Creating Calm Spaces: What the Brain Needs
Have you ever booked a hotel room or a home on Airbnb/VRBO based on the strength of its photos in the online listing -- but when it came time to entering the room, something about the actual space felt terribly wrong? The most gorgeous, well-lit interior photos may have us expecting a living space that’s equally relaxing and luxurious. But often, the actual experience of being inside them makes us anxious, claustrophobic, or even unable to sleep.
Maybe deceptive marketing photos are the culprit. But in many cases, the underlying problem is much deeper than that -- rooted in our evolution as a human species over the last 100,000 or so years, and how our brains have been evolving for many millions of years before that. Most of these spaces aren't designed for how we experience reality.
How Our Brain Experiences Spaces
Broadly summarizing the latest research, our brain basically has two modes of engaging with the world: front brain (prefrontal cortex) and back brain (cerebellum and basal ganglia).
When a behavior is repeated enough (like turning on and off a light switch, or walking into a specific room) the prefrontal cortex hands it to the basal ganglia, which runs it without requiring conscious attention. The back brain is the system that lets you drive a car. Even while carrying on a conversation or listening to a podcast, your back brain is aware of your surroundings.
Front brain activity, by contrast, requires focus and real-time attention. It’s the part of our brain we use to observe and process new activities, and interact with text and 2D imagery.
This difference explains why a photo of an attractive living space can be very different from how we react to that physical room once we are in it. We quite literally perceive them with different parts of the brain.
And once we are in that space, our back brain tends to fall back on “guidelines” that our ancestors' brains epochs ago.
Evolution of a “Comfortable Living Space”
When you enter a hotel room or home and consciously assess its materials, you probably notice construction and design principles from the last few decades, or at the very latest, from a few hundred years.
How we experience spaces like these, however, reflects tens of thousands of years of evolution of our ancestors as hunter/gatherers thriving in the savannahs of Africa. Academics expressed this phenomenon through a number of theories, including:
Sheltered spaces and the prospect-refuge theory: Coined by geographer Jay Appleton, he argues that our desire for sheltered spaces is rooted in the survival of early human tribes. A shelter enables us to survey for resources and threats (prospects) while keeping us concealed and protected (refuge) conferred a survival advantage. We are hard-wired, in other words, to draw feelings of safety and pleasure from environments that offer both views and a sense of enclosure.
Humans prefer cover verses. being out in the open. This image shows prospect refuge theory well. People are working in the enclosed NOOK pods in the back, vs. the couch and soft seating areas. One person is seated in a soft chair, but with a well defined backing behind her. Image from the Hosted Buyers Lounge at IMEX (global event planning conference) October 2026.
High ceilings and biophilia: Based on E. O. Wilson's classic Biophilia, a 2015 reanalysis of his ideas (Vartanian et al., "Architectural design and the brain," Journal of Environmental Psychology) found that rooms with higher ceilings were more likely to be judged beautiful, activating visuospatial exploration structures in the dorsal stream, the brain’s visual processing pathway that runs from the primary visual cortex to the parietal lobe.
Creating Coziness for the Back Brain
With all this science in mind, it’s possible to design living spaces that are visually appealing and resonate with what our back brain craves. By example, consider these elements:
Carpets and floor tile with fractals: This is meant to resemble the floor of forests, which appeal to our brain’s hardwired preference for soft leaves beneath bare feet. Fractals convey safety -- they suggest there are living things around. Put someone on a smooth surface with no details and the human brain feels like nothing is capable of living there. Put someone into an environment with natural patterns, and the back brain calms down. Life is present, and it’s safe to live (more on this here).
Many high end hotels have learned this. Lush carpet with natural patterns soothes the mind. Interior design which employs patterns and color harmony from nature sooth their guests.
Multiple sound sources: Nature doesn’t have a speaker system. It naturally teems with bird song, the wind in leaves, and other sounds both far and close, exciting the brain with calm curiosity and wonder. (As long as those sounds don’t include the growl of predators!)
Silence may seem encalming, but our ancestors could only hear when predators were around when everything goes quiet. This is why interior silence can be so unnerving. When the birds stop calling, our brain understands that as a threat. Birds chirp when things are safe. So if we hear bird sounds, we feel safe.
Architects can replicate this phenomenon in human-made spaces with nature-based sound loops with multiple high quality speakers playing different varieties of pleasant audio patterns (so they’re not overlapping or repetitive) that are subtle enough to attract our attention. To bring people to presence, multiple sound sources help. This is why lobby music can help people "arrive" at a location when entering from the non-place of a parking garage or busy street.
A noteworthy example here is Brian Eno’s “Music for Airports” with its ambient, non-intrusive soundscapes. These are important not just for visitors in spaces like hotels, convention centers, and office lobbies, but for the custodians and other employees who spend many hours in them -- a great audio environment reduces the negative feelings experienced by workers listening to soundtracks on repeat.
Calm Tech Institute has been working with Hello! DMC to bring these kinds of spaces to indoor environments like Urban Oasis and the WEC Resilience space read our latest Case Study here.
Creating a space of your own and seeking design guidance? Let’s discuss how we can collaborate!
