I recently read Your Brain on Art by Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross, an evidence-based yet gorgeously written book about how art transforms our brains and bodies.
There’s a section in the book that explores a 2019 design project in which the Google Hardware Design Group partnered with a small team of architects and furniture designers. Their goal: to demonstrate the ways that color, material, shape, and sound affect us in ways we don’t consciously recognize.
The result was A Space for Being, an “immersive installation that illustrated our bodies’ responses to different sensory environments.”
Basically, the team designed three rooms, each with unique characteristics incorporating design elements from furniture and artwork to color, texture, lighting, and even sounds and aromas.
Each guest in the exhibit was given a wristband that monitored their heart rate, respiration, and temperature as they walked through the three rooms and explored their unique designs.
At the end, each guest got a readout of their vital signs in each of the three rooms, showing which of the rooms made them — at least on a biological level — the most at-ease.
The results were conclusive, even obvious: our physical environment does have a clear, measurable impact on our baseline processes. No big surprises there.
But the exhibit also led to a much more fascinating discovery, one that we can all benefit from — whether or not we care about sofa fabrics or wallpaper color.
One of the visitors at the exhibit was a design journalist named Rab.
Rab found herself mesmerized by the first and third rooms, with their elegant, sophisticated aesthetics, while the vibrant and somewhat chaotic middle room left her unhappy, eager to move on.
At the end of the exhibit, she expected her biofeedback to match her conscious feelings.
What she found was the opposite.
In fact, the middle room was the place where her biological processes showed she was most at ease. Her heart rate slowed, her breathing relaxed, her temperature cooled. Every biological marker was sending the strongest possible signal that she was comfortable and safe, while consciously she strongly preferred the other two rooms.
This happened again and again, with visitors incorrectly guessing which of the rooms would cause the most significant calming effect on their bodies.
What was happening?
As far as Rab was concerned, she shared that she was a mixed-race woman born and raised in Latin America. She had grown up with an awareness of “invisible lines that keep darker-skinned individuals from shopping, lounging, eating, or just being in certain beautifully designed spaces.”
All her life, she had been sent the subconscious message that she didn’t belong in elegant, sophisticated rooms, to the point that her body had internalized that belief. That’s why the first and third rooms didn’t positively impact her vitals. Her body was on alert.
Okay, so how come she consciously enjoyed those rooms in conflict with her body’s signals?
Remember, Rab was a design journalist. She’d spent years studying and working in the world of sophisticated design, and as such she had learned to consciously overcome the internalized marginalization of her background.
The way she puts it, in Your Brain on Art:
“While I could lie to myself about my own sense of belonging, the data didn’t.”
So, what does this tell us?
Sure, it’s a somewhat discouraging commentary on the way that racism and marginalization sticks with us, deep in our bones, even after years and no matter what we may do or achieve.
But I think there’s something else to learn here, something more hopeful.
Rab genuinely enjoyed the “sophisticated” rooms on a conscious level, even if her primal signals told her not to.
Is that because she “earned” the right to belong in those rooms through her study and professional achievements?
Hell no.
She always belonged in those rooms.
All her education and experience did was convince her she belonged.
Our bodies are stubborn things. They’ve spent millions of years evolving to do exactly what they do, and they do it pretty well. Unfortunately, that can make them a bit rigid in adapting to the modern world.
Take anxiety, for example. Psychologists use the common example of the stick and the snake.
For our cave-dwelling ancestors, assuming that every long, skinny thing you saw on the ground was a snake would keep you alive long enough for you to pass on your genes — even if it was almost always just a stick lying there.
The easygoing, optimistic cave people who assumed every snake was a stick? Well, their genes aren’t around anymore.
You can see how, from evolution’s very single-minded perspective (have babies before you die), anxious tendencies are incredibly rewarding — even if they make us miserable.
But!
We’re not cave-dwellers.
The three-room experiment, and the experiences of people like Rab, show us one powerful truth:
Most of life is convincing ourselves we belong.
Rab’s experience in A Space for Being represents a personal triumph. She convinced her conscious, human mind that she had a right to occupy any space — despite what her primal “lizard brain” had internalized about race and exclusion.
What rooms do you belong in?
What spaces do you have a right to occupy, but haven’t convinced yourself of yet?
How would your life change if you felt entitled to occupy those spaces, to be and act and speak in them?
In another excellent book, The Real Work, Adam Gopnik beautifully and efficiently sums up the general ideology behind cognitive behavioral therapy:
We defeat our fears and phobias not by outwitting them alone but also by out-dumbing them, not by outthinking them but by overwhelming them with so much repeated mindless incident that our amygdala just turns off and surrenders, out-numbered.
So, how do we overcome the feeling we don’t belong in certain spaces?
We get in those spaces, dammit. We take up those spaces again and again until we’ve showed ourself that we’re safe there, that we belong.
So don’t wait until you’re not afraid to open doors.
Open doors until you’re not afraid.
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