We've Been Fitting Humans to Houses, Not Houses to Humans: A Panel on Neuroscience, Circadian Health, and Architecture

Most of us move through our rooms every day without asking why they were built the way they were. We choose a home for its price, its location, or the number of bedrooms, and rarely for how it makes us feel, think, or sleep. Over time, we adjust to whatever the space gives us and stop noticing that we're the ones doing the adjusting. But what if the relationship is supposed to work the other way? What if a house isn't only where the body rests, but also an environment that continuously influences how we live, think, and function?

For the sixth episode of the second season of Talks 21, I invited three special guests who each look at that question from a different angle.

• Kristine Mun is a Los Angeles-based architect, researcher, and educator whose work bridges architecture, neuroscience, and computational design. She serves on the executive committee of the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture. 

• Satchin Panda is a circadian rhythm expert whose research has helped advance our understanding of time-restricted eating and how the timing of food, light, and sleep influences health. 

• Thomas Albright is a neuroscientist at the Salk Institute, a world-renowned research institution in La Jolla, California. His research focuses on visual perception, and he has applied his findings to fields ranging from architecture to forensic science.

Across our conversation, we explored why the presence of a hospital window has been associated with better recovery outcomes, and why students in a Baltimore classroom achieved better results after the room was redesigned by changing only the patterns on its walls. We talked about the Salk Institute itself, where architect Louis Kahn used light as one of the central elements shaping the experience of the space, and about what Kristine calls the difference between designing for comfort and designing for health. We spoke about light, darkness, community, and why, according to Tom, we have spent decades forcing the human body to fit the house, rather than the other way around.

You can listen to the full sixth episode of the second season of the Talks 21 podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or here on my website.

Takeaways from This Episode

• Kristine argues that many homes today are built primarily around construction standards rather than human needs. The gap between how we build and how our bodies experience spaces is something she believes we are only beginning to understand.

• Satchin's research points to darkness as something we've quietly lost from modern life. Without sufficient darkness at night, artificial light can interfere with the biological systems that regulate sleep and stress.

• Tom ran an experiment in a Baltimore classroom. His team changed only the wall patterns, based on research into how the visual system responds to natural structures. Students' stress went down, and test scores went up.

• Community may be one of the most overlooked aspects of architecture, according to Kristine. Buildings that stack people on floors may make it harder to create the everyday social connections many people need.

• Comfort and health are not always the same goal. According to Kristine, architecture has spent decades chasing the first at the cost of the second.

• Satchin notes that we spend 87–95% of our time indoors. This is why he sees the home not simply as a container, but as an environment that influences human physiology and development from the earliest stages of life.

• More than half of the people in urban areas will soon live without access to a ground floor, according to Satchin. That's part of why he points to solutions like vertical gardens, a way to keep nature within reach.

• Humans have adapted to their environments for thousands of generations. Only relatively recently have we started designing indoor spaces with a deeper understanding of how they influence our biology and wellbeing. Satchin uses this perspective to show how much architecture and neuroscience can still discover together.

https://youtu.be/5ReaDTJvrYQ

Light as Medicine, Darkness as a Forgotten Luxury

Satchin Panda has spent his career studying circadian rhythms, the internal biological clocks that influence when we sleep, eat, and feel alert. One of his core findings is simple to state but easy to overlook: we spend 87 to 95% of our time inside buildings. For a child, that number is even higher in the early years. According to Satchin, this makes the home less of a shelter and more of a system that shapes brain development and physiology from birth onward.

Light is central to that system. Satchin's lab helped advance our understanding of how light-sensitive proteins in the retina send signals to brain regions involved in sleep, mood, and even migraine pain. Daylight, at the right time and intensity, can lift our mood. But artificial light exposure at night can, according to Satchin, interfere with the hormonal systems that regulate sleep and stress.

