Architects have long had the feeling that the places we live in can affect our thoughts, feelings and behaviors. But now scientists are giving this feeling an empirical(实证的) basis. They are discovering how to design spaces that promote creativity, keep people focused and lead to relaxation.
Researches show that aspects of the physical environment can influence creativity.In2007, Joan Meyers-Levy at the University of Minnesota, reported that the height of a room's ceiling affects how people think. Her research indicates that higher ceilings encourage people to think more freely, which may lead them to make more abstract connections. Low ceilings, on the other hand, may inspire a more detailed outlook.
In addition to ceiling height, the view afforded by a building may influence a person's ability to concentrate. Nancy Wells and her colleagues at Cornell University found in their study that kids who experienced the greatest increase in greenness as a result of a family move made the most gains on a standard test of attention. According to another study at the University of Georgia, using nature to improve focus of attention seems to pay off academically. It found that students in classrooms with unblocked views of at least 50 feet outside the window had higher scores on tests of vocabulary, language arts and maths than did students whose classrooms primarily overlooked roads and parking lots.
Recent study on room lighting design suggests that dim(暗淡的) light helps people to loosen up. If that is true, generally keeping the light low during dinner or at parties could increase relaxation. Researchers of Harvard Medical School also discovered that furniture with rounded edges could help visitors relax.
So far scientists have focused mainly on public buildings." We have a very limited. number of studies, so we're almost looking at the problem through a straw," architect David Allison says. "How do you take answers to very specific questions and make broad, generalized use of them? That's what we're all struggling with."
阅读下面短文，根据其内容写一篇60词左右的内容概要。
In 2002, an Australian man went to his friend's 21st birthday party. He got drunk, fell off some steps and cut his lip. He took a picture of his injuries and shared it with his friends online. "And sorry about the focus," he wrote. "It was a selfie(自拍). "That was the first recorded use of the word "selfie", according to some experts at Oxford Dictionaries.
Oxford Dictionaries declared "selfie". In recent years, the act of taking a picture of oneself with a mobile phone, placing the subject center-stage, has won great popularity with everyone from Britain's Queen Elizabeth Ⅱ to U. S. President Barack Obama joining in.
But the rise of selfie photography in some of the world's most beautiful, and dangerous places has also inspired a lot of risk-taking behavior, such as hanging from a tall building, standing in front of a rushing train and crossing a busy street. People who get addicted will never stop taking selfies, completely ignoring where they are. In fact, there have been several reports about people losing their lives while taking selfies. Several governments have now begun treating the selfie as a serious threat to safety, warning visitors to pay attention to the dangers when taking selfies.
"Walt Disney World is also banning selfie-sticks in its theme parks because selfie-sticks have become a growing safety concern for our guests, " Disney World spokeswoman Kim Prunty said under the new policy, and guests will be checked for the equipment during the routine bag check that happens near the parks' entrances.
Chimps will cooperate in certain ways, like gathering in war parties to protect their territory. But beyond the minimum requirements as social beings, they have little instinct to help one another. Chimps in the wild seek food for themselves. Even chimp mothers regularly decline to share food with their children. Who are able from a young age to gather their own food.
In the laboratory, chimps don't naturally share food either. If a chimp is put in a cage where he can pull in one plate of food for himself or, with no great effort, a plate that also provides food for a neighbor to the next cage, he will pull at random — he just doesn't care whether his neighbor gets fed or not. Chimps are truly selfish.
Human children, on the other hand are extremely cooperative. From the earliest ages, they decide to help others, to share information and to participate a achieving common goals. The psychologist Michael Tomasello has studied this cooperativeness in a series of expensive with very young children. He finds that if babies aged 18 months see an worried adult with hands full trying to open a door, almost all will immediately try to help.
There are several reasons to believe that the urges to help, inform and share are not taught but naturally possessed in young children. One is that these instincts appear at a very young age before most parents have started to train children to behave socially. Another is that the helping behaviors are not improved if the children are rewarded. A third reason is that social intelligence develops in children before their general cognitive skills, at least when compared with chimps. In tests conducted by Tomtasell, the children did no better than the chimps on the physical world tests, but were considerably better at understanding the social world.
The cure of what children's minds have and chimps' don't in what Tomasello calls what. Part of this ability is that they can infer what others know or are thinking. But that, even very young children want to be part of a shared purpose. They actively seek to be part of a "we", a group that intends to work toward a shared goal.
