(upbeat music) - So, thank you.

Thank you for joining us for Science Pub Bing.

This is a monthly lecture series exploring the exciting world around us and what is better than science.

(laughs) I'm Nancy Coddington.

I am the director of science content for WSKG public media.

I'm one of the co-founders of Science Pub.

And I'm also your host for this evening.

I would like to introduce the other founder of Science Pub Kristine Kieswer.

She is going to be behind the scenes this evening, fielding your questions from the chat and the Q and section.

So please make sure you get your questions in there for her.

I would like to also introduce a special guest with us this evening.

We have Jessica Hua, she is the associate professor of Biological Sciences at Binghamton university, welcome Jess.

And Jess is going to be our host actually for next month.

So we're really excited to have her here with us this evening, so thank you.

We have with us, our science intern, Julia Diana.

She is a student at Binghamton University and she's going to be live tweeting the event.

So you can follow that conversation on Twitter using the hashtag WSKG Science Pub and Julia is going to pop that in the chat so that you can follow that conversation if you like to do multiple things and tweet at the same time.

And I think that's all our housekeeping.

So tonight's talk is architecture plus the 21st century paradigm shift designing for the subliminal brain.

So what do you feel when you look at a majestic cathedral or maybe an imposing skyscraper or an ultra modern museum?

Why do you feel anything at all?

So tonight we are going to look at how the built environment impacts all of us and even reframes the history of modern architecture.

We'll explore new scientific findings and human perception the role of empathy in architecture and more I'm super excited for this evening's talk.

Our speaker this evening is Ann Sussman.

She is an architect, an author and researcher who is passionate about understanding how buildings influence people emotionally.

And as president of the Human Architecture and Planning Institute, Inc, theHapi.org and we're going to pop that link into the chat for you so you can follow that and find more information.

It's a nonprofit devoted to improving the design of the built environment through education and research.

Her book, "Cognitive Architecture: "Designing for How We Respond to the Built Environment."

Won the 2016 Place Research Award for the Environmental Design Research Association and very exciting for and the second edition of that book "Cognitive Architecture" is coming out this July.

So you have been very busy during the past year with the pandemic that's going on.

So I would like to give a very warm welcome to our speaker tonight Ann Sussman, Ann.

- Wonderful, thank you so much.

This is just amazing.

Thank you for reaching out and thank you for caring about science.

What the pandemic has really taught us is science really matters and science involved all of us.

Should I share my screen?

- Yes, please go ahead and share your screen at this time.

- Okay, here we go.

Is everybody see it?

- Yes.

- Awesome.

So the title of the talk is, Architecture: The 21st Century Paradigm Shift Designing for the Subliminal Brain.

And in talking with Nancy earlier, if you have any questions or want to say anything, please do speak up because we want to make this an interactive presentation as we can over Zoom.

And what we're going to be talking about is how we're really in incredibly amazing times.

We're in, what's called a 21st century paradigm shift.

It's not just a pandemic it's actual paradigm shift.

We're in this new time where believe it or not our 21st century is now called the new age an age of biology.

I was born in and went to school in the 20th century, the age of chemistry and physics.

My dad was a chemical engineer.

And the 19th century was the age of engineering.

And that gave us amazing things like the Eiffel tower.

I actually stole this idea from the OECD, the Organization for Economic Cooperation Development.

Professor Anne Glover, who is a female Knight.

She's the Dame of the British Empire.

That's a CBE, she's a biologist and she came up with this idea that the 21st century is a new age, the age of biology.

And she explained it this way.

And I used her slides because they're so good.

So the 19th century gave us engineering, gave us, you know camera trains, the Eiffel tower, the 20th century, look at this, we got radar, we got plastics.

I mean, we live surrounded by plastic so much we can imagine there was a time when there wasn't plastics.

We got the first computer, (static crackling) They changed what people could do, it changed the way we lived.

But now what the OECD is saying is we're in a completely new time and they're calling it the age of biology.

And now we can see things from the inside out, excuse me.

Does anyone know what this, the top slide is on the left, The top picture on the left is?

can you answer or the picture on the right?

- The top picture on the left is, yes Paul has indicated that that is DNA.

And I agree with him and Adam.

- That right and what's below?

- Right below that looks like, that's going to be a neuron.

- Those are neurons.

And how many neurons do you have?

- A lot.

- 80 to 100 billion.

And so, in a way that's the amazing thing about the 21st century.

We see the world inside out.

Whereas the 20th century gave us all this engineering.

Now we can kind of understand ourselves differently, and we can do completely different things.

Like Oscar is a tourist, even though he was a double amputee could make the Olympics.

I mean, that's unheard of in the 20th century, if you were an amputee, you didn't go to the Olympics.

It just shifts how you think.

And it's going to be very profound for many disciplines.

And one of the disciplines that's going to change the most, I'm going to argue in this lecture is architecture because now we can use these amazing new tools and actually look at how will people experience buildings.

Let me show you this.

So what you're seeing is this woman looking at a famous building it's Villa Rotonda it's in Northern Italy, it's by Palladio, one of the most famous buildings in the world in a way because it includes so much other architecture.

It was the basis in some ways, for an elevation of the white house, that's on every $20 bill.

And now you can take that building that was built like 400 years ago.

And you can look at how people actually look at it.

So every one of those big circles is called fixations.

That's where the stimuli is coming into the brain.

And the line between them is (indistinct).

And like the woman looking at this doesn't realize she's moving her eyes 45 times in 15 seconds.

But in the new age of biology that we're in, I do.

And I can actually see how she's looking at things before she consciously realized even though she doesn't consciously realize it.

And what you can do is you can also see that everybody looks at the world a little differently.

So here's another woman looking at it.

You can see she's looking at a slightly different.

And so what the big companies do that are really interested in selling things to human beings they will do a statistical averages.

They'll get 30 to 39 people to look at this image and they'll figure out where they look first, second, third, fourth, fifth sixth in the first 15 seconds or in the first minute, it's quite amazing.

They look for the TTFF that's the time to first fixation and they can actually find how long most people in this case 32 people looked at this.

They can see, Oh, well, let's see 30 people found the first fixation in a certain number of seconds.

It's quite amazing.

And you also can see how people look at the world with some differences, but with a lot of similarities.

It was kind of amazing but this building is what people really focus on in this building believe it or not is all the statues.

They do look at the center.

They look at the door and then they look at all the statutes.

It's quite interesting.

And this is how you set up a lab like this.

This is iMotions software that I just showed you.

iMotion software is used by Honda, BMW, GM.

I know that because iMotion says that on their website and this is the kind of detail, of detail that car companies, tech companies use today to really understand the human experience and design for people.

They'll track brainwaves, they'll do the eye tracking that you just saw.

They'll track facial expression.

We'll talk about that a little later.

They'll track heart wake, they'll track galvanic skin response, how electrical charges shift on your skin immediately when you see different things.

I mean, it's pretty amazing.

Everything they follow, and then they shift their design to better accommodate needs you don't even realize you have.

And what you can also get it can get kind of pricey setting up a lab like this, but what you can also get is you can now get software from 3M.

That's a big company that's called visual attention software, 3M VAS, and 3M VAS you can just upload any image you want or any Photoshop drawing or any drawing you did and it will spit out in less than 30 seconds.

They will tell you algorithmically how people are predicted to look at what you sent them.

And so if you want to design a building or you want to design a website, you want to know where people find the door, where they find the to-buy button, how quickly they find a certain element in your design.

You can determine that very quickly with this 3M VAS software without setting up the lab.

It's kind of amazing because it really shows you that we see things more like an animal than people realize.

