The Role of Memory in Shaping Our
Behavioural Responses to Environment
Our memories, both personal and evolutionary, significantly influence how we respond to our built environment. Childhood memories shape our early perceptions and behaviours, while evolutionary memories, like the "savannah hypothesis," suggest that we are instinctively drawn to environments similar to the African plains where humanity originated. These innate preferences for certain natural landscapes impact our behaviour and emotional responses in modern spaces, guiding our sense of comfort and well-being.
Our memories play a very big part in our hard wired response to our built environment. These memories can be divided in two parts.
Our Childhood memories.
These are a bit more obvious. It’s in our first homes that we form routines of thinking and form our first memories, good and bad. As Gaston Bachelard the French philosopher and poet so elegantly put it "we are the diagram of the functions of inhabiting that particular house…" And in that respect we all have some differences.
Our evolutionary memories
These are a bit more surprising perhaps. Here it gets really very interesting. It seems we have some faint echoes and primal connection with the environment that shaped our species. There is something called the “savannah hypotheses” and this suggests that we have an innate preference for the kinds of visual settings around the nature of the Savanah plains of East Africa, the place that we originate from as a species and left 70 000 years ago.
That somehow this origin has genetically programmed us to favour the visuals that we feel increased our likelihood of survival and thus we are drawn to its typical wide open plains with trees that appear in scattered clumps with wide low canopies and wide trunks, much like the Acacia trees found commonly in Africa. This has been the findings of several controlled laboratory studies across all cultures with participants who live in many different types of environments from the Nigerian rain forest to the Australian desert.
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