything to happen there. And I think that's unrealistic. It's unrealistic to expect that of people, it's unrealistic to expect that of places. And so trying to think of different a whole environment in which you can navigate from one place to another uh based on what the point of that environment is, uh makes a lot more sense. That we're not static creatures, that the built environment is designed for us to move through. One of my favorite examples uh for this is talking about airports, uh, perhaps because I travel more than I should, and I'm not you know one place enough, uh, is you want your airports to be pretty coherent, right? You have to get to your gate and you don't want to get lost and you don't want to figure out right the stress of getting to your gate in time uh after you've gone through the stress of TSA and all of that, right? So you want it to be coherent. And at the same time, often if you travel internationally, you get dumped into those duty-free places that are high in fascination, but you get in there, you're like a rat in a maze. You can't figure out how to get out, right? And so you've got these two pieces within the airport that are working at cross purposes.
Lyssia KatanIt's interesting you mentioned airports because we had Dr. Katie Petito on the show, and she works uh specifically uh with neurodivergent individuals and uh talking about we discussed sensory rooms and four neurodivergent individuals that anyone can use. And she was saying there's a really beautiful one in one of the airports. I don't recall which one, but it's just the chaos of travel can overwhelm anyone, let alone an individual who's autistic and definitely feels overwhelmed. So, and and I know what you're talking about that Philly airport does have a crazy duty-free section. You just have to wind your way through there and it's a maze. It really is.
Dr. Anjan ChatterjeeAnd it's not just Philly. I mean, just about every international airport. I mean, they're they're designed to to get you to buy stuff, right? That's the whole point.
Lyssia KatanSo and their stuff looks fun. The beautiful, gorgeous displays and the colorful and in the samples, everything. It's it's it's a marketing tactic, it's genius, but I high fascinating.
Dr. Anjan ChatterjeeRight there.
What Makes A Space Feel Homey
Lyssia KatanWhat about hominess? What actually makes a brain register a space as home?
Dr. Anjan ChatterjeeYeah, in some ways that's the hardest one and the one that has been studied the least and one that most architects and designers don't even think about. And what's hard about it is it depends on, it really depends on people's backgrounds and their even where they live. What is what will be homey if you live in a northern climate is going to be very different than if you live in a subtropical place. You know, what's homey in Florida is going to be very different than what's homey in New England. And, you know, so there's a climate component, and then there's a personality component. Um I dislike the cold, and so every January or February I'm out of here and I go someplace uh usually semi-tropical. Uh but people in Philadelphia complain about now August, you know, is is hot and muggy, and I love it. Like uh why would I leave this climate? So you know so climate is one thing, but more directly, what is in your house, so as you can see, the wall behind me is colored, it's a kind of maroonish color. Uh I've grown up with in India, India is a very colorful place. I've grown up with color everywhere. And often when people from whether it's India or Latin America come to the US, sometimes their reaction is, where's all the color? Why is everything so bleached out? Um, so I think those kinds of things is where our own personal experiences and what we now, whether they're, you know, we used we talked about my experience with my grandparents, right? There's a kind of warm glow around nostalgia around those spaces. Um it I would add one other component, which is that there's a social component to it as well, which is it's not just the space, but the kinds of things that take place in the space. So why is it that people often in parties will uh congregate around the kitchen if you have a nice kitchen and someone's cooking, right? There's that whole experience of you know, food is being prepared, and you know, maybe you're having a glass of wine, but there's uh it almost does the stovetop or the oven kind of becomes like a modern-day heart that people you know congregate around. So you could ask the question, slightly frame it slightly differently, to say what is the organization of a space that encourages and promotes certain kind of social events and interactions that's an integral and part of being homie as well.
Lyssia KatanAnd I can imagine also the history with spaces like that can tie in as um we had Amber Dunford on the show, and and she's uh uh she she's done work with individuals who were redesigning their space and um maybe grew up with not many safe spaces in their home, but their kitchen was a place where they felt very safe with their grandmother. And and so now a kitchen is really important. So I'm sure that somehow ties in with their history going back to variability.
Dr. Anjan ChatterjeeYeah. Yeah, absolutely.
