Valentine, C., Mitcheltree, H., Sjövall, I.A.K. and Khalil, M.H. (2025) ‘Architecturally mediated allostasis and neurosustainability: A proposed theoretical framework for the impact of the built environment on neurocognitive health’, Brain Sciences, 15(2), 201. https://doi.org/10.3390/brainsci15020201.

Valentine and colleagues introduce one of the field’s strongest recent theoretical propositions: architecture may participate in allostatic regulation. Instead of treating stress as an instantaneous reaction to an isolated visual stimulus, they model repeated exposure to environmental stressors as a potential contributor to cumulative allostatic load mediated through the HPA and SAM axes. The framework connects chronic physiological strain with neuroplastic processes involving the hippocampus, prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex and amygdala, and names “neurosustainability” as the long-term maintenance of neurocognitive health in relation to environmental conditions. Its conceptual operation is temporal: architectural effects matter not only because a room alters an immediate preference or arousal score, but because recurrent environmental demands may accumulate across everyday life. The paper is explicitly hypothesis-generating and calls for rigorous empirical validation rather than claiming settled causal mechanisms. Its wider bridge is to public health, where architecture becomes an exposure regime whose consequences must be studied longitudinally, alongside noise, pollution, crowding and other chronic environmental stressors.