- And so I have a question about that really quick.

So do designers do mock-ups and then redesign things based on what the eye tracking reveals, you know before (indistinct) your car, the houses.

- Well, so basically this software has just been introduced in the architecture profession.

Adobe Photoshop is pretty big in architecture and a plugin for the software just happened in October, 2020, but yes designers call this a spellcheck for their design.

So if you're doing a website for WSKG and you want to see how quickly is the donate button seen, you can actually use this software then do another design and find that the donate button will be found more quickly.

Yes, it is used as a spellcheck for design in all kinds of fields, but it's new to architecture.

It's extremely powerful, a little bit scary because it shows you kind of how easy it is to manipulate people.

(laughs) But yeah, any other questions do ask me.

So the big theme of this talk, I mean, this is it, the cat's out of the bag is basically in the 21st century as part of this 21st century paradigm shift.

you're designing for the unconscious brain because now we have these biotech which allow us to completely see the unconscious.

It's incredible.

Just like you can see those 45 little fixation dots I just showed you a couple of minutes ago.

You can see all kinds of other things as well to design for the human body that most people don't even realize they have.

And that's what they're doing today.

It's kind of amazing.

Now, Freud was this a famous a psychologist.

He had this quote, the mind is like an iceberg.

It floats with one seventh of its bulk above water.

That's basically the idea, Freud saw he didn't have the biotech world we have today, but he saw after interviewing hundreds of people that often people don't understand what's driving them, but their unconscious brain was driving in ways they don't understand and conscious activity sits on unconscious behavior.

But so actually this is really funny.

Freud was a little bit wrong though now Freud says, 14% of our life is conscious.

What we now say is 5% or less.

Most of our brain activity, unconscious 90% of brain is beyond our conscious awareness and really 5% or less of what we're actually thinking, feeling doing is conscious.

And what's funny that first quote, I took from a website design, a website that's for designing websites.

They're already actively using this brain science and telling people how to design websites, the bigger idea another way to say it as all of our conscious thoughts and actions are unconscious first.

That's adapted from Eric Kandel and a book I'll talk about later in the talk.

It's basically understanding, it's all about designing for the subliminal brain, which until recently most people never kind of intuitively had but you couldn't get the hard data on it.

Now you can get the hard data on it.

And I don't want to get in too much in the weeds here, but the weeds are kind of cool.

It turns out the human body sends 11 million bits.

A bit is a unit of information per second to the brain.

So every second when you are up, the brain is sending 11 bits per second to the brain for processing.

But the conscious mind can only handle 50 bits per second.

You see the problem.

So do you understand why Honda, BMW and GM are designing for the unconscious brain?

Because that's directing you, get it?

- It's pretty new.

Yeah, that's pretty impressive.

- It's pretty incredible.

What's incredible is how the science is accepted by the car companies and the tech companies.

And a lot of the rest of us don't realize what's going on.

But you know, it's so interesting now we are in a different time.

When I was in architecture school, to my architecture license in the 20th century the word emotion never came up anywhere.

And now you go to the supermarket, there'll be the science of emotions on the rack before the checkout, the science of emotions, people are talking about emotions more.

Even men talk about emotions more.

It's kind of interesting.

And then there's a spacious talk by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor it's had 25 million views on TikTok.

And she says many of us think of ourselves as thinking creatures that feel biologically we're feeling creatures that think.

She's really interesting woman.

She's a former Harvard neuroanatomist.

She got a stroke.

She's a person studying the brain and she lost control of her brain.

And she was watching herself lose control.

So when she gives her talk, it's quite convincing, you know?

So this idea that your emotional first, feeling visceral first then thinking that's a big shift.

That's a huge paradigm shift.

And you see it also in business schools, like this is a Harvard Coop there, the business school has books on mindfulness, happiness and empathy, who knew.

Now leadership is about understanding of emotions and guys are studying this, amazing.

That's part of the 21st century paradigm shift.

So how will the age of biology reframe architecture and how we see ourselves?

I think I could show you a few more slides about that they are pretty captivating.

So here you could see, this is a building that's owned by the city of New York.

And actually the city of New York gave us the resources to do this study.

It was recently renovated.

It's a public library and we watch this tuft student look at it.

We didn't tell her what to do.

This is exactly what her eyes did without conscious control.

That's how she looked at it.

And then what we did is we photo-shopped out the windows and had a different set of 30 students look at this version.

What's really interesting is we didn't tell them what to do, but you notice something different, when the building, same building, you notice the difference, what happened?

- His eyes don't go to the windows, which is interesting because when you showed me this, my eyes went to the windows because you know where the windows would have been because it really bothered me.

(laughs) - Well, we had 30 different people look at the one on the left and 30 different people looked at the one on the right.

And then this is individuals, but what's really fascinating, we then aggregate the detail.

So we had 30 people look upon the left and we can actually see how people looked at the buildings.

It's really amazing.

With 2.6 seconds, they found that where the door was and then the building on the right you see what happens?

1.2 seconds they find the door a little faster, but what's so interesting here is at 10 seconds they're looking at the end of the building, but then by 12 seconds, they're looking back at the building.

Whereas in the building on the left where it doesn't have windows, the brain doesn't let them look back at the building by 12 seconds, they're looking beyond the building.

They don't even know what consciously the brain's making them do, but what the brain's making them do is not attached to the building as much.

So when I ask people, I've asked about 700 people this question, where would you rather wait in front of the building on the left or the building on the right?

Where do you think people want to wait?

- Well, the building on the right with the windows is definitely a little more eye pleasing.

I'm gonna stand in front of that building.

- That's where everybody said, but they didn't know why.

And I'll have an insight because I'd done the eye tracking I know what their subliminal brain did.

Their subliminal brain without their conscious awareness, it's just what Freud says, made the decision for them.

Isn't that amazing?

- That is amazing.

But if you go the other way and then you're so focused on where things should be then they're not, what does that say?

(laughs) - (indistinct).

That's a good question.

Yeah, because people didn't know, we had to have different people look at it.

They didn't know there were windows there.

So that's it.

And so this is an example too, where this is an actual a parking garage in Somerville, Massachusetts.

And then we had someone add some Matisa like art.

Where do you think people want to wait in front of the Matisa like art or the blank facade?

- I would, I would like to stand in front of the art.

It's definitely, - (indistinct) and you don't understand what your brain did, but what you can do is you can I track in this case we only eye tracked it with 10 people.

And what happens?

This is what's fascinating.

Mind blowing, actually what your brain is doing.

When the building doesn't have art, your brain doesn't let you look at the blankness very much.

It makes you look down the street.

When the building has art, you don't look down the street.

You look at the art.

Isn't that amazing?

- It's amazing.

So we actually have a question in from our audience about that.

So do advertisers use this technology - All the time, honey.

If you go to business school now, like a WPI or American University, Worcester Polytechnic Institute you will have an eye-tracking lab.

It's all the time.

It's all the packaging design, it's everywhere.

It's all used to manipulate the person because they they get it.

And it's a little crazy how bad it is because now they not only manipulate where your eyes are gonna look.

They can control that by how they design.

They also can measure like how often you smile.

So there's technology that measures how your muscles move on your face.

I can see your muscle moving down, Nancy.

- Turn my camera off.

- No, don't do that.

And what that does is aggregates data.

And we saw, they only four people smiled when it looked like this, but now when you let go like this you can see without, people didn't realize what their brains making them do but we watch them.

We had 10 different people look at this one.

And so three people, five of them smile three times in 14 seconds.

Absolutely amazing.

Now this is really interesting software and there are 43 different muscles on your face.

