Why Neuroscience Needs Photography

A few weeks ago I was at a photography exhibition in Munich. Large prints, well curated, good lighting. The images were technically solid. But when I left the hall, nothing remained. I couldn’t remember a single picture. Beautiful images, seen, gone.

On the way back I asked myself why. The answer is simple: the photographs had no context. No problem they made visible. No reason they needed to exist. They were art without cause.

What data cannot do

There are over 60,000 studies on how buildings and cities affect people. Ceiling height changes how we think. Daylight determines how we sleep. Noise raises cortisol levels. Greenery reduces crime. The research is there and it is clear.

It sits in journals that only academics read. The findings are buried in tables and p-values that no mayor can interpret and no investor wants to. Architects know that light matters but they cannot quantify why. Urban planners suspect that density is a problem but they have no language for it that works in a city council meeting.

The knowledge isn’t missing. It’s invisible.

What a diagram cannot do

One could say: then make an infographic. Translate the data into charts. Colorful, understandable, shareable.

That works on one level. A diagram creates an aha moment. The viewer understands the information. But it is one of a thousand pieces of information that day. Tomorrow it is forgotten. A diagram informs. What it does not do: move you.

The urgency that follows from knowledge about the built environment is not an intellectual insight. You have to feel what a bad space does to a person before you are willing to change it. Feelings do not come from lines and bars, no matter how well designed they are.

What photography can do

An image of a man staring at his phone in a windowless concrete canyon says more than the study proving that lack of visual connection to nature raises blood pressure. Not because the image is more precise. But because it stays.

Photography makes data tangible because it touches you emotionally. What touches you stays with you. What stays with you changes behavior.

When you see a space that demonstrably makes people sick and you see the person inside it at the same time, you understand the urgency at a level no study result can reach. And for those who will never understand databases and architectural planning but are affected nonetheless, photography creates access that otherwise does not exist. Residents, citizens, patients, children. They can all read an image.

The numbers behind it

A Harvard study showed that better indoor air quality can increase cognitive performance by 101 percent. Not by a few percent. By double. The cost of this improvement: 14 to 40 dollars per person per year. The estimated productivity gain: 6,500 dollars per person per year.

90 percent of a company’s operating costs are people. Only 10 percent are rent and energy. A one percent improvement in the work environment yields more than the entire energy savings of an ecologically optimized building.

Lack of daylight exposure at work costs 46 minutes of sleep per night per employee. Buildings that make people sick cost 150 billion dollars per year in the US alone. In Europe 200 billion euros are lost annually to absenteeism.

The numbers are there. As long as they sit in tables, nothing changes.

The difference

Ecological building is expensive. It requires better materials, elaborate insulation systems, solar technology, heat recovery. The additional costs are 7 to 9 percent. That is technology. That costs money.

Human-centered building costs almost nothing extra. Ceiling height is a design decision. Window placement is orientation, not technology. Visual connections to nature are site planning. Acoustic zoning is a question of spatial layout, not budget. The materials that are good for people are often the same ones that would be used anyway. It comes down to composition, proportion, light and air.

The difference between a building that makes people sick and one that keeps them healthy is not a price difference. It is a knowledge difference. And that knowledge needs to become visible.

The exhibition as analysis

A city can be documented photographically. Not as a coffee table book, not as tourism marketing. But as analysis. Every image is backed by data. An ontology that structures the knowledge from over 60,000 studies provides the scientific explanation for every documented situation: why this square feels oppressive. Why this street triggers stress. Why this park calms you down.

The public visits the exhibition and understands their own city better. Politicians get a tool that makes their decisions explainable. Planners get recommendations that don’t disappear in a drawer because they are publicly visible.

The message to every visitor: This is why you feel the way you feel.

And then: This is how it could be.

Together

63,000 research findings explain why spaces heal or make people sick. This knowledge has had little impact so far because it is invisible.

Photography solves that. Not as illustration and not as decoration. As translation. It takes what sits in databases and turns it into something a person can feel, understand and remember.

One needs the other. Without photography the research stays in the database. Without research the photography stays on the wall. Together they create something that can change cities.