Reorientation depends greatly on the perceived geometric information, which constantly changes during navigation in urban environments. Environmental novelty, as a driver of exploratory behavior, is likely to engender this spatial Aha! moment. The paper investigates the contribution of two qualitatively different types of novelty, corresponding to distinct visuospatial cues: (a) situations that cause surprise e.g. a sudden change in spaciousness; versus (b) situations that engender mystery e.g. a change in the complexity of visuospatial information and the promise of gaining new information. Visibility graph analysis is used to quantify and examine these hypotheses in relation to participants' exploratory behavior and brain dynamics (EEG) during virtual navigation. The findings suggest that reorientation is a spatial boundary effect, associated primarily with a change in visuospatial complexity.

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Rhythms exist both in the body-brain and the built environment. Becoming attuned to the rhythms of the environment, such as repetitive columns, can greatly affect perception. Here, we explore how the built environment affects human cognition and behavior through the concept of natural attunement, often resulting from the coordination of a person's sensory and motor systems with the rhythmic elements of the environment. The article argues that the built environment should not be reduced to mere states, representations, and single variables but instead should be considered as a bundle of highly related continuous signals with which we can resonate. Resonance and entrainment are dynamic processes observed when a driven oscillatory system (e.g., the brain) oscillating at specific (intrinsic) frequencies is influenced by the dynamics of the driving system (e.g., an external signal). This paves the way for visual rhythmic stimulations of the environment to couple with and affect the brain and body through neural entrainment, cross-frequency coupling, and phase resetting. We discuss how environmental elements in actual architectural settings can affect neural dynamics, cognitive processes, and behavior in people. The article argues that the concept of rhythm is crucial in understanding the brain-body-environment relationships, and the inclusion of the built environment in ecologically valid experimentation is a necessary next step to understanding the brain in real-world settings.

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