Each one of them is activated when you feel different emotions.

The software was developed by a company called Facet.

The software was called Emotient And I'll tell you the truth now, Apple bought the software, took it off the market.

- Of course they did.

- Of course they did.

- And just a clarification in your graph that you have where you have the dips and the valleys where is it showing where people are smiling?

- Oh, this one right here?

- Yeah.

- That's the number of people that smiled.

- So when it goes high, that's where the smiles are.

- No, no, no So when it's a line graph, nobody's smiling.

But if it's at four people smiled on the right here and then five people smile, three times, you see.

Okay, that's how it shows.

It is a little confusing, but you can actually track this software was taken off the market bought by Apple because they don't want competitors.

You're a trillion dollar company they don't want competitors having this kind of a very powerful marketing tool.

But there's another company called FMT, that does something similar that Apple hasn't bought yet.

- Give it time.

I have a quick question.

Before we keep going on back to the windows for just a moment, regardless of having, you've got one that has the windows and one that doesn't have the windows, we're back on another slide.

Is it because the windows give human scale?

Is that why we're more attracted to the windows?

- Okay, we'll get into that.

That's a little more complicated, but I think what happens is that the brain for survival the way you are is because of 3.8 billion years of survival, And basically areas of contrast immediately get attention.

And when there's no contrast, there's nothing to look at so the brain tells you don't go there.

So the window has incredible contrast to it right?

- Yeah, it does.

- So that's what's getting your attention and it has a light behind it as well.

And what's so interesting though is it's not conscious.

It just shows how the unconscious directs you and now you understand why business school students are using this because they want to manipulate you completely.

So basically with biometrics you can predict and measure how people ignore blank things, how buildings make people feel and behave, how often they smile and you can and how specific elements impact on overall design which is really important if you're an architect, you know, if you put windows there or not, people are going to behave differently without understanding why.

So here's, I'll just go through this pretty quickly.

This is in Brooklyn and it was a brand new public public museum.

Where do you think people will look?

- I'm going to see, I'm looking actually at that building in the back, but I'm also looking at the series of windows behind the cars.

- There you go.

You're good girl.

That's exactly what happens.

That's exactly what people do.

They look at the building in the back.

So you've designed just imagine this the architects (indistinct).

You're really, really good, Nancy.

The architect is designed for $30 million.

This building for the public, with public funding.

It's a public museum and where do people go (indistinct) they look at the housing behind.

It's not even connected.

And then they look at the fire hydrant.

- That's interesting.

Why is that?

- It could be 'cause people don't look at blankness.

So I had a GSD student at Harvard design in some windows and friend said to me and those windows are not very well designed at all.

It didn't even matter with when you put the windows in the brain will not let you look as much at the high rise in the back.

See what happens.

See how the red, isn't that interesting?

- Yeah, absolutely.

- Stresses the brain to take in blank facades.

So you can ask really understand new things about how people actually look, this is another building in New York.

Where do you think people will look?

It's a public library built about 15 years ago.

It's a public library supported by public funds.

It's supposed to serve the interest of the public.

- I dunno, I feel like this one's going to be a trick question because I first, I'm going up to the light that I'm going, I go down to the entrance where it says Queens library and then I go along the wave of the glass.

- Okay, that's good.

Well, good that's not bad.

So this is what happens.

Basically, they ignore the building completely glass is very hard for our brain to look at.

And so people look at the girl doing yoga.

They looked at the contrasting bus with the entrance and they look at the faces of other people.

It's pretty wild.

- The bus definitely caught my first.

- You got that area of contrast that gets your eye, right?

And then here's a famous place in Boston.

And what happened recently changed hands Hancock Tower, really famous.

And so they put an art installation on it.

And people only looked at the art installation.

It's really wild.

So people you start to understand pretty quickly is it's nature's preset, how we look at our world and we're really built to see people.

So if I show you these slides really quickly.

Do you know what was the image in the previous slide?

- I do.

(laughs) How about our audience, how we went by pretty quick.

Did anybody notice what was in that slide?

- (indistinct) the slide?

- Christine says there were some mugs in the slide.

- (indistinct) did you get anything?

I'll show it to you.

- Somebody looked away, right when the slide came back up.

Did anybody notice what was on those mugs?

Mugs with faces?

Yes.

- You got it.

- Mugs with faces.

- And so basically, when you show this, if you ever want to look at the design of an Apple ad, you'll notice it has very few fonts in it.

There's a reason because it takes 60,000 times longer for your brain to process a font and to process a smiling face.

So in the smiling face process very, very quickly.

So that's it.

People are built to see people and that's the big deal.

And that's something that this very famous Renaissance painter made fun of.

So here you can see the face pretty easily, right?

- Yeah, I do.

- But what, how about here?

Can you see it here?

It's the same painting upside down.

- Sure, sure.

So I was trying to see if I could actually see it in reverse.

If there was another way if it was coming from the, - You can't because basically the way the brain has the pattern, the template for the face right side up and you can see the upside down face, but that's called parts space processing and that takes longer.

That's, what's so interesting about this that you immediately can see this, right?

So this is the big idea, the human brain devotes more area to face recognition and recognition of anything else.

That's the really big idea.

This is Eric Kendall, Nobel prize, winning neuroscientist former professor at Columbia.

And so to sell his book about neuroscientist he puts a beautiful face of a woman on the cover.

It all makes sense, right?

He's walking the walk, right?

You get it.

And, and so this is it.

This is from candle, the brain reconstructs reality according to its own rules.

And so that's it.

Then they now they know, two years ago, they did a study projecting an image of faces in for pregnant women.

And the fetuses they learned in the third trimester could already recognize the right side of this.

It's absolutely amazing.

So that's it, it's a big boat business.

Again, they know about our subliminal brain and how we immediately respond to faces all the time.

So that's why Amazon has a smile on its logo and they also are always getting more data.

So when you look on Amazon for a book, the number one thing that people click on an Amazon book site is the human face.

Number two thing is a pet face.

Barack Obama's new book has his face on it.

Hillary Clinton's book has her face on it because subliminally that'll sell more of your book.

- Well, that's good to know.

When I go to pen my, - You gotta have a face on.

Another car company study this and there's a Midwestern couple you can now actually buy they're called car lashes.

And you can actually buy eyelashes and makeup for your cars.

I have seen them in Boston, people wearing them.

I mean, people just identify with cars as faces, right?

But it's not just the car companies.

It's computer scientists, the people designing robots.

This was from an article about a computer science from a computer scientist.

Because if you want to design robots for people you have to know what people do.

And this is what he says.

The perception of faces is more critical than previously thought for how humans perceive the aesthetics of the environment and the architecture of house facades and the buildings they're surrounded by.

So we're looking at them like their faces basically all the time.

That's what we need to see because that's what we evolved to see.

That's the big deal.

So as an architect, this was really fascinating.

It suddenly made me understand architectural history really differently.

No wonder there are so many faces on medieval churches in Spain.

And it makes sense because people in the middle ages were illiterate.

they couldn't read and the church was very powerful.

You'd want to go to the church you're being seen by the apostles as you walk in and subliminally, you'll look up at them.

And then up here's an Apple store.

The 12 apostles of Apple, exactly the same design.

This is in Boston, 2013, the 12 apostles of Apple.

What can you do?

Because people subliminally again, will be still attracted to the faces and notice how the fonts are very small.

And then Apple also braces prop plot placement on what's called the endowment effect because we still a Hunter gatherer brain simply touching a product, increases our sense of ownership and compels people to buy things.

That's why Apple always has everything out so you can touch it that's what they're doing.

