Great Places, Everyone

After my first year of architecture school, a lucky break landed me a summer job at a healthcare design firm. Their manifesto was simple: good buildings promote good health, and good coffee—to be brewed hourly by the junior hire, me—promotes good design. In Places of the Heart: The Psychogeography of Everyday Life, Colin Ellard points out that these two beliefs might be converging at neurons not terribly far apart. Great places, like great coffee, act deeply on our brain’s complex workings, and over time, these places can change our brains themselves.

Scientists are probing these links with a toolbox that is growing daily, says Ellard, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Waterloo. For example, the ubiquitous smartphone has made us “traveling beacons of personal data,” while some buildings now host embedded sensors to measure the biometrics of passersby. Places of the Heart, Ellard’s second book, is an exploration of how these technologies...