Why are we hooked on Hypermobility, a damaging addiction of modern life? Let's look harder at our real human needs

OUR MODERN WORLD is just a couple of centuries old, the presence of mankind upon our planet around 300,000 years. So can it be entirely logical to just add response after response in transport interventions on top of where ‘modern man’ has ended up in just 200 years of technological trial and error (and all the problems that has brought), but ignore the basic character and needs of the people it is all supposedly for?

It is a rather simple story. Within that very recent past, as soon as human movement was liberated from dependency on the internal power source of an individual ( or their horse), and thus limited by a natural bodily energy capacity, we entered onto a slippery slope of unbridled mechanised transport activity with seriously bad implications for human life, and indeed its survival on the planet.

The key step was when we shifted from animal power to mechanical power less than two hundred years ago - in particular when we migrated from horse to steam locomotion in the mid nineteenth century, as an extension of the industrial revolution. At that time this seemed an attractive change. The high resource costs of the ingenious invention of steam power, hidden behind the rapidly rising price of grain and the enthusiasm for all things ‘steam’, especially the railways, meant that the habit of frequent travel was born. This was given a further major impulse when the motor vehicle was invented towards the end of the nineteenth century, and the switch made from solid to liquid carbon fuel. The mass manufacture of vehicles drove not only industrial processes, but also legislative change to feed our appetite for this amazing creation.

The Los Angeles Traffic Ordinance, which incidentally came into effect exactly one hundred years ago on 25 January 1925, placed vehicles above people for the first time in the hierarchy of priority in the public realm. In the UK, common law has maintained the legal status of the person over the vehicle in theory, but the practical reality is that the UK, like many other nations, has followed the American model, and the private vehicle has dominated the landscape of social evolution ever since. Recent activity over the implementation and then partial removal of active travel schemes in the UK has shown just how robust this one century old practical hierarchy now is. The tolerance of high levels of fatalities and serious injuries arising from road collisions (a person is killed in a road traffic collision somewhere on the planet every 26 seconds[1]) shows that Society is seemingly not too greatly concerned with this cause of loss of life.

The real issue here is not limited to the priority of vehicles over pedestrians however. What we really need to do is some basic thinking about the actual overall amount of movement we are doing, and why. Hypermobility (“too much mobility”) is the root problem. We have become used to the idea that we can move where we want, when we want, and how we want. And that the wealthiest few can do that the most – by land, air and sea. Those in lower socioeconomic groups are limited in this respect, because they are priced out of this hypermobility market, or people whose movement is restricted for other reasons, such as disability. So we have the situation where there is too much mobility in total, but that this excess is enjoyed by a “mobility elite” who can make all those choices, at the expense of a “mobility poor” who cannot.

This contrast in mobility in turn affects the equitable distribution of good quality life, whether that is made on the basis of wealth, disability, gender or some other discriminatory division. Why should one part of the population suffer the poor health imposed on it by the behaviour of others, who can themselves avoid or escape from the perils that they induce? At least the ‘progressive’ people, who favour achieving some form of equitable sustainable society with a good quality of life for all, must surely accept that there needs to be some cap – if not reduction - in this travel explosion?

Of course, an appropriate level of mobility plays a part in achieving a satisfying and sustainable quality of life. Our need for basic clean nutrition, water and air is unlikely to always be met exactly where we are, so we need to move either ourselves, or use transport modes to bring the two together. Bridging this gap is a biological requirement, and our bodies have suitably evolved to facilitate the movement we require to search for our survival needs. However, especially over the past 100 years, we have designed our world around the idea that such movement should not only be possible, but desirable, and eventually, unavoidable and so needs to be intrinsically catered for. The measured objective seems to be the quantum of “movement”, not the quality of life. So provision for movement has been prioritised, even where the quality of life suffers as a result.

To this way of thinking the railways, motorisation and then aviation were a godsend. We no longer had to bring the satisfaction of need so close to the people: people could travel to satisfy the need. “I like to travel” became “I want more travel” and has turned into “I need to travel”. A potentially vital or enjoyable occasional journey has turned into an insatiable personal addiction, and an enforced social and economic necessity to achieve the basic purposes of life.

Amongst other consequences, this prioritisation of movement which feeds our hypermobility has destabilised our physical and mental health. For example, the “enforced necessity” of travelling to a place of employment is not often a benign act. We can now readily deploy our skills in neuroscience, physiology, biochemistry, biology and psychology to measure the stress levels rising in passengers travelling in a crowded metro train. The increase in cognitive load needed to handle the stressful nature of being forced into what the brain perceives to be an unwelcome and threatening situation is truly shocking. The release of Cortisol, (the “stress hormone”) as a result means that travellers in crowded trains are subjected, not just to the uncomfortable situation of the commuter journey itself, but also to the ongoing high levels of glucose in the bloodstream until the Cortisol level dissipates. This takes several hours to do – just in time for the repeat dose in the journey home. The release of a stress hormone is the brain’s response to the presence of what it perceives as a threat to survival. This is how the brain ‘sees’ the journey on a crowded train. Some people might be able to cope OK with these mental and physiological effects, but many others may not.

