This is your brain on urban design
Psychology on the Street, running at Urbanspace Gallery until Nov. 14, looks at how cityscapes influence the brain.

TheStar.com
Sept. 22, 2015
Sarah-Joyce

Neuroscientist Colin Ellard knew he wanted to study animal habitats; it was choosing an animal that was tricky. After years observing Mongolian gerbils, he finally found the perfect creature.

“It’s us!” he said of his final realization.

For the past ten years, Ellard has studied how our brains and bodies react when we roam the streets of some of the world’s biggest cities, including New York, Mumbai and Berlin.

This fall he has taken the lab on the road again, running Psychology on the Street at the Urbanspace Gallery at Richmond St. and Spadina Ave.

Part exhibition, part experiment, Ellard shares what he learned inside the gallery while carrying out more research on the streets surrounding it.

In past experiments, he monitored sweat glands with special wristbands to measure stress levels. In Toronto, he has added special headbands that measure brain waves.

With the experiment ongoing, he hesitated to reveal too much of his hypotheses. But some stops on his research walking tour are more obvious than others.

The warm fuzzies felt in green spaces, for example, are consistent across every city Ellard has studied.

“Even modest exposure, something like a parkette, has... so profound an effect on people’s psychology that it’s a matter of public health. There’s good evidence now that there’s a relationship between even simple things like the numbers of trees that you plant on the boulevard of a street and the health of people that live in that neighbourhood.”

Crowds, traffic and construction, on the other hand, can drum up so much stress it makes people sick.

“We know that people who are overstressed by urban environments are more likely to be prone to cardiac disease, to diabetes, a host of other nasty environmental diseases,” he said.

Overstimulation can erode the body, even without considering how the brain processes the stress.

“I asked the bikers (in Mumbai) what’s it like living in a city where it’s hard to cross the street even, when the traffic never stops,” Ellard said.

Uniformly, they told him they adjusted to the constant whir of people, cars and carts. The scientist’s instruments suggested otherwise.

“They might think that they’re getting used to it, but they’re incredibly hyper-stressed.”
Meandering past buildings, parks and alleys, Ellard’s tour groups explore the relationship between psychology and urban design using the tools of neuroscience.

“I think this kind of research, by showing how people respond to the places that are here, can highlight some of the key principles that can be useful in designing better public places.”

Participants can download an app for a self-guided tour or turn up Saturdays for directed walks, all while self-reporting back the feelings drummed up by bland grey buildings and dark alleyways. It's on the more-involved guided tours that he measures both stress levels and brain waves with the special headbands and wristbands.

Construction awnings, Ellard found, can feel threatening — the poles, plywood and clutter undermine the pedestrian’s ability to imagine an escape from any danger.

“We’re no longer trying to avoid sabre-tooth tigers, but we have those same kind of in-built preferences for particular lines or shapes in space that came from that kind of evolutionary lineage,” he said.

Though tigers aren’t a common site for city-dwellers, construction sites are which could keep the researcher in business for awhile.

“We could keep doing this for years,” Ellard said, over the clang of a passing dump truck.