The Neuroscience and Architecture of Time
by John P. Eberhard, FAIA
Founding president, Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture

Summary: This is a good time to talk about time. It is the beginning of a new era in the history of AIArchitect, it’s time to begin another school year, it’s about time for you to come home mentally from your vacation, and it’s time to stop and reflect on what neuroscience can tell us about how and why the brain responds to time. Time, of course, is crucial to planning, designing, and creating the built environment. It is so much a part of our lives from our first memories on that we implicitly think of time as a thing. It is not. It is a concept that we have used our conceptual brains to define and measure. It is also a part of our hard-wired brains, and we find manifestations of that biological clock in organisms as simple as the fruit fly. Join John Eberhard, FAIA, as he explains time as a function of neuroscience.

Below is a synopsis of the article. For the full text, click on the PDF link located in the column on the right.

Time is a product of the human mind. It does not exist in a physical sense, except in the devices humans have developed to keep track of “intervals.” We have a sense of there being a continuous stream of experiences in which one event is followed by another because our mind and memory provide us with the ability to recall past events. Our mind and working memory can also provide us with the ability to contemplate an event in the future.

To measure the time between remembered events, we have agreed on physically measurable intervals: hours, minutes, and seconds, for instance. Knowing anything about time depends on the neurons—the 10 billion cells—of the brain. More precisely what the brain “knows” about the meaning of time depends on the specific arrangement of the networks of connections between neurons and the way that neurotransmitters are released and absorbed to communicate between networks.

The mechanical clocks: A clock is a machine in which a device that performs regular movements in equal intervals of time is linked to a counting mechanism that records the number of movements. All man-made clocks, of whatever form, are made on this principle. The first domestic clocks were smaller versions of large public clocks. They appeared late in the 14th century, and few examples have survived.

By the middle of the 20th century, when man began to travel into space, more and more accurate clocks were needed. The National Bureau of Standards in Washington built a “clock” based on the oscillation of a cesium atom—the most reliable counter in the universe. Its definition of a second is “the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium 133 atom.” This works for setting the “atomic clock” kept by the National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST) in its Boulder laboratory, which is the standard for time measurement that we use in the U.S.

The biological clock: You probably go to bed and get up about the same time every day. For most people, the “clock” inside their heads tells them it’s time to get up; if they stay up “past bedtime,” they get sleepy. Neuroscientists now know that this happens because we have a “clock gene,” inherited from previous generations, that sets a tiny region of our brains called the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) used to produce a chain of chemical and nervous instructions that ripple through the body, controlling how each organ and tissue functions over the 24-hour day.

Time “flies”: Human generations are approximately 10,000 days long, but the common fruit fly (scientific name Drosophila) has a generational time of 10 days. Dr. Seymour Benzer, searching for a genetic basis for mammals’ ability to keep time, first examined Drosophila in 1967 and discovered a gene that served as a natural clock for the fly. He also discovered:

• A strain of flies with slow clocks that caused them to have 29-hour days, a strain with fast clocks that caused them to have 19-hour days, and a strain whose clocks seemed not to work at all—they were considered insomniacs.
• The mating “song” of the Drosophila has a rhythm established by the same clock gene. Each strain of Drosophila has a slightly different song, and females only mate with the males who sing the song of their species.
• The clock gene of the Drosophila consists of 3,600 nucleotides (each represented by one of four letters A, C, T, and G). The fly with the slow clock had had the G nucleotide changed to an A in position 1766, and the fast clock fly had a T changed to an A in position 734. This small change did not break the clock but it accelerated or decelerated the “hands.”

It is likely, although not yet proven, that much the same thing happens in our brains, even though we have brains that are 100 thousand times as complex. We have 10 billion neurons in our brains and the Drosophila has only 100 thousand. What is much less known is how environment—including the built environment—interacts with biological clocks. That is just one more area where the neuroscience of architecture will need more research in the future.