A neuroscientist takes his lab on the road to explore the psychology of the streets.
We don’t usually think much of it as we’re walking down a street, but our bodies and brains are constantly reacting to what’s around us. Psychologists and neuroscientists have spent years studying the effect of cities on our behavior and our emotional and physiological states, but a lot of questions remain unanswered.
For example, studies have suggested that green space can have a positive effect on well-being. But “does a set of trees on a boulevard do it, or do you need to be completely immersed in a space?,” asks Colin Ellard, a neuroscientist at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, and the author of the new book Places of the Heart: Psychogeography of Everyday Life. “And does simply walking down a street with a nice landscape work, or do you have to sit on a bench in a park for half an hour to get these beneficial effects?”
To answer these more nuanced questions, Ellard is making the streets of Toronto his lab—as he has done before in other major cities like Mumbai and New York City. Psychology on the Street is part study and part exhibit, in which researchers take small groups of people on hour-long walking tours through the heart of the city. Here, participants are both guests and test subjects.
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As a species, humans are what Ellard calls “infovores.” That means we, like other animals, tend to select habitats that give us information about our surroundings. “Animals look for locations to live where they can both have some protection but also they can gain information about what is going on in the world,” says Ellard.
That might help explain how we respond to bland cityscapes. When he studied how people react to building facades during his walking tours in New York, he found that those who looked at featureless, bland building fronts—like that of a Whole Foods—were bored and unhappy. Sensors on participants’ wrists showed little physiological arousal. (A study by psychologists at University of Waterloo has also linked boredom to the increase of cortisol, a hormone associated with stress.)
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Of course, different city landscapes provoke different reactions and stress levels. As CityLab previously reported, Ellard found that some of it has to do with one’s own experiences and memories. So how a native New Yorker experiences the Lower East Side (he reported generally positive reactions in one study) differs from how a tourist would.
Similarly, in densely packed Mumbai, locals found empty public spaces like churchyards and parking lots relaxing. Those were where people went to find solitude and privacy, and to escape the “hubbub” of their crowded homes, as Ellard puts it in his book. In the U.S., we generally consider empty spaces like that as barren failures, which is why many planning efforts seek to fill them.