So they're going to have, when you walk into an Apple store, what you mostly see our faces of other people looking at other technology and that makes you do the same thing.

And then they always have their technology really, really easy to touch because of the way we're evolved as a mammal, we are very impressed by touch.

We think we can own it.

Basically, there's sum this up, you can take the person out of the stone age, but you can't take the stone age out of the person.

That's Nigel Nicholson UK psychologist.

So there's fantastic irony here.

So what Apple is doing is they're designing, this is an Apple store, five years later exact same light layout.

They're selling the most sophisticated technology arguably in the universe with the fact that our brain and body is still primitive.

See the irony is pretty fantastic.

And Steve jobs has this famous quote with the broader one's understanding of the human experience, the better design you will have.

He basically, he didn't hidden experience that most people don't know about, but that's what he was talking about.

So what all the tech people, all what they're doing, what all the marketers are doing is exploiting our primate brains, our animal nature.

So quick question.

Why do you think our brain unconsciously prioritizes people and faces all the time?

Quick question?

- Well, that would be right through evolution.

Ronan says, 'cause we can relate to them.

Michael says safety.

- Safety, yep.

How about survival?

- Yeah, there you go.

I wouldn't want to look up into that face.

- And also a baby, a human baby is the most, it's the most helpless youth on the planet at birth.

And so they have to be able to immediately bond to phases.

So you have to be able to see faces and you have to be looking at to faces.

So basically what we can see in the 21st century paradigm shift, we start seeing when you do eye tracking you start seeing just how faced biased we are.

And then you also start to understand architecture differently because you realize that it expresses our hidden internal brain architecture.

And it also expresses not to get too much into the biology but how much we need to be seen to be at our best and how mammals actually co-regulate, there's this idea that we need to see face people seeing us because we're a social species to regulate our own nervous system.

Perception is relational.

This man, Stephen Porges came up with the polyvagal theory.

It's the idea that mammals unlike reptiles really regulate their emotional states by being seen by others.

And that's why, bars are so important and going out to dinner is so important, and that's in one way why the pandemic was so painful.

This just came to me over Twitter today and I'm just showing it because way, well, they're talking about how we need to, this is a company called Create Streets out of the UK.

They're trying to build better for people.

And they're showing, you know, these 18th, 19th century ways they used to build in Amsterdam.

But why does it still work?

Well, it looks like a face.

It's easy for anyone, even if you don't speak Dutch to feel at home there to want to connect to that building.

And here's another thing not to get too much in neuroscience, but this is a neuroscience explains to me in architecture, decoration ornament, serve a functional utility.

In other words, because of the way we evolve, we actually need windows to look like eyes and doors to be in the center like they could be a mouth and great designers like, Walt Disney actually figured this out.

He may Disneyland the first one in the '50s and the California Orange Grove.

And he made Disneyland main street with all these ornate 19th century looking facades by 1960s it was the most visited tourist destination in all of the United States.

They built another Disneyland like this in Disneyland Paris in the 1990s, by 2016 it was the most visited to our site in Europe.

People need to see organized complexity.

They need to see detail.

So I'm going to wrap the talk up soon soon, but I'll just quickly go on to the last part then and the question I was wanting to ask as an architecture student was how did modern architecture happened then?

Why did biggie buildings become so blank and faceless?

This is a 19th century building in Cambridge on the left.

And this is a modern building in New York on the right.

You know, what happened?

And when you do VAS study you run it through the 3M VAS software in 30 seconds it'll show you that subliminally the brain can attach and make a memory of the building on the left.

Whereas on the building on the right it looks at the fire hydrant, it looks at the book drop effectively it's showing you because it's mostly black and light blue it's not looking at the building at all.

The architect has designed a building that subliminally the brain will not let people look at.

So what happened?

To answer that question just pretty quickly is you have to understand who the people who founded mothers architecture, they call them the fathers of modern architecture.

And it turns out two of them were German, World War I veterans Ms. Vanderbilt and Walter Gropius.

And one of them was the (indistinct).

Interestingly, they all lived around the same time and born in the 1880s, died in the 1960s.

And so what happened when they were about 30 a war we don't talk about much, World War I because of World War II.

And there was a great PBS series in 2018 to commemorate the centenary of World War I really important because they trying to get people to understand it a little better.

And there's a great quote in that.

the impact of World War I is contemporary.

And that is the theme of the end of this talk.

The impact of World War I is contemporary.

We're all living in everyday.

And World War I this is another amazing thing from World War I, the British government paid a 62 year old artists John Singer Sargent, an American to go to the Western front in 1917 and portray English and American soldiers fighting together.

And then he painted them and then the British government in 2018, paid for this painting to go all over America.

And I saw an amazing another first tanks (mumbles).

So what's the point, the point is there was incredible tragic impact of World War I, including mass death and PTSD.

What happens with PTSD?

Well, it was so fascinating.

PTSD really wasn't talked about for most of the 20th century.

It didn't enter the doctor's manual the diagnostic statistical manual that doctors use until 1980.

So people with PTSD they obviously symptoms called it shell shock.

They didn't really know what it was and it wasn't until the 1990s, they could actually do a scan of your brain and magnetic resonance imaging and actually look to see how the brain changes.

The brain architecture gets rewired with trauma.

And basically this is huge.

This book came out in 2014.

"The Body Keeps the Score" by this doctor here, doctor Bessel, Van Der Kolk.

All about that, I'll just read a brief quote here or remarkable insight from modern neuroscience is the understanding that what we express externally reflects hidden internal brain structure or the structure of our inner world.

Reality is a construct between the eye and brain.

Not only the way we live, but specifically the way we choose to build buildings reflects hidden internal brain design.

And we may not know we carry yet unconsciously are always responding to just like I showed you in the first slides, how your brain is unconsciously responding to a building with, or with windows very differently.

Where a brain that's been through trauma will unconsciously respond to reality much differently afterwards.

So we can now see as Gropius.

One of the founding fathers of modern architecture who worked at Harvard from the thirties till 1952, who taught people his method, he had PTSD and his architecture is an external expression of his PTSD.

So this is a bunker I'm on the right near the Western front that still survives they haven't, they allow trees to grow up because soldiers from World War I their bodies are still in the ground there.

And this is Gropius house that he built while he was working at Harvard 20 miles away from the campus.

And it kind of looks like a bunker.

And then with PTSD you become disembodied as your buildings I could never understand what was so crazy to me is why modern architecture looks so different than architecture in the past.

For the first 2,000 and 3,000 years architecture was very similar and then suddenly with modern architecture it's different with PTSD become disembodied.

This building on the left is directly opposite Gropius house and it looks like you can find the front door you kind of know where you are, you think the building wants to see you, the building on the right when you visit this building they tell you a story of a woman coming up afterwards after it was built and thinking it was a gas station.

It does doesn't look like it's a home.

And the other thing about PTSD, that's interesting and I think really revealing is when you have to get ready they certainly saw this with soldiers that served in recent wars in the overseas, in the United States, you lose the ability to take in detail, your vision suffers.

So that's why there's so much detail in the house to the left.

And there's like almost no detail at all here.

Your brain can't take it in.

It stops time.

And this is where it's really amazing.

With PTSD you keep replaying the trauma subliminally.

So here's the trench from World War I trench.

And then here's Gropius' study.

It's laid out exactly like a trench where you can't see out unless you stand up and then where the things that you need are stored in very simple shelving, exactly like in a trench.

And then Gropius', bedroom it's kind of mind-blowing.

He laid it out, just like the bed areas where the men would sleep in a trench.

They slept in a place called a dugout in the trench wall, where they are just places where men would sleep behind a sturdy doorframe.

