Notice any strange behaviors at work lately? A paranoid feeling that someone who'd like to eat you is sneaking up behind your unprotected back as you tap away on your keyboard? Inexplicable urges to find a window and stare out of it? An uncanny ability to instantly locate the document you need within the towering piles of paper on your desk?

Don't worry. It's all in your head--or, more precisely, your brain. Evidence is mounting that suggests that your spine, your vision, your respiratory health are not the only things affected--even shaped--by your work environment. At this very moment, your office place may be activating ancient synaptic pathways or subtly creating new neural circuits in your cerebral cortex. And the new technology--electronic (PDAs) or mechanical (ergonomic seating)--you have acquired to improve your comfort and productivity on the job may be incrementally reprogramming you in ways that will ultimately have the opposite effects.

Well, perhaps you should worry.

We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us. Winston Churchill stated it so elegantly nearly half a century ago, but it has been hard to prove in any scientific way that our designed environments affect the way we behave when we are in them.

In the intervening years, the fields of neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and evolutionary biology have made enormous contributions to our understanding of how the brain works, describing both the mechanisms that produce human behavior and the evolutionary adaptations that helped to form those mechanisms. Concurrent studies of productivity in the workplace have shown that a variety of things in the physical environment (light quality, views to the outside, the ability to control the environment) affect the way people feel about and behave at work. But there have been no conclusive studies that integrate science and design in an effort to identify how and why specific features of the built environment affect us, for better or worse.

In May 2003, the American Institute of Architects (AIA) announced the establishment of the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture to investigate the neurological underpinnings of design. The AIA has dubbed the emerging field of study "neuro-architecture" (a bit confusing, since neuroscientists use that term to describe the structure, or architecture, of the brain). Their goal is to prove the hypothesis that "the environment, the structure we live in, affects our brain and our brain affects our behavior."

They have a rich body of research on which to draw.

Designing for the Stone-Age mind

Evolutionary psychology, for example, offers some intriguing ideas about how and why certain aspects of the environment affect behavior. The human brain has evolved over the course of some 10 million years, about 9.9 million of which the human race spent living really close to nature, in small nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes. During that time, evolutionary psychologists (EPs) say, natural selection shaped a brain that was very adept at certain tasks, like spotting ripe berries and evading toothy predators. Today's systems analyst or facilities manager is rarely called upon to do these sorts of things.

"The key to understanding how the modern mind works," EPs say, "is to realize that its circuits were not designed to solve the day-to-day problems of a modern American--they were designed to solve the day-to-day problems of our hunter-gatherer ancestors." In other words, "our modern skulls house a Stone Age mind."

The implications of this for workplace design range from the practical (don't design workstations that require people to sit with their backs to the entrance) to the poetic.

Biologist Edward O. Wilson coined the term "biophilia" to describe the preference for natural landscapes that was genetically imprinted on our brains during our long evolution in the African savannah. Wilson and his colleagues posit that aesthetic preferences evolved because certain environments enabled our prehistoric ancestors to better solve the problems of their time--such as how to find food while not becoming food oneself. So, even today, we feel better in an environment that provides us with refuge as well as a vista and are calmed by colors that once signified food (green) and drink (blue).

Environment as teacher

Of course, the human brain is not a closed system. Evolution "hardwired" our brains with certain neural pathways that are passed on genetically. But it also developed the brain's capacity to activate more than one neural circuit at a time and to apply the knowledge embedded in our Stone-Age minds to Information-Age situations. In his book Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are, neuroscience professor Joseph LeDoux explains: "Most systems of the brain are plastic, that is modifiable by experience, which means that the synapses are changed by experience."

In other words, our daily interactions with our environment are laying down new neural pathways that will in turn affect our future behavior. This could explain, for example, the common office phenomenon in which the occupant, surrounded by piles of papers and books and journals that have accumulated over months, knows exactly where to look in which pile for a specific document--but is unable to find anything for days after a spouse or assistant "organizes" by filing documents and shelving books in a more logical fashion.
Design that acknowledges how people learn (often entirely unconsciously) from their environment, then, could conceivably have a positive impact on how people behave in that environment.

Oops: Unintended consequences

Which brings us to another interesting body of research regarding the unexpected consequences of design. An environmental change implemented to change behavior in a positive way, to solve a particular problem, may create a new and unanticipated problem. For instance, ergonomic chairs designed to prevent the slouching behavior that leads to backache might produce new behaviors that lead to other physical ailments. Without some discomfort to spur people into occasionally getting out of their chairs, they may continue too long in activities (like keying or reading from monitors) that lead to neck ache or eye fatigue.

Princeton University scholar Edward Tenner has made a career of tracing and analyzing the unexpected effects of invention and design. In his new book Our Own Devices, he explains: "If we define technology as a modification of the environment, then we must recognize the complementary principle of technique, i.e., how that modification is used in performance. New objects change behavior, but not always as inventors and manufacturers imagine."

Not all unintended consequences are negative, of course. In his book, Tenner describes how a new technology--sending text messages via cell phone--is leading to a renaissance in the use of that original human tool, the opposable thumb. He has observed a new generation of people who grew up using their thumbs to tap out messages on the phones' tiny keypads now putting those handy appendages to other new uses as well. "Many kids in Japan even point and ring doorbells with their thumbs instead of their index fingers," Tenner says.

Your inner hunter/gatherer

John Eberhard, director of research planning for the AIA and a member of the advisory board of the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture, cautions against expecting the Academy's interdisciplinary research to revolutionize architectural design overnight. He estimates that it will be a decade before we will have a factual database from which to draw conclusions about how to design brick-and-mortar architecture that complements the ancient and constantly changing architecture of the human brain.

In the meantime, it can't hurt to try to understand and cater to your inner caveman or to become more aware of how your workspace may be quietly programming you in subtle--or entirely unimagined--ways. But don't try and blame a lackluster performance report on the color of your office walls. Dr. LeDoux reminds us that just because "our brain has not evolved to the point where the new systems that make complex thinking possible can easily control the old systems that give rise to our base needs and motives, and emotional reactions...doesn't mean that we are simply victims of our brains and should give in to our urges."

So quit staring out that window and get back to work.

The view from writer Debra Wierenga's home office in Saugatuck, Michigan, includes water she would never drink and wildlife she would never eat, but it gives her great pleasure anyway.