PERCEPTION AND PLEASURE

Tomas Saraceno, Cloud City 2012

In my research, physical context is deeply related to what people perceive of the build environment. But what is perception?

In neurological terms [1], to perceive is to recognize something or an experience through a process initiated by one or more of our senses. The combination of the five senses (not only vision) is what enables us to build experiences of our environment which in turn become "percepts". Percepts are not only the result of the combinations of these stimuli recorded in our brains, but they have another dimension which includes our past experiences and memory. 

There are two different types of perception: the unconscious which is immediate and the conscious that can take several seconds. When a percept is formed, it has no meaning until it is recognized (by using memories of past experiences). Creating a memory begins with forming a perception, which happens in 3 stages: awareness, attention and recognition. One can only recognize what he knows, and if one finds himself in an unknown position, the body initiated a spontaneous (below the conscious level) alarming state until a meaning is formed for the percept (one understands what is happening). 

An interesting new theory proposes that the brain is “hard-wired” for pleasure. In other words, the brain encourages us to seek information by rewarding us with a sensation of pleasure (liberation of endorphin). All the human knowledge is based on the act of seeking. Whenever one struggles to comprehend a perception, the click of “you got it” increases the level of pleasure in the human body.

The human natural curiosity and the importance of people to actively “seek” understanding and meaning for their environments remembered me about the most prominent critic of the Situationists against the modernist urbanism: “ [Le Corbusier] had taken away that we have a right to expect from truly impressive architecture – disorientation on a daily basis” [2].  I am interested in an architecture that establishes an ambiguous relationship with its context, one that encourages people to become consciously aware of the space they are in (and their condition in it) by exploring the attention that our “alarm state” generates.

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[1] The information for this post was extracted from the books The Architect’s Brain (2008) and Architecture and the Brain (2005) by John Eberhardt, founder of the ANFA (Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture).  

[2] Wigley, M. Constant’s New Babylon: The hyper Architecture of Desire,1998.  

[random note] An interesting recent study by Semir Zaki (2005) suggests that rather than perceiving the world as a unitary event, there are several "microconsciouness", each specialized in one different aspect of perception and with different time gaps among them. In other words, for the case of vision, instead of having only one image formed in the retinas and interpreted by the brain, the order of things perceived are: location, color, form, motion (as much as 80 miliseconds before) and orientation.