He did the exact same layout in his second floor, bedroom.

Sturdy doorframe, and then behind that, just his bed.

And then when he built a deck, the side facing the street he covered with a tall wall so no one could see him in it.

And then interior wall construction mimics trench construction, believe it or not I'm eight miles from a World War I trench that was reconstructed in Hudson Massachusetts at the American heritage foundation.

They recently opened it.

So you can go experience the World War I trench.

When you go in and you see kind of random construction the way it's built, because someone's about to kill you, you're going to build very quickly and put things kind of in a random way.

And you walk into Gropius' house, horizontal siding is placed vertically.

It's that same kind of, you know, rushed feeling.

So modern architecture or direct expression of trauma of World War I trench.

I presented this at a medical conference in 2019, and at ANFA that's the Academy of neuroscience for architecture in 2020.

And there's a YouTube video of it.

If you just Google the happy.org you'll see the YouTube video of it basically that modern architecture.

Now it happens it doesn't express typical brain architecture it expresses damaged to brain architecture.

And then briefly, what about Le Corbusier, Le Corbusier did not serve in World War I.

He was too blind, and this is his architecture.

It was very powerful in terms of what got built in the 20th century had a huge impact.

But now if you read any biography of him, they talk about Le Corbusier was autistic.

And when you're autistic, you're face avoidant.

You don't like looking at faces.

And often you're very logical thinkers.

Someone once told me that 25% of all professors in engineering schools are the autism spectrum.

So Le Corbusier came up with five points of architecture that I put on the right here.

He didn't ask anyone.

He didn't know preference studies.

He wasn't evidence-based he just came up with it.

It's kind of an engineering thinking.

Doesn't understand how human perception actually happens.

And the amazing thing though, is this is again, the new age of biology that's mind blowing.

You have someone normal, look at a kitten someone on the autism spectrum.

Can you tell which is which?

- Well, the one that they're not looking at the face, right.

- Practically, right?

So that's why it's so amazing.

Now this technology that can show this.

So in audit, they can now diagnose, I've read they can now diagnose autism in infants as young as two months, by the way they move their eyes.

Whereas neuro-typical child without or adult without conscious control immediately look at the face, it's really amazing.

So what you can see is that, there's a lot of this on the internet now that you could find how autistic brains see the world differently than neurotypical ones.

So that's the big point, autistic brains, PTSD brain see the world differently.

That's why modern architecture looks so different.

So one on the right is autism spectrum 30 people on the left are neuro-typical, look at the difference.

Autistic person looks right at the blank.

So that's fascinating.

Isn't it?

- That is fascinating.

- Isn't that amazing?

Because you can (indistinct), here's what you have to understand.

We don't see reality.

It's a construct between eye and brain.

And now we understand brain architecture.

So we can tell a modern architecture is a direct expression of atypical brain architecture.

It has to be that's why Le Corbusier's architecture looks like this, he can look at that, a neurotypical person can not.

How did modern architecture happen?

Relationally compromised people with atypical fixations.

These are subliminal fixations you don't control.

Came up with the approach because the world was wounded rushing to bury the past, there were all kinds of new technologies and there were economic current power structures willing to profit from it.

So this is coming out.

This came out in a new book "Urban Experience and Design" it's in the second additional cognitive architecture.

When you discuss architectural history now, you have to talk about modern architecture was the direct result of atypical brain regulation?

Impact of world war one, architecture becomes a void.

It's an external expression of atypical brain structure So understanding human perception is relational changes, how we assess things.

It helps us understand also though, this is what's so important about it, what we need to see.

And so 21st century paradigm shifts helps us really see what people need to see to be at their best.

These are all buildings in Greater Boston.

Most of them are protected by historic bylaws now, but you can understand why people love these buildings.

And then the 21st century paradigm shift lets us forecast behavior.

We understand subliminal behaviors that we cannot control direct our experience.

So I'll just briefly tell you this.

This was (indistinct) I took this in Cincinnati and it's the new Zaha Hadid.

It was an art center there.

And basically what happened is people couldn't look at the building.

It was too blank.

So about eight years ago, they put this statue metro bot, with streaming text and have happy face right at the front door.

So people would look at the building you see what they had to do to the architecture.

They had to put a bandaid on it because the architecture really didn't work.

Finally, their learning objectives, we can see the unseen.

You can understand unconscious processing, outside conscious control.

Directs our behavior in the built environment.

We can see how a biometric modeling like eye tracking or facial expression analysis can predict their behavior.

And we can learn how evolutionary history precepts the human responses to stimuli, how we're hardwired to look for and add faces all the time.

And finally, we can appreciate that we are not modern.

You can take us out of the stone age but not the stone age out of us.

Briefly, I'll just show the books that you might want to read what really got me into this was "The Age of Insight" by Eric Kendall.

He wrote it in 2012.

It's brilliantly written.

This is a new book on marketing that just came out in 2020, "Blind Sight" it's all about how marketers use the subliminal brain to manipulate us.

And then there was my book.

The second edition is coming up in July.

Human Architecture Planning Institute.

I'd love to hear from all of you.

Our mission is promote evidence-based design, and we really want to really get people to understand more how humans actually function.

We're not cars, we're people, were animals and our subliminal brain has guiding our experience.

Finances, real, stay curious (laughs) and questions, okay.

- We have lots of questions for you Ann.

The chat has been an absolute buzz.

So I'm going to kick off with, Paul had had a question.

Do you consider architecture and the built environment as Richard Dawkins concept of the extended phenotype?

- I'm not sure what your question is?

I don't quit understand it.

I mean, I think when you start doing this research, you realize we see the world like an animal and our biology is preset what we want to see and that's just it and our biology can't change as fast as our technology.

- Yeah, and that phenotype would be that expression of the DNA, right?

- Right Yeah, it is basically, I guess then yes.

Yeah, the answer would be yes.

- Can you change the way your subliminal brain works?

- I think there are some, you know there is maybe some ways you can change your way your subliminal brain works.

And I think there is therapies for PTSD and there are therapies for autism to change how their brains work and you can learn.

But in some ways it's very difficult.

Like the face bias is not going to change.

In addition, your body is in a continual state of flow and is always to stimuli continually you're just not conscious of it.

- Thank you.

Can you tell us the name again of that software that was purchased by Apple and buried for their own purposes?

- Yeah, that was Facet is the company.

And in 2016 they bought it.

I was able to use it before 2016.

I still have it on my computer and the continent the software is called Emotient E-M-O-T-I-E-N-T and it's pretty amazing they did that, but you could see why they did that.

The software is extremely powerful and it shows all the way people are feeling before they're maybe even consciously aware, they're happy.

They'll be able to tell it by the way the face is moving.

You know, I'm sure you've had that experience in your life when you're saying, "Hey Nancy, you didn't really like "when I said that, did you?"

And you're saying, "No, I didn't, what do you mean?"

And because of what your face did I'm sure you've had that experience you know.

- I have not a very good poker face.

(laughs) - People are reading you subliminally all the time.

- That is very true.

Very true.

Patrick's has a question.

Has there been any experiment done or data on whether people look at maybe dependent on one culture, where they grew up or to experience the person's life experiences and what they're exposed to or age group or profession.

- Those are super good questions.

And basically here's the deal.

This is what's real.

It's really fascinating and tremendously scary.

Basically the first three to five seconds when you look at something at a glance it doesn't matter your age, gender, religion, language you look at it the same way I was at 3M VAST, scientist explain this to me and you look at it a lot like, I hope you're ready for this guys, like a monkey.

Okay and then after that, when consciousness kids kicks in, that's when a page biases culture start picking up, but the immediate thing is completely animal.