A Simple Rubric To Read Spaces
Lyssia KatanSo when a home is really beautiful, and this is great for our listeners to be able to, you know, take some practical information from our conversation. If their home is is beautiful, but they still feel restless, can you generally point to one of these key elements missing, or is it pretty difficult to pick out?
Dr. Anjan ChatterjeeI would say that again, let me step back as you've noticed. I don't answer your questions directly. But I actually appreciate it.
Lyssia KatanI like the story that leads to the answer.
Dr. Anjan ChatterjeeOne of our uh approaches for gear aestheticists in general is that this is a way for people to understand themselves. And you know, so we do these, for example, slow booking experiments where we have people looking at work of art for 15 minutes. And that for many people is very hard to do. Uh, you know, not have your phone, not have anything. You're just looking at this one thing on a wall for 15 minutes. Uh, it's well-night torture for many people. So, but we give them tools. Uh in going back to the aesthetic triad, we have them spend five minutes really looking at the form, at the minds, at the shape, the color, the composition, really pay attention to what they're looking at. We have them spend about five minutes then querying themselves about what they're feeling about it, right? Are they do they like it? Do they find it repulsive? Do they are they intrigued by it? And it doesn't have to be, and it almost certainly never is just one emotion, right? So it's a time to to feel what you're feeling, right? And we going back to the track that we rarely stop, we rarely stop to notice what we're feeling, right? So this is a way to do that, and then we say spend a few minutes, uh five minutes to look at the image and what are your associations to this image? How let your mind kind of wander over it, from it, around it. And are any of those associations relevant to your own life? And our big thrust is to say that you don't have to know intricate knowledge of art history or of the history of techniques and who was reacting to who. I mean, all that stuff is great to know and it does contribute to the experience, but it's not necessary and that basically this thing that you're looking at on a wall is a vehicle, it's a window into yourself, and try to approach it that way, right? How do you how do you understand yourself uh better by looking at this thing and taking the time? So I think the same thing applies where you know I will have people do, and this is an exercise that your listeners can do, uh, and not just in their home, but it can, you know, in different rooms in their home, whether it's their kitchen, their dining room, living room, bedroom, in their bathroom, but even their workplace if they go to work somewhere, or their grocery store, or the next time they're in an airport, uh, or in their neighborhood, right? The the corner you know, down from their house, and pause there and query themselves about how coherent is this space? Right. Uh and does it feel coherent? Am I confused by where I'm supposed to go? Am I confused about the layout of this? Uh, how is it fascinating? Do I want to stick around? Are there things I want to look at uh that I want to explore? And ultimately, do I feel comfortable here? And part of this is to get people, give people a rubric with which to train themselves to notice certainly about the environment, but it's really to learn about themselves. And the better they get at that, then the more this becomes automatic. I think then your question answers itself, right? They're gonna look at their living room and find that, you know, I haven't done anything in this place for 20 years. Now that I'm looking at it intentionally and feeling what I'm feeling, like, you know, that painting's gotta go, and that that pile of newspapers in the corner that I've I no longer even notice has got to go. Uh, you know, I think those things reveal themselves. Uh, it also would be, you know, for people who don't live alone, uh, it becomes an exercise also in social communication because your partner, your kid, whatever other people, if you've got roommates, might very well have different reactions. And, you know, then it gives you it gives you a platform and a language with which to talk about why it is that you know one person experiences the space one way versus the other. Uh, and you know, I suspect that they're you know, I mean the extreme of that is the roommate who will never do the dishes, right? And that's you know, but you know, at least it gives a uh vehicle with which to uh to open up that conversation. And it might be that, you know, there are some roommates that are just not going to be compatible. The the those the way people experience the spaces are so, so vastly different.
Lyssia KatanRight. And and perhaps something that you deem as very homey to your partner may be the opposite because of how they grew up.
Dr. Anjan ChatterjeeYeah.
Lyssia KatanIt's an interesting exercise to be able to go through and really understand why is this room not working for me or why do I love it? Why do I always hang out in here?
