On Natural Attunement: Shared Rhythms Between the Brain and the Environment

Abstract

Rhythms exist both in the body-brain and the built environment. Becoming attuned to the rhythms of the environment, such as repetitive columns, can greatly affect perception. Here, we explore how the built environment affects human cognition and behavior through the concept of natural attunement, often resulting from the coordination of a person's sensory and motor systems with the rhythmic elements of the environment. The article argues that the built environment should not be reduced to mere states, representations, and single variables but instead should be considered as a bundle of highly related continuous signals with which we can resonate. Resonance and entrainment are dynamic processes observed when a driven oscillatory system (e.g., the brain) oscillating at specific (intrinsic) frequencies is influenced by the dynamics of the driving system (e.g., an external signal). This paves the way for visual rhythmic stimulations of the environment to couple with and affect the brain and body through neural entrainment, cross-frequency coupling, and phase resetting. We discuss how environmental elements in actual architectural settings can affect neural dynamics, cognitive processes, and behavior in people. The article argues that the concept of rhythm is crucial in understanding the brain-body-environment relationships, and the inclusion of the built environment in ecologically valid experimentation is a necessary next step to understanding the brain in real-world settings.