And the way it kind of makes sense.

You know I don't think cars changed their headlight arrangements that much when they sell in different countries.

- Oh, you got to see in front of you.

Another question, I think you started to answer this already in your last question, but how does age play a part in tracking, you know, for instance do you senior citizens focus on one area as opposed to a younger person?

- According to the vision scientists at 3M, the first at a glance, the first three to five seconds or so it doesn't matter, age doesn't matter.

But then definitely after that age and culture does matter.

So agent culture can definitely matter.

- Great, thank you.

Do you have any data about night.

Lindsay is an architectural lighting designer and curious about these concepts as related to the nighttime environment.

- That's a really, really good question.

That's a super good question.

I think that the issue is when you're dealing with neuroscience and all these ideas, it's like drinking out of a fire hose, too much is coming at you.

So I think what you have to do, well, I wanted to really focus on was daytime and the public realm.

Why is it easy to walk in Paris?

Why is it not so easy to walk in suburban America?

I couldn't understand why.

And this science actually has answered that question.

It's because the subliminal brain is not fed the fixations.

It needs to keep itself suit.

It's a real problem.

Having an old brain.

- All that knowledge rolling around in there.

- That's a real problem that our brain is we're still animals and we're still responding to the same thing.

- Did anyone test how architects and architectural historians look at buildings?

- Yeah, that's been tested.

And basically if you go to architecture school that apparently kind of changes your brain and you don't look at the world anymore, like a normal person.

So actually when they do these studies, they want to know they want to separate out the architects from the non-architects because going to architecture school.

And then the funny thing is that when the end of the day I would argue that you want to design for regular people because architects are what 0.001% of the population you want to design for the normal brain.

And that when you go through architecture school you stop seeing the world like a normal person especially when you're taught modern architecture.

Which it was made up by people who couldn't see the world normally because they were so traumatized.

I think what's fascinating.

And what's so new is understanding how trauma really impacts the brain.

And it really does.

So if you've been traumatized, it will subliminally you won't even know it's impacting you, but it's still impacting you because the reality is all as a construct between your eye and your brain and you don't even know what your brain has in it half the time.

- So Anna had a question about art.

You know it would be interesting to use eye tracking software to see how a viewer is actually see a particular painting.

Do you have any examples of that?

- Yeah, I do actually, you want to see them?

I actually have, I eye track some Picasso's and I was really, really fascinating.

And it's really, really interesting.

I mean, I don't know if you want me to share my screen, but I could show it to you that Picasso figured out that if he did a painting of a young girl with really distorted eyes, people would really look at it and really focus on it and he was right.

And if you do a painting with only one eye, instead of two won't look at it as much.

Eye tracking art's really, really interesting.

And what's really interesting too, is the websites about the most viewed paintings of the world that you can find.

And most of them, seven or eight of 10, they tend to show people, like the Mona Lisa, as the most viewed painting, the picture of the woman on the book, by Eric Kendall.

I mean, often famous paintings have people in them.

Are there are some abstract paintings too, but those are those are usually fractals.

That's a whole nother topic, but - Oh yeah, absolutely.

- People don't like blackness, but that's a good topic.

I think it's a great subject for a book.

Eye tracking art would be fascinating - Or a Twitter conversation.

So Bella was asking, so are we going to see a trend of architects, equating attention with approachability?

Are the things our eyes linger on better for our cities and health?

- I would argue that's a really super good question.

I would argue yes.

So, because we're a social species we're hardwired for attachment.

And if we can attach our nervous system, can't calm down.

I showed you pictures of like those charming buildings in Amsterdam and even one of your slides before we started show those charming buildings in Amsterdam, it was really interesting.

That was kind of funny.

So yeah, we need, we actually, it's kind of just like when you really think about it though, it all makes sense.

Just like nature's preset your heart rate before you're born.

She's preset how many times you're going to breathe in a minute before you're (indistinct), she's basically set what your walking pace is going to be.

It's all kind of preset by evolution, nature has also preset what we need to see.

And so we need buildings that suggest people that look like us that are vertical, bilateral symmetry that have a top middle and bottom, that have windows that could be seen as eyes very quickly.

That's basically what it's going to be because that's how our nervous system is hardwired.

Remember, this is what you have to remember, it's really important.

Buildings are really recent.

So humans are maybe 120,000 years old but buildings are only like 5,000 years old.

So like the nervous system we have evolved without buildings, you get it, so we kind of have to have buildings that look like us for us to feel comfortable in the public realm they create.

Otherwise what happens is people get in their cars and cars are like envelopes.

They seal you in your own little tube and you you're not in the public realm anymore.

You're in your own little tube and that's not healthy.

- Right, well, a lot of us experienced right over the last year with not being together with the pandemic.

Ronan had a question, is this topic something that is not talked about much because now that we understand the marketing methods of large companies we won't purchase those items or is this addictive.

And we, as humans can not stop it, even if we want to.

- Yeah, I think the companies are very, very smart.

You know, Apple hires, PhD, neuroscientists, they get it.

They're very, very smart.

They're designing all the parts of subliminal brain to manipulate us and they're very, very smart.

- (indistinct) they spend a lot of money on marketing.

- And the concern is who's designing the public realm that we really need.

Who's designing, safe walking places, you know who is designing city halls that you really want to walk into.

And that's the scary part I think.

- I found that interesting with the library that the library was a public space, but being all glass it was something that we kind of passed over with our eyes.

- It's exactly what it is because the architects that's the problem because the architects don't study biology, you know that's the issue.

They need to study biology, just like the (indistinct).

- It seems like Gropius' home and studio were designed defensively, unclear entrance and small windows.

Is that seeking a feeling of security?

- Yeah, believe it or not, I presented these slides to a Harvard medical school professor and to professors at trauma schools and they all said it is the brain wants security and safety.

That's what it is.

They said it's classic PTSD.

That could tell because they study PTSD.

They understand what happens so your brain is subliminally always looking to feel safe.

- Makes sense.

- That's what happens.

And they don't even realize it.

What's so funny is they don't even realize he was doing it 'cause you're not consciously doing it.

It's fascinating how it works.

- What is the thinking?

As in the end of upside down, thinking that brains are sending receiving units, that there is solely one mind similar to David Bombs, thinking - That sounds fascinating.

- So that's from Lynn, so if Lynn you have any clarification on that you want to pop in the chat that would be great.

Masias says, you can't remember if Frank Lloyd Wright served, I'm gonna say, - No, Frank Lloyd Wright was from a different generation.

He was from an earlier generation.

So he was born, I don't know, 20 years earlier.

So he was a completely different generation and he did not have PTSD.

And he was very upset with the way they were building.

And he thought something was wrong with it.

And he was right.

And his buildings, I mean he does have some unusual modern buildings, but his buildings tend to have a top, middle and bottom.

They have a sense of narrative coherence and they're not so, they fit in a way the way that the modern buildings do not.

What happens with modern building environments is just to become very disjointed.

It's actually fascinating and become really, really because the people creating them were disjointed inside.

I could never understand why traditional old towns they're so coherent.

You can walk right through it all makes sense.

Whereas modernism is never coherent.

It's ramped up, it doesn't make any sense because when the people came up with it didn't have a coherent sense inside them.

Remember reality to construct between eye and brain.

So you're seeing what trauma therapists talk about is just dissociation.

They gave us their dissociation.

There's this great quote from Bessel van der Kolk the famous trauma doctor, hurt people hurt other people.

That's what happened in modern architecture.

And that's what know because it doesn't feed us what we need.

