A A growing body of research in cognitive science illuminates the physical and mental toll bland cityscapes take on residents. Generally, these researchers argue that humans are healthier when they live surrounded by variety or work in well-designed, unique spaces, rather than unattractive, generic ones. Urban policy professor Justin Hollander and architect Ann Sussman review scientific data to help architects and urban planners understand how, exactly, people respond to their built surroundings, particularly at work. People, they argue, function best in intricate settings, not ‘big, blank, boxy offices’.

B Indeed, that’s what Colin Ellard, a neuroscientist at the University of Waterloo in Canada, has found in his work. Five years ago, Ellard became interested in a certain building – the gigantic Whole Foods Market ‘plopped into’ a notoriously textured part of lower Manhattan in New York. Ellard partnered with the Guggenheim Museum to analyze what happens when someone walks out of a tiny neighborhood restaurant and encounters a full city block with nothing but ‘the long, blank facade of the Whole Foods Market’ building.

In 2011, Ellard led small groups on Lower East Side walks to measure the effect of the urban environment on them. Participants recorded their response to questions at each stopping point and wore sensors that measured skin conductance as a response to emotional excitement. Passing the monolithic Whole Foods Market, people’s state of arousal plummeted. Physiologically, Ellard explained, they were bored. To describe this place, they used words like ‘bland’ and ‘passionless’. In contrast, one block east at the other test site – a ‘lively sea of restaurants with lots of open doors and windows’ – people measured high levels of excitement, and they listed words like ‘lively’ and ‘socialising’. Ellard explains that the main objective of urban design should be to produce some kind of novelty or change every few seconds; otherwise, we become cognitively disengaged.

C The trick, it seems, is to design a world that excites but doesn’t overload our faculties with a constant barrage of information. ‘We are, as animals, programmed to respond to thrill,’ said professor Brendan Walker. In Walker’s ‘thrill laboratory’ at the University of Nottingham in the UK, devices measure heart rate and skin conductance to see how people respond to adrenaline-producing experiences such as a roller-coaster ride. A thrilling encounter moves us quickly from a state of equilibrium to a desirable ‘disorientation’. ‘Humans want a certain element of turmoil or confusion,’ he said. ‘Complexity is thrilling whether in an amusement park or architecture.’

D Psychologists have found that awe-inspiring moments can potentially improve our well-being. One study conducted by Melanie Rudd, Kathleen Vohs and Jennifer Aaker of Stanford University in the US showed that the feeling of ‘awe’ can make people more patient and less materialistic. In an experiment, the researchers showed students 60-second clips of waterfalls, whales, or astronauts in space. After only a minute of virtual images, those who said they were awed also felt less pressed for time. And in another variation, people made hypothetical choices between physical and experiential goods of equal monetary value. Those who had just ‘felt awe’ were more likely to choose an experience over a possession, a choice that is linked with greater satisfaction in the long run. In other words, a visual buzz – whether architectural or natural – might have the ability to change our frame of mind, making modern-day life more satisfying and interactive.

E It’s important to note, however, that architectural boredom isn’t about how pristine a street is. People often confuse successful architecture with whether an area looks pleasant. On the contrary, when it comes to city buildings, people often focus too narrowly on aesthetics, said Charles Montgomery, author of Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design. Some of the happiest blocks in New York City, he argues, are ‘kind of ugly and messy’.

In 2014, Montgomery’s Happy City lab conducted an experiment in which he found a strong correlation between messier blocks and pro-social behavior. Montgomery sent researchers, posing as lost tourists, to places he coded as either ‘active’ or ‘inactive’ facades. He concluded that the former had a high level of interest, that is they were messy, while the latter had no special features such as long warehouse blocks. Pedestrians at active sites were nearly five times more likely to offer assistance than at inactive ones. Of those who assisted, seven times as many at the active site offered use of their phone.

F Fortunately, it’s not necessarily a dichotomy – new architecture can achieve the optimal level of capophony and beauty. Take the 2006 Hearst Tower in midtown Manhattan. Designed by architect Norman Foster, Hearst Tower is a glass-and-steel skyscraper, 40 stories of which are designed in a triangular pattern, differing in style from the 1920s Art Deco base. From the outside, the facade jolts city dwellers from their daily commutes, while energising employees who enter it each morning. For many who walk by, Hearst Tower’s design may not be the easiest to understand; it’s both sleek and old. The top looks like it traveled from the future. Inside, workers travel upon diagonal escalators, up a three-story water sculpture, through the tower’s historic atrium, flooded with light. Few New Yorkers who pass by would find this building boring. And they’re likely to be happier – maybe even nicer to each other – because of it.