It is not surprising that many people opt to avoid the crowded train by travelling in their own private space by motor vehicle. But this also induces stress, both in themselves and others who have to cope with the effects. Modal shift is an attempt to survive by avoiding such harm, not really about price or time, or even ‘saving the planet’. But only some people have access to the possibility of extracting themselves from these circumstances. The inequity of this unfair attack on human health is something that we should be seeking to address as a societal concern, and the transport community should be at the forefront of doing this. Instead, we seem to just always be trying to continually accommodate this hypermobility appetite.

So what should we do about this?

The first act should be to recognise that mobility is something quite distinct from movement. Homo sapiens is a social species, so social connectivity is crucial to our survival, indeed it is hard-wired into our brain[2] over those 300,000 years we have been around, and is the engine of advanced civilisation. Mobility enables social connectivity. The Sociality that results is what enables Society to function and our species to prosper. This Sociality fundamentally needs connectivity and interaction between people, not between communication devices. So in order to exercise it we need to be able to meet other people, which usually means some method of connection. So yes, we need a certain level of movement, but only to the extent that it serves the purpose of Sociality. Not enough mobility leads to isolation. And so, incidentally, will the arrival of a widespread deployment of AI to replace much of the sociality in human life.

The crowded metro train mentioned earlier is an example of hypermobility, where the amount of movement is excessive to the extent of inflicting stress on people, with the attendant risk to ongoing health. In such conditions the level of pleasurable interactions and sociality is minimal. The number of people we can manage to be social with at the same time is quite limited. The observed behaviour of people resisting entering a crowded space at density levels of around 2 people per square metre, which is hardly crowded, attests to this.

Such evidence suggests that instead of trying to increase capacity to cater for – and by doing so induce - more movement, the transport community should be working for a reduction in movement from present excessive levels in order to maintain people’s mental health. The welcome emphasis on walking as a transport mode in the last contribution to this Deep Thinking series is a crucial part of this.

This wider agenda is why I set up a laboratory (Person-Environment-Activity Research Laboratory, PEARL[3]) to enable us to look a bit more deeply inside our brains to understand how to make mobility genuinely work for people, sociality, and society.

How much more of our daily needs might be met without the need for motorised travel? There is a whole marketing industry based on converting the more happenstance concept of “liking” into the more commercially viable one of “wanting.” “Liking” leads to the reward of a dopamine rush. The marketing world then attempts to convince people that they could have even more of such feeling of satisfaction by repeating the dose. But this can all too easily end up in addiction. In the case of mobility, we have been convinced over the last hundred years or so that we “need” to travel, even that we need a car in order to do so. We have designed our cities, working practices, our laws, even the social culture in which we live, on the basis of having become addicted to motorised movement. Placing assumed “needs” in a better spatiotemporal and social context is therefore a vitally important first step in considering a better approach to mobility in the twenty first century.

Secondly, we need to change our way of thinking about cities. Suppose we were to start thinking about how to present most of our connectivity and mobility “likes” within a range at which it is easy to reach with our internal energy supply, and design a neighbourhood around these parameters.

Think of a city, not as a megalopolis of millions of people, matching an infinite number of origins and destinations, but as a number of neighbourhoods, each of which could have its own set of immediate proximate “likes”. The strategic picture overall would be to link these through an energy-conserving sociality-inducing public transport network that complements the basic non- motorised shape of human life.

In this view, the city is an organism, where each ‘cell’ is autonomous, purposeful, and connected to others so that the vitality of the overall organism is sustained. This connective system is there to enable cells to collaborate, cooperate and communicate with each other. It is a Mobility system. It is necessary for the structure of the city’s Mobility system to be in balance with the neighbourhood cells, just as the system of nerves and blood vessels needs to be in balance with the human body’s cells. In either a cell or a city, not enough mobility leads to cellular malfunction; but hypermobility leads to a cancer.

Maybe all this is a problem for those who work on the supply side of this industry. But in just producing more we are missing the human dimension of what we are doing it all for. Here’s a fact. The processing capacity of the human brain is a little more than 11 million bits/second. Of that, just 80 bits/second are aligned with conscious awareness[4]. The vast majority of our brain is occupied in predicting preconsciously the next few moments so that it can generate responses to keep us alive. It creates perceptions on which we act. Most of this happens long before we could be made consciously aware of the stimuli that are initiating those perceptions.

