It’s been a week since my last post. In that time, Meredith and I presented the Krasnow Construction Blog to the Neuroarchitecture Workshop in Woods Hole, and…I spent two days at the Mason President’s Council/ Board of Visitors annual planning conference retreat in Airlie Virginia.
First with regards to the Neuroarchitecture Workshop. While I wasn’t able to stay for the entire conference, the trans-disciplinary exchanges between neuroscientists interested in way-finding (hippocampus) and architects was incredible. One of your colleagues who was participating suggested it was perhaps the begining of a new field: applied neuroscience. In any case, the science was excellent and the views of Buzzards Bay were to match.
The Planning Conference was equally enjoyable. In the evolution that I have witnessed over the years attending this meeting, it is no longer a question of whether we want to be a great research university (with strength emphasized in the biosciences) but how fast we can get there. We discussed an initiative for a level of investments in research that was frankly breathtaking.
What a great place to work!
Jim
Discoverers and Discoveries 
Hear, hear! Applied neuroscience! One of the things that we struggle with at these workshops is how to test the proposed hypotheses about the brain’s relationship to the environment. While some spatial issues are unique to human experience, many are not. There exists a large body of knowledge dealing with how organisms perceive and move through space. If architects tap into this knowledge as a starting point, I believe the field can come up with more informed designs. Thanks to the representatives from Krasnow who participated in the workshop, and to all Krasnow residents for giving us the raw data and issues from which we can begin to raise neuro-architecture questions.
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