In 1977 Irene Pepperberg brought Alex, a one-year-old African gray parrot, into her lab at Harvard University to teach him to reproduce the sounds of English. At that time most scientists considered animals mere machines, lacking the ability to think in a rational way or feel emotions as humans do. ‘I wasn’t trying to see if Alex could learn a human language,’ said Pepperberg. ‘My plan always was to use his imitative skills to get a better understanding of avian cognition.’ Given that Alex’s brain was the size of a walnut, most researchers thought Pepperberg’s study would be futile. But by the time Alex died in 2007, he knew 150 words, could count, do simple arithmetic, and distinguish between objects according to shape, color, and material. Many of Alex’s skills, such as his ability to understand the concepts of ‘same’ and ‘different’, are generally ascribed only to higher mammals. But parrots, like higher apes (and humans), live in complex societies, and need to monitor changing relationships and environments.

‘They need to distinguish colors to know when a fruit is ripe or unripe,’ Pepperberg noted. They need to categorize things – what’s edible, what isn’t – and to know the shapes of predators. And it helps to have a concept of numbers if you need to keep track of your flock. For a long-lived bird, you can’t do all of this with instinct; cognition must be involved.’

Just how easily mental skills can be acquired is perhaps best illustrated by dogs. For abstract thinking, humans employ symbols, letting one thing stand for another. And Juliane Kaminski, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, believes that dogs can do this too. In 2008, Kaminski and her colleague Sebastian Tempelmann conducted an experiment with a border collie. The dog successfully selected and brought her owner toys which she had never seen before, prompted only by a picture of each toy.

Creativity is another skill which seems to have evolved in humans and animals alike. ‘People were initially surprised to discover that chimpanzees make tools,’ says behavioral ecologist Alex Kacelnik. ‘But then people thought, “Well, they share our ancestry – of course they’re smart.” Now we’re finding these kinds of exceptional behaviors in some species of birds.’ New Caledonian crows, for example, use their beaks and claws to fashion tools to poke out grubs from palm trees. ‘But the problem is we don’t have a recently shared ancestry with birds – our last common ancestor was a reptile living over 300 million years ago.’

Kacelnik and his researchers at Oxford University were particularly impressed with the ingenuity of one of the crows – Betty, a wild-caught female. In one experiment, Betty successfully selected a hook-shaped wire to get a piece of meat from a glass tube. Then, when another bird unexpectedly stole the hook, Betty took a straight piece of wire, shaped it into a hook, and retrieved the food. This was the first time Betty had seen a piece of wire like this, Kacelnik says, ‘is a major kind of cognitive sophistication.’

We are clearly not alone in our ability to invent or plan – or even to plot and lie. Studies show that western scrub jays can guess another bird’s intentions and act on that knowledge. A jay knows that if another jay watches it hide a nut, there’s a chance it will be stolen. So the first jay will return to move the nut when the other jay is gone. ‘It’s some of the best evidence so far of experience projection in another species,’ says Nicky Clayton of Cambridge University. What’s more, the jays seem to know how long ago they hid a particular kind of food, and they manage to retrieve it before it spoils.

Human cognitive psychologists call this ability ‘episodic memory’ and argue that it only exists in species that can mentally travel back in time. They believe that animals cannot distinguish among past, present, and future the way humans do. Such skepticism is a challenge for Clayton. ‘We have good evidence that jays remember specific hiding events, which is the original definition of episodic memory. But now the goalposts have moved. Whenever we find a mental skill in a species that is reminiscent of human ability, the human cognition scientists change the definition.

Cognitive psychologist Louis Herman has spent decades studying bottlenose dolphins. These intelligent mammals are highly interactive, social and cosmopolitan, living in subpolar to tropical environments worldwide. Among the many skills exhibited by Herman’s dolphins is the ability to imitate the motor behaviors of instructors. If a trainer bent backward and lifted a leg, the dolphin would turn on its back and lift its tail in the air. This requires the imitator to form a mental image of the other individual’s body, then adjust its own body accordingly – actions that imply an awareness of one’s self, an ability once seen as the sole preserve of humans.

What Herman finds fascinating is that these aquatic creatures diverged from primates millions of years ago. That kind of cognitive convergence suggests there must be some similar pressures selecting for intellect. We don’t share their biology or ecology, but do share the need to establish life-long bonds and alliances. This appears to be the likely common driving force.