What I have been seeking to explore in this contribution is the way that the preconscious brain creates the perceptions to which people react. Working with/for the conscious mind is way too slow, late and narrowly focused to cover for the real responses to the human social and built environment that the evolved brain is making all the time.

Surely, in thinking about our transport future we need to dig more deeply into what is the essence of our lives and where mobility fits in that? That, at least, is what I am doing now in the PEARL laboratory.

More about PEARL

The Person-Environment-Activity Research Laboratory (PEARL) in East London offers an extensively customisable laboratory space, to engage and study the senses. Lighting, sound, smell and physical features can all be controlled to create unique, real-scale experiences, test environments and study the responses of the brain and senses.

PEARL is 40,000m3 of adaptable and customisable space in which we can create life-sized environments such as a high street, an urban park, a train station, a hospital ward, or a supermarket. In these we investigate with cameras, sensors and participant feedback, how people interact within that environment and how that interaction affects their physical and mental well-being, so we can learn to make environments better for society.

The holistic and integrative nature of PEARL

The simulation of physical elements engaging our senses helps us believe we are in a specific environment where we can experiment. The lighting can mimic any time of day, sounds can match reality or expectations, and smells can be introduced. We can collect data on, for example, people's movements, eye motion, heart rate, skin responses and brain activity as people carry out tasks and move around in the space. Using these data we can then feed this into research and models into new areas of urban design.

We collaborate with a broad range of stakeholders to maximise the impact of our work. We have worked with partners such as Guide Dogs, Transport for London, Goldsmiths, Contemporary Visual Arts Network, TG0, Ramboll and many more. These projects have had different user focuses including neurodivergent school children, specific road users, visually impaired pedestrians as well as the general public.

PEARL is a part of the UK's national research facility for infrastructure and cities, called the UK Collaboratorium for Research on Infrastructure and Cities (UKCRIC). PEARL is hosted by UCL as a transdisciplinary research facility of the Centre for Transport Studies, which is part of the Department of Civil, Environmental & Geomatic Engineering. The £50m capital funding for PEARL was provided by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS), through EPSRC, and UCL. UCL also covers the core operational costs.

“Isn’t PEARL just a fancy way of doing what we are doing already?” was a regular comment when we first opened.One of the things that has stood out to me during 2024 is that this question has been asked less often than in previous years. Most of those who have visited since we took over the building in 2021 have been shocked and amazed about what we can do in there. Not everyone has picked up the other part of that observation: “… and what could PEARL do for us?”

This is perhps not surprising given that PEARL is very different from other research facilities. Others might have large spaces, they might have a comprehensive lighting system, they might have smart sound and acoustics systems. One or two might have a smell system, and maybe someone else has a configurable floor. Others might have mobile brain scanners, person-tracking or an array of physiological and physical measurement systems. None has all of these at the same sort of scale as we have in PEARL. But our visitors can imagine using some at least of these to support them, so why have they not crossed the bridge into asking that unasked question?

The quick and superficial answer is that they have been astonished by the scale and breadth of what is on offer and are simply not used to thinking in detail at that scale. “Can you build a station?” Of course, but what do you want to do with it: what do you want to find out? “Can you prove our navigation algorithm?” Yes we can do that – but what do you want to find out? “Can you create a giant model of a brain?” Yes, but what do you want to represent in it? “Can you create a novel performance space?” Yes we can, but what are you really looking for that you can’t do in an existing one? These questions are challenging for the people who have experienced PEARL, but they are much harder for their colleagues who haven’t – especially those charged with responsibility for the finances. Inevitably the response turns into “Why would we build a station in a laboratory when we can use one of our own?”. A perfectly reasonable question to ask. And there is an answer, but it isn’t quick or superficial.

Partly because we have learnt more, partly because we are becoming better at explaining it, and partly because the people coming to visit us are developing their own thinking, this kind of dialogue has started to show signs of changing.

PEARL (Person-Environment-Activity Research Laboratory)

PEARL is a bit deceptive. It looks very simple: it’s a big space. But inside that big space we can study the way the brain engages with the environment around it so that we can understand how the person responds to the situation they are facing. By being able to work out how the brain is stimulated by the environments it encounters, we can compose the most appropriate level of detail in substantive environments so that we can create the illusions that stimulate the brain into thinking it is in the real situation we are studying. This could be a street, a bus stop, a train, a park, a supermarket, or whatever. The key is for us to understand what the brain is responding to in the environment, and to make sure that this is within the environment we are presenting it with.

