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Does your office layout seriously mess with your stress levels? Do you have all your best ideas staring out of a window? Have you ever got lost in a building or city where every corridor or street is featureless and bereft of landmarks? Is it really possible that for some newborns, the room in which they spend their earliest days could affect them for life?

Yes to all of those, says John Zeisel. He鈥檚 one of a handful of people looking at how our physical environment affects our brains. Their theory is that many places cause stress just by their design, and that we can improve our quality of life by building in ways that reflect the way our brains work.

Zeisel has designed care homes for people suffering from Alzheimer鈥檚 and, at the other extreme of life, hospital rooms for premature babies. Now, Zeisel tells Michael Bond, he is turning his attention to the needs of office workers and schoolchildren

How do you use design to minimise the distress suffered by people with Alzheimer鈥檚?

We use the concept of natural mapping to substitute for the cognitive mapping abilities that the person no longer has. We build a surrounding that contains its own mapping devices.

If you live in a complex environment, to feel comfortable you need to be able to remember what鈥檚 around the corner and which way to go. If you can鈥檛 remember that, and there鈥檚 nothing to indicate where you are, you feel lost and stressed. Most care homes have hallways that all look the same. This is very distressing for people with Alzheimer鈥檚.

How do you overcome this?

We do two things. One is to ensure that all hallways and pathways have a destination visible from wherever you are in them, so you look down the hallway and see a fireplace or a kitchen or something that the person will associate with safety. The second is to have plenty of familiar landmarks along the pathways, such as photographs chosen by the patients, so when they鈥檙e walking along they know where they are because they can see things that give them a sense of place. They can see where they鈥檙e going, instead of wandering aimlessly. This kind of thing has a profound effect on a person鈥檚 mood and level of anxiety.

How important is our sense of place to how we make sense of the world?

If somebody has amnesia, and cannot remember certain things, they say: 鈥淚 don鈥檛 know who I am.鈥� To remember something, you need to know where it happened as well as when it happened. Place is essential to memory: without a memory of place, people lose their sense of self. At around 10 months old, children start to be aware of where they are, whether it鈥檚 their mother鈥檚 breast or their crib or their home, so when they go into an unfamiliar place they become unhappy. This process seems to be hard-wired. Knowing where you are seems to have evolved to be essential to our development and survival.

Is that like the hard-wired cognitive maps that migratory birds and some animals appear to have?

Not as such, but what we do know is that our brains are hard-wired to make maps of our environments so that they remain familiar. London cabbies, for example, when they learn the city鈥檚 streets, are learning the links between places. We know where we are and how to get somewhere by creating relationships between meaningful places. My work is all about taking advantage of this kind of knowledge of how the brain develops a sense of place and self, how it builds cognitive maps, and so on, so we can nurture it with the right environment to provide the developmental support we need. For example, we鈥檙e using functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate where in the brain our sense of place resides. If you understand what is going on in the brain, you can build an environment that supports rather than cuts across it. My research on wards for premature babies is a classic example of that.

What do premature babies need in terms of design? You鈥檇 think warmth and oxygen would be enough鈥�

Like people with Alzheimer鈥檚, premature babies are extremely vulnerable. While a fetus grows, the brain鈥檚 auditory and visual pathways 鈥� in that order 鈥� and the sense organs develop before the fetus is exposed to external stimuli. During the last few months, a fetus starts sensing noise and vibration. The retina and visual cortex are still developing in anticipation of the visual stimuli to come.

If babies are born prematurely, the development of their auditory and visual pathways is disrupted by exposure to artificial lights, noisy equipment, the voices of doctors, and so on. This creates permanent damage, which means they cannot discriminate between frequencies and tones as well as other babies. They can develop speech difficulties, and they never become good musicians. Being exposed to overly bright lights too early means that the eye grows too quickly, often resulting in myopia. The idea is to design places that act as a good substitute for the womb.

Are there changes we can make to everyday spaces?

This is what we鈥檙e looking at now, and we have a lot of hypotheses, rather than findings. I鈥檓 in the middle of a study of the impact of the physical environment on the brains of office workers. We鈥檙e looking at how it affects stress, attention and mood, and then at how those affect productivity and health. Your environment can cause you stress in many ways, such as not being able to see out of a window and so being unaware of how the day is passing, or if you鈥檙e not surrounded by the people you need to talk to most. We鈥檙e developing portable, non-invasive brain imaging tools to help us see what鈥檚 going on in the brains of office workers.

We鈥檙e also looking at whether there is some way we can use the well-known fact that people often solve problems most creatively when they go off and think about something else. Having places in the office where you don鈥檛 have to focus on your work is one way to encourage this. We also plan to test whether you can better focus children鈥檚 attention in the classroom with flexible lighting that can be used to illuminate the teacher or objects.

What about outdoor spaces?

The same kind of thing applies. For example, to design a public space that is as stress-free as possible, you need to think about having long vistas and few hidden areas, which worry people at night. You would try to design the space so that you could see other landmarks from it, so people get a sense of where they are. With housing estates, you need to design private areas that people feel they own and feel safe in. In planning cities, you鈥檇 have lots of place names and signposting to make it easier for them to make a cognitive map of where they live.