Some time ago, although not long ago, I entered a gray morning to visit Tilburg Cathedral in Holland. After crossing the door, the loud sound of the organ overwhelmed me. The music, sublime, occupied every corner of that architecture and myself. A penetrating sound, which seemed to lengthen not only the very high ceiling arcades, but my open feeling of being alive and seized by that physical reality made with deep ideas and emotions. And there I stayed, for a long time, sitting on those old walnut benches. It is true that this experience, and before or after it, and with different emotional records, has happened to me in other settings, outside the Pantheon of Agrippa, before the Parthenon in the Acr Greek polis, in the circus of Rome, or in what I imagine I could experience before the Burj Dubai that looks close, with almost a kilometer upright, the blues of the sky.
What are the architectures that are like springs that open and awaken many corners of our brain? Recently, at the root of very recent data, I began to think again about the importance of architecture in relation to teaching, whether it was preschool or university . And I asked myself the following questions: Why teach students in large classes, with large windows and natural light seems to improve and produce better performance in them than the teaching taught in narrow classes and poorly lit? Could it be that colleges, secondary schools or even universities themselves, which are built in large cities, model the way of being and thinking of those who are being trained in them? It is possible that the architecture of the schools does not respond today to what the cognitive and emotional process really requires to learn and memorize according to the codes of the human brain and are, in addition, aggression enhancers Still, dissatisfaction and depression? Up to what point to live constrained in the space of a classroom, far from the large tracts of land with open horizons or mountains, trees, carpeted soils of green or dry bushes, has not altered the genuine emotional basis of the neural mechanisms of learning and memory?
And even more. To what extent concealing a child of a few years in a nursery with anonymous walls, without any emotional significance, does not direct the construction of a brain in which millions of molecular and cellular changes occur every hour of his small life? Think that after birth, and in just three years, a child's brain increases more than half a kilo in a maelstrom in which new synaptic contacts are created and build neural circuits that code for specific functions.
In that time that brain absorbs, unconsciously, everything that surrounds it, including and in an important way the emotional air that surrounds it, whether it is alive or inert, whether people or animals, whether things or houses, colors, movements and much more. To what extent does this not influence, diminish or even turn off the open light of a child's mind? Are we not already learning, in a firm way, the tremendous interdependence of the brain with the surrounding environment, always aimed at learning the environment and only to safeguard the survival of the individual?
Well, a part of all this is called today Neuroarchitecture. And a part of that neuroarchitecture, since its young birth in 2004, is dedicated to the study of the environments where it is learned or taught. Today, architects in constant dialogue with neuroscientists, are already designing new schools with student classrooms, particularly elementary, with different orientations and angles to favor natural light sources, the wide design of windows and walls, air flows and noise control . These are studies that include ideas about how the brain works and the codes that brain brings to birth. That is, studies with which it is intended to adapt the architectural environment to enhance more and better the expression of those codes with which it is learned and memorized and beyond as taught. It is true that the questions are still infinite more than the results, but in this way of interdisciplinary dialogue it is hoped to reach a new dimension that affects the conception of a new neuroeducation.
Francisco Mora
Source: EL HUFFINGTON POST
Source: https://cambiemoslaeducacion.wordpress.com/
Neuroarchitecture