- Right, Sharon says Gropius is pre-war building looks the same event his post-war post-war buildings.

How would PTSD explain that?

- Well, I think it doesn't quite look the same as a top, middle and bottom.

I've looked at the (indistinct) and stuff.

It doesn't quite look the same.

It's not as blanket as a top middle bottom.

The front doors are right there.

It's not the it's architecture changed.

I think what happened, the architects at the turn of the century in the early 20th century were really trying to incorporate engineering thinking.

and so I think that's what the (indistinct) his early structures look like.

But then when he went to a PTSD you can really incorporate engineering thinking because you're more dissociated.

You don't understand how people think.

So there is a real difference.

The front doors of his pre-war buildings are easier to find than the front doors of anything he built afterwards PTSD grabs hold of you and doesn't let go.

- Yeah, but the way that it alters the actual brain.

- Yeah, and again, reality is a construct in your eye and your brain, you don't see reality.

- Have you done any studies with people experience with meditation?

- No, those are really important studies.

The people are really doing this.

There's a trauma research association the Bessel van der Kolk guy he talks about that there's trauma and they do meditation for PTSD.

They do play acting, they do art.

They do amazing things to try to sooth the traumatized brains.

And there are definitely all kinds of therapies around that weren't available when the modern art fathers of modern architecture were living.

- And so with modern architecture, you know we had two or three people kind of anchoring that they were influenced by trauma.

But what about the, all of the architects and people who followed their theories after that?

- Yeah, that's really, really interesting too.

I mean, why did they just take hold?

I mean, I think they, it just kind of changed, There was a need to rebuild that was fantastic.

And then the problem after World War I you had World War II, which even more death and trauma and need to rebuild, and not understanding what traditional people traditional architecture gave people that was the issue.

They didn't understand it.

Then it was cheaper to build often in the new, modern way.

You didn't need the craftsman.

It was kind of cheaper to build in a way if you could think of industrial thinking, but they didn't understand that that's not how humans are wired to see things.

- So how does this theory about the animal brain relate to modern art?

- I think modern art also can, there been books written about that?

Modern art also reflect some of the trauma and association because the industrialized world just changed so quickly.

The Wars happened, you know, these fantastic Wars for the first 40 years of the 20th century and just it just turned everything upside down.

And I think modern art reflects some of that.

I think Picasso's work reflects some of that, but at the same time Picasso's work has all was his face, isn't it?

You know, he got it.

He knew what people needed to see.

- Megan was saying she could see how this could influence planning and shaping of public spaces.

But she's curious if you can talk a little bit more about how this could be applied to communities and neighborhoods at large.

- Well, I think it's really, there's this famous idea in I think philosophy, but also in science that you can't solve a problem unless you ask the right question or you can't get the right answer unless you ask the right question because it turns out questions are embedded in the answer.

So if your question of the way you're framing the new neighborhood or the new school doesn't understand that humans are animals, they have subliminal things, driving them.

They need to see faces.

They go for edge conditions that are consistent.

They love detail.

Then you're not going to get the right answer.

That's the problem.

You know, questions and answers are embedded.

Humans are not machines.

In America one of the problems we built a lot of our towns around cars.

And that's kind of a problem because people don't walk like cars, you know?

- Right, absolutely.

Do you find common ground between your work and Christopher Alexander's?

- There are people who talk to me, there's Nico Sela Garros, a professor at the University of Texas, San Antonio often talks to me about Sela Garros and how Christopher Alexander kind of predicted some of this.

I think he understood it without ever having access to the biometric tools because a lot of these tools just weren't available when he was doing his work.

- JJ Gibson wrote a book called "The Ecological Approach "To Visual Perception," in a key coined the concept of affordances.

Do you deal with this concept much?

- Affordances are really important we do talk about in the cognitive architecture we talk about edge conditions and affordances or about edge conditions.

So it turns out humans one of the things we do, the secret things we're doing we're always looking for faces without realizing it.

We're also subliminally, always looking for secure edge conditions.

We're called a thigmotatic species.

So just like a mice, just like most mammals of prey we're thigmotatic without even knowing why we'll walk along an edge condition.

We'll sit, look, I'm sitting with my back against the wall.

It's really, really interesting.

And even in Disneyland main street where there are no cars people walk, they tend never to walk in the center of the street.

Even though there are no cars they walk at the edge conditions.

It's just how the brain works to secure it's a survival and a survival strategy, basically.

- Great, thank you.

Do you think that architecture will revert back to the older form and make use of faces or has this already started to happen?

- That's a really good question.

I think the thing is, in some ways buildings are so expensive.

Architects have much less control and you hope.

So I'm hoping that the public can really make public health and human wellbeing a priority.

And then maybe get this science incorporated into how we frame our communities.

It's a really good question.

I mean, because we've been building the wrong way for about a century and so we need to revert back and we've been too car centric, which really is unhealthy.

I'm very concerned, I'm a mom.

I'm very concerned that Americans are now, you should all know this 46 in longevity, on the world health organization chart, 46.

That means 45 other countries people live longer.

A retired surgeon explained to me, 70% of Americans are overweight, 40% are obese.

One of the reasons we have the longevity issues in this country now is because of the obesity we aren't designing the world we need to live in.

And that's a real concern.

And I think understanding people better will can help that with your help.

- Working together.

Why are some buildings designed without build without windows?

- That's a really good question.

I think it's cheaper.

You know, I think often, you know it takes a lot of money to build right?

And it just cheaper to do.

And there was this sense, I think after World War II, particularly we want it to be modern.

We want it to put everyone in cars.

I will put DDT on the crops.

We'll make everything plastic.

We'll tell mothers not to nurse their babies, because it's primitive.

I mean, we had all these ideas which when you really start thinking about the ecosystem we're part of actually don't sense.

- That's very true.

We had a comment that modern design is calming to me ornate architecture stresses me out.

Is this common?

- It could be, but I would argue, we'll have to see.

You know, it depends.

We have to see, you know it'd be interesting to check that out take you in certain places, see where you go.

If Disneyland main street had all Northern modern buildings people wouldn't walk of it, the brain wouldn't let them, because the subliminal, what happens is a subliminal brain that you don't control makes the fixations on the diverse elements that it sees, the contrast of elements and then that pulls you forward without your awareness because walking is done with automaticity, automaticity means automatically without thinking about it.

So if it were to Disneyland main street were all glass plate glass nobody would walk down it, you can't.

- We have another.

We've got lots of great questions, which is wonderful.

Talking about our World War I architecture, why did other architects mimic those designs versus trying to look at something different?

- Well, I think again, it was part of the new ethos of the new world, the world of plastics, of formula for babies, of everybody in a car, this idea that engineering and work 'cause war gave us our world.

There's a new bestselling New York times book about that.

We're really living in the, and Tom Hanks wrote an article about the New York Times recently, it's the 75th year after the end of World War II, you know, war gave us our world.

And we were just so entranced by the technologies.

We just kind of took them all in.

What was the question again?

I forget what, - Just so you know, why would they mimic, essentially?

- I think what happens too is, this is a really interesting idea.

There's also a lot of gaslighting, that with someone gaslighting is a term when people are telling you something that's not, humans learn by being mirrored.

And these people who were teaching, who had PTSD didn't mirror the right way.

They couldn't, they didn't tell.

And when I went to architecture school traditional architecture was never mentioned.

So I assumed, I guess it's never important.

But then why do this Disneyland all of traditional architecture and why does everyone go to Venice?

It makes no sense when people have pictures of Paris you think there are no modern buildings in Paris.

Why is that something didn't make sense?