Darkness, he points out, is something modern life has gradually reduced. Homes rarely go fully dark anymore. Screens, streetlights, and always-on devices keep a low level of light present around the clock. It's the exact habit Darin Olien described when we talked about the comforts that quietly work against us. There, though, we looked at what a screen does to our attention, not to our hormones.

What about the spaces we live in? Do our homes allow us to experience true darkness at night? And does that really make a meaningful difference? Satchin has an answer for that too. In our conversation, he described a psychiatric hospital and a cardiac unit in Prague that both decided to sync their indoor lighting with the outside day-night cycle for patients who otherwise rarely see daylight. What that ultimately changed for both the patients and the doctors treating them, you can hear in episode 6.

Can Nature-Inspired Design Influence the Brain?

I've always found something remarkable in the way nature creates order without simply repeating itself. A leaf, a coastline, a cloud, they all echo the same pattern at different scales. Kristine described this to me as self-similar variation, the reason nature can layer countless patterns on top of each other and still feel calm rather than chaotic. Try that with wallpaper in your own home, and it usually just looks like a mess.

Tom Albright, a neuroscientist who has spent decades studying the visual system, took that same idea into a real classroom. His team redesigned a public school classroom in Baltimore (US) without changing the furniture, the layout, or the size. The only change was the pattern on the walls, inspired by research into how cells in the visual system respond to natural structures. A second classroom remained unchanged for comparison. In the redesigned room, test scores went up. Stress, measured by heart rate variability, decreased.

But Tom also raised a deeper question. Does biophilic design still work once we know it isn't real? He shared a moment in a hotel where a wall of light initially appeared to him like sunlight coming through a window, until he noticed the bulb behind it, and the beauty of it disappeared instantly. Kristine saw it differently. In her view, the experience had been real up until that point, and nothing about discovering the trick erased what he'd already felt. I found myself closer to Tom's perspective here. I don't want to be fooled, even pleasantly. I'd rather know the reality of a space than enjoy a beautiful illusion inside it.

Can Architecture Help Us Rebuild Connection? 

Children are naturally curious about the world around them, and the place that curiosity is built for is nature, not four walls and a predictable floor plan. Kristine Mun believes some buildings can come closer to that same sense of discovery. A flat floor is easy and comfortable to walk on, but tilt it even slightly, she said, and the body starts moving differently through the space, more curious, less settled. Even the building where we recorded this conversation, the Salk Institute, was designed with a similar idea in mind by the architect Louis Kahn.

Kristine also pointed to what she sees as one of the most overlooked challenges of modern architecture: the loss of community. High-rise buildings can bring hundreds of people into floors connected by elevators, with no real point where neighbours meet. Children used to run outside because there were other children in the street to run to, and a whole neighbourhood would know where they were. Now, according to Kristine, we're more protective, more tied to our devices, and increasingly living through a loneliness that has little to do with how many people actually surround us.

She believes this is something architecture needs to start designing for directly. Not just light, or comfort, or how a room looks, but whether a building actually brings people together or quietly keeps them apart. A hallway that forces neighbours to pass each other. A courtyard built for more than walking through. It's something I explored from a different angle in an earlier episode of Talks 21 with Eva Le Peutrec, Marco Maio, and Karel Smejkal, where we looked at what makes an entire city a place people actually want to live in.

Listen to Episode 6 of Season 2 of Talks 21

Do you feel more creative in some spaces and more tired in others, without ever being able to say exactly why? Our conversation may offer some answers to that. Just as why Tom and Kristine ended up disagreeing about whether AI can actually design better buildings, or whether it will simply repeat the same flawed assumptions at a larger scale.

You can listen to the full sixth episode of the second season of the Talks 21 podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or here on my website.

If you'd like to explore the work of my guests, visit:

Kristine Mun, PhD, and Thomas Albright, PhD – both serve on the executive committee of the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture.

Satchin Panda, PhD – circadian rhythm expert, mycircadianclock.org.

Filmed in January 2026.