Concurrents – Environmental Psychology: Chipmunks All

by Sally Augustin, Ph.D. | May 7th, 2018

A comment I’ve made at several international design conferences recently has really resonated with my audiences. At each event, I’ve pointed out that although in the last few hundred generations humans have developed all sorts of cool tools, our brains have remained much the same and continue to process information and respond to the world around us in the same ways they did when we were a new species, just starting out. Spaces that would have made it more likely that we’d be relaxed or tense in our prehistory continue to affect us in the same ways today, for example, whether those responses are caused by things we see, hear, smell, taste or touch, or because of the way our sensory experiences interact to jointly affect us. Research shows that we communicate a lot via scents that our bodies generate and that we’re not consciously aware of. We share a …