So, you need a train to be moving? What tells our brains that the train is moving? Sound? Vibration? Images? Touch? The combination of all these? What can we tell from such data? Well, it means that we can study how, for example, changing the sound profile or the lighting might alter thermal comfort, or the way passengers prepare to leave the train. In other words, we can explore, not just the usual physical characteristics of the environment with people, but also how human brains respond to them. And we have a variety of methods, approaches and techniques to help us in this new approach. This changes the way we can interpret, understand and model responses, and thus what we should include in a design to obtain the best passenger performance and reaction. It means you can start to design public spaces from inside the brain outwards, instead of basing designs on observations of just the overt physical reactions of people in existing environments.

Recent examples at PEARL have involved crowds, where we have been able to track in detail large numbers (>100) of participants in detail navigating around a maze, including an evacuation process, and including, dynamic real-time position, locomotion, skeletal monitoring, and brain monitoring. We did this to demonstrate some of our capabilities to a particular group of industries. However, that evacuation procedure seems to have broken all the prediction rules derived from the conventional evacuation models. We need to work more on the data, but there is the unswerving question “why did only 60% of the participants leave by the signed exit route and the other 40% by another route?”. We have some ideas about this, but for now the point is that you can only see that detail if you are scanning brains and locating people en masse under controlled conditions, and, because we can do that, this is the kind of question that PEARL can help to answer. The thing is that nobody has been able to ask it before.

Participants boarding buses inside PEARL as part of an experiment to determine how thermal comfort alters with different exterior environment conditions. This will affect the future design of buses in London.

So, is the problem you are facing with people in a public space one that you have been having for some time? Is it a problem that is resisting your attentions? Is it the result of you having done the usual in the past, but is seemingly intractable? Is it in the “too hard” box? Whatever your industry, if you are dealing with person-environment interactions, and whether it is transport, healthcare, performing arts, crime prevention, crowd management, exhibition or museum management or some other example, PEARL can help you come afresh to the challenge, with new eyes (ears, noses, skin, brain …).

As I said at the beginning of this piece, I have noticed during 2024 that some people are beginning to open their questions to this sort of review. We have had questions like: “instead of setting a new standard, what about thinking about what the standard has to deliver, and how people respond to that?” or “How can we move people around a transport terminal in a better, more comfortable and less frustrating way?”, or “can we design infrastructure that is less scary for people?”, or “can we determine how comfortable people might be under different environmental conditions?”. But inevitably there are many more questions that could be asked.

Examples of experiments we have run are: the effects of the cognitive conflict for autistic children between the calming effect of green space in an urban park and the urban soundscape; understanding the effects of supermarket design and operation on autistic adults; responses to different seating layouts in buses; colour deficiency and navigation in a metro system; sensorial interface between a metro train and passengers on a station platform; feelings resulting from freedom to move seating infrastructure in a green or grey space; impacts of floating island bus stops on disabled and visually impaired people; responses to multisensorial perceptions of a street environment; how people decide when it is unsafe to cross in front of an oncoming car; stress levels and cognitive loading on crowded metro trains; cycle lane widths and interactions between cyclists and pedestrians; atmospheres for serenity in an enclosed environment, and a lot more…

Recently, PEARL hosted a massive neuroarchitecture experiment where we had over one hundred participants navigating around a labyrinth and undertaking some social ecology experiments so that we could explore different people-tracking and brain-monitoring technologies in the context of large numbers of people and complex environments. This is a huge undertaking in neuroscience: to monitor such a large number of people simultaneously in a controlled-yet-real environment has never been done before. For architecture it is very rare to see such a complex environment being tested at scale with such a large number of people being tracked and monitored in such neuronal detail. This is about how we learn about people in their environments.

Much of our understanding of how cities and transport systems work relies on assumptions about how people respond to, use, and behave in their environment. While many of these assumptions are based on years of experience and are generally valid, the models we use often fail to reflect what truly happens. At PEARL, we can test these assumptions using systems like eye trackers, accelerometers, brain scanners, and motion detection tools to monitor how people move within the environment, allowing us to challenge or validate these assumptions.

We'd be delighted to hear what you might think of asking us to look into. You can start the conversation by visiting https://www.pearl.place, contacting us at pearl@ucl.ac.uk. Do come and see us to experience the facility in person!

References and Links

1. WHO, ed. (2023). Road Safety Annual Report 2016, World Health Organisation. OECD/ITF, Paris. Retrieved 31 July 2024.

2. Apps M, Rushworth M Chang S (2016) The Anterior Cingulate Gyrus and Social Cognition: Tracking the Motivation of Others, Neuron Review, 90(4), pp 692-707

3. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/pearl
   https://www.pearl.place

4. Zimmerman, M. (1989) The Nervous System in the Context of Information Theory. In: Schmidt, R.F. and Thews, G., Eds., Human Physiology, Springer, Berlin, pp 166-173