Neuroaesthics: Can Beauty improve performance?

🌳 Can a Beautiful Environment Make You Better at Your Job?

No one posts a holiday pic in an ugly setting. As we enjoy the northern hemisphere summer, many of us will choose holiday destinations of great beauty, often close to nature. Beaches, mountains, trees, and countryside all populate our feeds at the moment.

This got me thinking about neuroaesthetics. What is the impact of the beauty of our environment on our brains? Does being surrounded by beauty improve how we feel and perform? Research increasingly suggests that it does. One particularly striking study showed how violence and recidivism was dramatically reduced in thoughtfully-designed prisons.

I am not comparing our homes or workplaces to prisons, but it is worth asking why we seek out beautiful places when we travel if they did not do us tangible good. And why we do not bring more of that into our daily lives. I am not suggesting we all move to a beach in Portugal with our laptops, but what could be the effect on our performance if we made small improvements to our surroundings? A declutter here, a picture on the wall there. We are all biophiles by nature, with an innate drive to be near greenery and natural beauty. If that is true, could landscaping a balcony or adding a single pot plant have a measurable impact on how we work?

It is widely accepted that music affects the brain. Whether or not you believe that certain frequencies have healing properties, it would be hard to find someone who has never had shivers from a piece of moving music. That dopamine hit is a clear sign of the power of our soundscape. The same goes for scent, the sense most linked to memory. Could our visual landscape be just as influential?

Have you noticed the effect your environment has on your wellbeing and performance? How about for your team? How much could you gain from making your surroundings more beautiful, even in small ways?