The Quest to Measure the Brain's Response to Urban Design

So there I was, walking down familiar cobbled streets in Brooklyn’s Dumbo neighborhood, trying not to feel self-conscious even though I resembled a character in a 1990s sci-fi rendering of The Future. Not only was I wearing an EEG device that looked like a bulky phone headset, with a sensor positioned squarely in the middle of my forehead. I was also dutifully walking, as instructed, at a “museum pace,” and maintaining what we had been told to think of as “robot torso.” That meant that when I saw something that interested me – a display in a shop window, a piece of graffiti, a wan and shivering model being photographed in the middle of the street – I was supposed to turn my whole body to look at it C-3PO–style, pointing the iPod Touch in my hand in the direction of my gaze.

I felt a little ridiculous. But people in a trendy New York neighborhood like Dumbo are careful not to act surprised at anything weird-looking. That would be uncool. So no one paid much attention to me or to the dozens of other headset-wearing people wandering slowly and robotically around the neighborhood that same chilly afternoon.