Environmental Neuroscience

Simone Kühn, PhD, is the Director of the Center for Environmental Neuroscience at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin and Professor of Neural Plasticity in Psychiatric Disease at the University Clinic Hamburg-Eppendorf in Germany. Her primary research focuses on how the human brain is shaped by the physical environment in healthy individuals and in psychiatric patients. Moreover, she has studied brain plasticity in response to lifestyle factors and habits with various brain imaging methods. She studied psychology at Columbia University in New York and Potsdam University, and received her doctorate in psychology from University of Leipzig. As she worked at University of Gent in Belgium, Charité University Medicine in Berlin and at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London.

Part I: Theoretical Background.- The fundamentals of environmental neuroscience.- The Rise and Future of Environmental Neuroscience in Environmental Psychology.- Part II: The adaptation pathway (Environment-to-brain): How the environment impacts humans.- Interplay between the physical environment and the human brain - Insights from MRI research.- Human Brain and Behavior in Geospatial Context: Why and How.- Advancing the Neural Exposome.- Part III: The mitigation pathway (Brain-to-environment): How humans act on the environment.- Leveraging the social neuroscience of prosocial behavior to advance our understanding of pro-environmental behavior.- Neuroscientific approaches to understand barriers and promotors of pro-environmental behaviour.- Part IV: Neuroscience of the built environment/architecture.- Aesthetics of Architecture: Emerging Insights from the Brain.- The built environment and the brain: Emerging methods to investigate the impact of viewing architectural design.- Application of biometrics in architectural and environmental design.- The Potential of Biophilic Design and Nature to Improve Health, Creativity, and Wellbeing.- Part V: Focus on special populations.- Environmental exposures and child neurodevelopment.- Neighbourhood urban environments and cognitive health in ageing populations.- The City & the Psych - A chronology.- Environmental Neurorehabilitation: Harnessing the power of the environment in rehabilitation following neurological conditions.- Experiential Equity: Reconstructing Cities Through Intersecting Theories.- Part VI: Specific methodological approaches.- Extended Reality in Environmental Neuroscience Research.- Neuroscience and Geographic Information Systems to investigate the impact of global warming on mood disorders and brain plasticity in urban areas.- In the right place at the right time: Leveraging geographic ecological momentary assessment to analyse contexts and health.- Mapping the human brain with computational anatomy.- EEG for the study of environmental neuroscience.- Part VII: Sociological, historical and equity perspective.- What's wrong with environmental neuroscience? - Sociological and historical perspectives.