Architecture can give you a headache. That sentence probably doesn't sound surprising for anyone who has dealt with the stress of practicing or studying architecture but, increasingly, psychologists are beginning to understand that you don't need to work on architectural designs for buildings to cause you pain. In an interesting article published by The Conversation, Arnold J Wilkins, a Professor of Psychology at the University of Essex, discusses how discomfort, headaches, and even migraines can be caused or exacerbated by simply looking at certain visual stimuli—with the straight lines and repetitive patterns of urban environments singled out as the main culprit.
As Wilkins explains, our brains have evolved to process images of the natural world. His article describes a number of ways to measure how hard the brain works to process visual information, from modeling a simple neural system on a computer to measuring the oxygen usage of people's brains when they are looking at images. In both cases, the evidence suggests that the brain works harder to process images of buildings than it does to process natural scenes. In some cases, this extra workload can cause physical discomfort, pain, and even migraines.
But what is it about urban environments that causes this extra workload? Wilkins' research suggests that the answer can be found in a mathematical tool known as Fourier Analysis. Fourier's work is arguably most well-known in the context of modern communications: the "ones and zeros" of digital transmissions are actually composed of a superposition of smooth analog sine waves, a technique that has its origins in Fourier's work in the early 19th century.