Dr. Anjan ChatterjeeAnd that's why I think it's worth doing, not just in your home, but in a whole bunch of environments. So you have the whole panoply of experiences, right? It could be that your work environment really sucks. And this is why you'd rather work at home versus other people. I mean, I have a gorgeous office, and even during lockdown, I used to go to my office and work there because it was the other advantage was nobody else was going there. So I was super quiet.
Noise As A Constant Threat Signal
Lyssia KatanWhich noise affects us a whole lot more than I used to even realize. But now I'm aware of constantly as we're recording there's construction across from my house. I always hear all the noise, and and it it it it's certainly distracting.
Dr. Anjan ChatterjeeI'm glad you brought that up. And this is one of my talking points about how in America designers don't think sufficiently about noise. And the uh even you're in the tile business, right? Tile is highly reflective, and that's something to consider. Uh, we've all been in you know, fancy bathrooms where you know they're beautifully pointed with, you know, marble and tile and mirrors and stuff, and all that is great. Then you get one of those Dyson things to dry your hands, and that blast of noise makes you just want to rush out of there. Uh so you know, and urban construction noise. Uh one thing worth noting is that a lot of things like sirens, construction noise, noise from HVAC systems, uh these are auditory signals that were designed to alert us that um you know they're uh they arouse us to be careful and conscious of potential threats, right? That's the physiology if it increases our sympathetic nervous system and so on. But the whole system was designed for short phasic, like short bursts of that. But now many of us in the environment, it's there all the time, and it pushes our physiology into this state of vigilance as opposed to quickly alerting and then getting back to baseline. We we don't get back to baseline because it's there all the time, and then we forget about it, but it's still there, still messing with our physiology. So I noise, I think, is one of the most underappreciated, especially in urban areas, one of the most underappreciated uh pollutants uh that works against us.
Lyssia KatanAbsolutely. I I have a personal vendetta against leaf blowers. I think they are infuriating, and there comes a point where we they're just droning on in the background. We don't really realize how loud they are until they turn off. And then you can almost take a sigh of relief. Yeah, absolutely. And and I am always walking around with earplugs, not in, but earplugs, because when places are too noisy, it's just I can't focus, I can't concentrate. So it's funny you say that.
Dr. Anjan ChatterjeeYou know, another good example of that is uh we were talking about we've talked about airports a fair amount, but flying, uh, I at this there's there's a low frequency hum in every plane that's there all the time. And at this point, I can't fly without um noise-cancing headphones on. And uh, you know, it's just there. And there's that same sense of, you know, when you're out of that space, that sense of relief that uh yeah.
Lyssia KatanYeah, and you you don't notice it until you do, and then you can't ever unnotice it. Yeah.
High Ceilings Curves And Awe
Lyssia KatanWhat about ceilings? You've um your research has uh or has touched on curves versus sharp edges, high ceilings versus low ceilings. How do those elements tie into uh our general awareness of a space?
Dr. Anjan ChatterjeeYeah, so we've looked at ceilings, we've looked at curvature, we've looked at openness, and openness in this context is whether uh a space is like a cave versus you can look past it, that there's you know windows or a balcony or something like that. People generally tend to prefer that kind of sense of openness. Uh people with higher ceilings, it seems to encourage a kind of exploration uh in the extreme uh with certain kinds of buildings, uh particularly cathedrals and spiritual spaces, that hype seems to matter in evoking feelings of awe and transcendence, right? So like tall spaces and part of the experience of of awe seems to uh have specific components, which is there is a kind of vastness uh where, you know, so it could be the Grand Canyon, but it could be, you know, in Sagrada Familia, you know, these huge spaces. Uh you feel small in them, but it's the feeling small without feeling insignificant. Like you feel small, but you're you feel connected to something larger. And when those three things happen, you know, people tend to feel awe. So ceiling height is one component of that. Uh on the curvature, the part of our general take is that our brains were really, really evolved to adapt to certain natural environments. And the environments we find ourselves in, uh whether it's the last 10,000 years, especially the last 200 years, especially the last 10 or 15 years, is so so different than that. Uh and so we have the the notion that there are very few, if any, sharp angles in nature. And if there are, they're thorns, they're things that you want to avoid, right? And most of our homes are all about angles, right? They're rectilinear, they're and it's just not the environment in which our brains were designed to flourish. So that's something to take into consideration. Even having a slight curvature on quarters makes a huge difference. Um we think that people, and and this is true for infants, will orient to curved uh environments more than angular ones. Uh, there are some experiments that were done a while ago looking at higher primates, that higher primates will engage more with curved objects than uh than pointy objects. So there seems to be something very deep about that uh that we're engaged with. Uh so you know, we think curvature is important. You know, when I talk to architects and designers, there are all kinds of pragmatic concerns because rectilinear slabs are easy to mass produce, right? So that's you know, that's where and so you have to be very rich and fancy and hire a special person to not you know to be able to get around that. Um you know, but it is the case. And and you think of some traditional houses, like traditional places. I spent some time in in Botswana and South Africa. There are traditional houses there tend to be round, for example. Uh, you know, they're often made of mud or natural materials, uh, but they're round, they're not rectilinear. So, you know, I think I think curvature matters, and you can try to uh incorporate that uh to the extent that if you can get some roundedness in corners uh in our houses, that's helpful.