And because in a way your gaslit to tell you that traditional architecture didn't matter anymore, but in a way you have to have compassion World War I and World War II were so horrible, people didn't want to look at the past.

They wanted to throw it out.

And they had this idea they could start from scratch and Gropius would say to students, we're starting from zero.

Well that's PTSD 'cause great architecture is always evidence-based.

That's why it worked.

- I like that.

How are you differentiating correlation and causality here?

Couldn't there be alternate explanations for why we fixate on windows or how we can diagnose early modernists?

- No, I know nature doesn't work that way.

I think the struggle for survival is so intense.

Things have to be pretty much preset.

You just like there, your heart rate is going to more or less be preset.

Your breath rate is more or less going to be preset.

How you're going to foot put one foot after another.

There's going to be some range is more or less preset.

What you need to look at, how your eyes are going to move as more or less preset.

Now, the major thing your brain is doing is vision.

Vision takes huge amounts of energy and more of your blood flow goes to your brain than any other organ.

It's all really interesting.

The brain is hugely complex, it's all basically preset.

And I think what we didn't understand in the 20th century and what we're struggling with now with climate change is we're in a closed system.

It's a system, it's a very complicated system.

And to really design, we have to, we're part of the system, we're of the system and to design better we have to acknowledge that.

I tell my students, you know, now with DNA, we now know that they share 86% of the same DNA as a zebrafish.

Or zebra fish is 86% human and you sell 99% or 98% with a chimpanzee.

I mean, it's a whole different way.

Oh, and it's even more funny you say or share 15% of the DNA with mustard grass.

I never thought I presume grass and people were completely different.

Think again, it's not, we're part of a closed system.

It's been interacting for millions of years and we're not modern.

- Could you please discuss from a neuroscience point of view how the brain is working during attachment or without it?

- I'm not sure I'm not a neuroscientist.

I'm not sure I can answer that question, but I can say is the human brain is hardwired for attachment.

We need to have attachment.

And we we're built for attachment and we're built for having others see us to help us see ourselves.

We need to attach to other people and we need to attach to buildings to be feel safe and secure.

One of the problems of the design of the human brain is it has something called the amygdala.

And that's kind of like a fear-based system in the brain.

It's kind of in the part of the brain.

And basically that's going to go on alert without conscious awareness and get you jumping into a car or get you running down the street without you even knowing what you saw.

I'm sure if you've been driving, sometimes you've moved and say, "Hey, I didn't even see that car coming."

And I've already moved away.

Or you were walking you suddenly jumped on a sidewalk.

I didn't see that that person coming, but I've already jumped on the sidewalk.

How did that happen?

Your brain subliminally told you to do it, but the human brain, the architecture of the human brain one could argue is fear-based.

And so that's why we need Disneyland to have all those ridiculously ornate buildings, 52 of the, one different than the other because that soothes.

the brain to make you feel like you're safe.

And then plus Disney did something very smart.

He took all the cars off the street.

I'm not sure I've answered your question.

- No, I think that you got it.

We have a comment here from Grig Ryan Prince Charles designed housing schemes.

in the UK in the late '80s which tried to mimic designs of the past with the tweet little windows and the pitched roofs, the urban layout copied medieval street layouts.

Despite this, they were architecturally very poor a little more than a mustache.

And from an urban point of view, they have been failures.

Do you have a comment on that?

- Well, I've been to one of Prince Charles, thing is that he did Poundbury and that was amazing.

It was absolutely fantastic.

It felt timeless, I felt safe walking there.

I didn't know the place at all.

Poundbury was absolutely great.

And there's new buildings that I've seen that have gone up in the past two years and they're also fantastic.

I think the Prince Charles intuited, basically he did evidence-based design.

He went and looked at places where people like to be.

And what you find in Massachusetts generally is if something has a historic district designation it sells for like 20% more, the things that do not.

And in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts the highest real estate in the Commonwealth per capita is in Nantucket Island.

That was an old whaling town.

And that became all the whole Island basically is under historic designation, they banned modern architecture in 1960s or something.

You cannot build a modern building.

Now only ultra millionaires lived there.

They have beautiful cobblestone streets.

It's you feel really cozy walking down those streets.

It's kind of amazing what's happened.

So modern architecture is for the wealthy in Massachusetts get the most beautiful old architecture.

That's what happens between the class thing.

- Yeah, that's unfortunate.

Very pretty to look at though.

How do you think that the pandemic will shift the future of architecture?

- I hope it gives us a chance to really understand the biology's real 'cause in a way the pandemic is all about, invisible things are there, you can't see a virus, but it's changing our life.

And in a way, this lecture is about the same thing.

You can't see those fixations I just showed you, but they're there and they're driving you anyway.

So I hope that biology is part of the humanities and I hope that the pandemic gets people to say that, right.

It's all human.

- Right, absolutely.

What about the mothers of modern architecture?

Who are they and is their work vastly different?

- Well, that's a really good question.

I mean, I think in a way this idea of fathers, of modern architecture I took this from the history books and those are the things that architecture students are taught.

What they haven't been taught until recently.

And this is really basically this year that they were all had brain disorders and that changes how you look at them because those men had incredible power.

They really did.

Ms. Van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, Luco Busie.

In California, there was Neutra, Richard Neutra.

And he was also world war one vet.

They had incredible power at that time.

And I think our society since then women are gaining more power definitely.

I mean we have a female vice-president what do you know?

- All right I think we've had so many wonderful questions.

I think we're going to wrap it up with this.

What is on the horizon for you and besides your book coming out in July?

- What kind of question is that?

Oh, well, I'd love to do with Nancy's help, I'd love to do, I really love getting science out there and I'd love to do a PBS Series.

Carl Sagan did a famous one, you know and I'd love to do a PBS Series about like the science of the human body and how it really matters and how we can't just have advertisers know about it.

We can't just have car companies understanding our subliminal brain.

We have to have everybody understanding it.

And especially the people building our schools and our streets and our crosswalks.

And so there's just this opportunity, I think in a way because of the pandemic to try to get like maybe a PBS Series or to try to get more people educated about how they work and to have compassion for our history.

- Well, that sounds great.

I look forward to working on that with you.

That would be a lot of fun.

- We have to do it.

I mean, it's really exciting.

And some of the tech tools that are out there are mind blowing and we need to look into it.

- It absolutely is.

It absolutely is.

Thank you Ann, this has been really wonderful.

To find out more information about Ann's work you can visit her blog that's geneticsofdesign.com.

And the link is in the chat.

Also Ann Susman assessment website, which is annsusman.com.

And I will be following up with an email with some of that information as well.

If you enjoyed this our science pub is on May 11th at 7:00 PM.

Guest hosts, Jessica Hua we'll be taking you through an exciting talk from Nick Bus on frogs, frozen roads and human safety, keeping animals and humans safe through the seasons.

So Nick is going to be talking about his research.

Christine has put the link for may science pub in the chat.

So please do go ahead and RSVP for that right now while you are thinking of it.

I want to thank Ann Susman for your time and expertise.

This was an absolutely fascinating talk.

I know there was a lot of chat going on over on the side.

So I think a lot of people were really engaged.

So thank you.

Thank you so much.

This is being recorded and it will be available on WSKG YouTube in our science pub playlist.

And I want to thank Christine Keysborough, Julia Diana, Jessica Hua, Alyssa Micha, who is our director and producer for this evening, WSKG public media and I'd like to thank you for spending the evening with us and attending tonight's science pub.

If you liked us, be sure to visit Facebook for future events at Science Pub Bing, and you can find us at WSKG's website as well, which is wskg.org.

I'm your host Nancy Coddington.

Thank you very much and have a good night.

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