Tracing the neural imprint of space: a neurourbanist inquiry

Date

2025-9-1

Author

Sözeri, Furkan Erdem

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The relationship between the human brain and urban space presents an interdisciplinary research area that brings together neuroscience, environmental psychology, and spatial design. This thesis aims to investigate how spatial indicators at the architectural and urban scales interact with the human brain and shape perception, cognition, emotion, and memory processes. While many studies in the literature remain within disciplinary boundaries, this research offers a comprehensive synthesis by combining neuroimaging-based data (EEG, fMRI, HRV, etc.) with spatial indicators. The impact of environmental parameters (such as complexity, light, natural elements, symmetry, density, and sensory stimuli) on brain function is systematically analyzed. The multi-scale dashboards developed in this context, along with the synthesis of the human brain's embodiment of space through its relationship with space, reveal how design features are processed and experienced in the brain. A theoretical and methodological framework for neuro-urban science, re-establishing the connections between space and the brain, and suggests new interdisciplinary avenues for future research. However, it is aimed at taking one of the baby steps towards one of the possible development paths of the planning and design paradigm, which will be initiated by the theoretical synthesis of the experimental outputs of the first steps of the infrastructure that neuroscience offers to the spatial design discipline, starting from an individual scale and reaching a societal scale.

Subject Keywords

Neurourbanism, Neurology and space, Spatial indicators, Human brain and environment interaction, Neuroarchitecture

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/116085

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Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences, Thesis