Lyssia KatanIt's really funny you mentioned that because we had uh Professor Hollander uh on the show, Professor Justin Hollander on the show, and he said that the corners also remind us of sharp teeth, of like a predator. And uh and it and it's interesting because really I'm trying to think in nature and I can't think of one sharp corner that's not uh concerning like a thorn or predator's teeth. And and I always feel I love arches. I'm always I feel more cozy and around space. For someone listening, what is one thing that they can do this weekend that their brain would genuinely respond to in their space?
Dr. Anjan ChatterjeeI would go back to what I said before, which is that I think what they can genuinely do is to query themselves. I think rather than thinking about what I can do in this space, it's learn about yourself and how you're reacting to the space. And I think that's almost a a cheat code that then lets you figure out what to do with the space. But if you don't know yourself, you know, you might as well pick up a magazine that tells you what to do, uh, right?
Lyssia KatanSo what Vogue says or architectural digest says works for everyone may not work for you. May not might not suit.
Dr. Anjan ChatterjeeAnd whatever Vogue says, nothing works
Space Matters Plus Where To Follow
Dr. Anjan Chatterjeefor everyone.
Lyssia KatanSo if someone was to forget everything about this conversation except for one thing, what would you want it to be?
Dr. Anjan ChatterjeeSpace matters. Space matters for our well-being. Uh, we sometimes get so habituated that we don't realize it and we make small adjustments just to adapt without even realizing it. I think this point is now easier to make after lockdown. Many people had that experience of like I'm stuck in this place, either I like it, I don't like it, whatever. Uh so it something that was always in the background became foregrounded. But in a curious way, we tend to have very short memories, and many people have sort of swept the pandemic and the lockdown under the rug as though it never happened. Uh, and I would try to re-evoke at least a few good things that happened then and what if it is to be conscious of space and how space uh matters to our well-being.
Lyssia KatanThat's exactly what we talk about. Dr. Chatterjee, it has been an absolute honor. I can talk to you all day long. Is there a place where listeners can follow your work?
Dr. Anjan ChatterjeeYeah, and you know, social media's uh evolved over the time. Uh at this point, I would say LinkedIn is the best place. Uh we publish, we put all of our publications there. I have a psychology today blog that uh that where we write non-technical descriptions of our research. Um so all of that is goes on LinkedIn more than anything else. Uh you can go to our my Scepter's website where we have PDFs of our published work, links to various media interviews or public talks I've given. So at some point this will end up being on our website. But if people want to go and look at look at that, if people want technical papers, they can find them. If they want non-technical descriptions, they're there.
Lyssia KatanAmazing. Thank you so much, Dr. Chatterjee. You're so fascinating. And thank you for all the work you're doing. Everything that you're discovering and researching is is helping us as we learn about it and are able to apply it to our own lives. Thank you for your time.
Dr. Anjan ChatterjeeYeah, I appreciate your interest. Uh, more people need to hear this stuff from you more than me.
Lyssia KatanThank 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. Thanks again for listening. I'll see you next time.