🔴 Viewpoint: How Cities Reshape the Soul

A Journey Through Stone and Self

I. The First Imprint: When Stone Speaks

The first time I felt a city pressing against my ribcage—not metaphorically, but as a physical sensation, a compression of breath and space—I was four or five years old, caught in the gravitational pull between two Portuguese cities that could not have been more different. Lisbon, with its sun-drenched limestone hills that seemed to exhale warmth even in shadow, and Porto, brooding beneath its granite fog like some northern monument to maritime melancholy. This was the late 1970s, a time when Portugal itself was undergoing its own metamorphosis, shedding the chrysalis of dictatorship for something uncertain and luminous.

It wasn't the verticality that struck me—those corporate canyons of glass and steel that would later define my experience of modernity were still distant abstractions. What arrested me, what carved itself into my developing consciousness, was the vertiginous drop of the calçada pavements, those intricate mosaics of black and white limestone rushing toward the river like frozen waves. I remember the smell of damp stone after rain, that particular mineral perfume that rises from ancient surfaces. I remember voices echoing off narrow tiled facades, bouncing and multiplying until the air itself seemed crowded with invisible presences, creating a density of sound and shadow that felt somehow alive, somehow aware.

There was a physiological dimension to this encounter that I couldn't articulate then but have never forgotten: a tightening in the chest, as if my ribcage needed to shrink to fit through the narrow passageways. A quickening of pulse when the street suddenly opened onto a vista of the river, vast and indifferent below. A subtle but unmistakable recalibration of my internal rhythm to match what I can only describe as the complex, historic heartbeat of the streets themselves—ancient, syncopated, patient.

Even then, in that nascent moment of consciousness, I sensed that I wasn't merely walking through the city. The city was walking through me. The stone wasn't just environment; it was agent, actor, architect of something interior and irreversible. The geometry of those streets was imprinting itself onto the still-soft neural pathways of my brain, creating a template, a filter, a fundamental orientation toward space that I carry even now, decades and continents removed.

This childhood encounter raises a question that has haunted architects, phenomenologists, and now neuroscientists for centuries, a question somewhere between matter and consciousness: To what extent does the built environment architect our inner lives? We habitually speak of cities as backdrops to human drama, as stages upon which we act out our triumphs and tragedies, our comedies and catastrophes. But what if the stage itself is directing the play? What if the geometry of our streets, the texture of our facades, the density of our crowds, the height of our ceilings aren't just influencing our transient moods but fundamentally rewiring the neural pathways of our brains, sculpting our capacity for attention, empathy, even love?

This is the radical proposition of neuroarchitecture and neurourbanism—emerging interdisciplinary fields suggesting that our cities are shaping our souls just as surely, just as permanently, as we are shaping their skylines. The relationship is not one-way consumption but a reciprocal transformation. We build cities, and then, quietly, inexorably, they rebuild us.

II. The Paleolithic Brain Meets the Modern Grid

To understand how cities shape the soul, we must first examine the biological machinery of perception itself, that astonishing three-pound universe of neurons and synapses that mediates every moment of our experience. The human brain—your brain, my brain, the collective brain of humanity—evolved not for the rectilinear grids and vertical ambitions of modern metropolises but for the savannah, for grasslands punctuated by acacia trees, for open horizons that allowed us to spot predators and prey, for the fractal patterns of vegetation that signaled water and shelter, for the soft, undulating lines of nature that our visual cortex processes with ease and pleasure.

This is not nostalgic romanticism but evolutionary fact. When we place this Paleolithic brain—still essentially unchanged from our hunter-gatherer ancestors of 40,000 years ago—into a landscape of hard angles, relentless noise, visual hyperstimulation, and artificial light that confuses our circadian rhythms, we create a profound friction, a fundamental mismatch between organism and environment. This friction is both generative and destructive, producing innovation and anxiety in equal measure.

I recall walking through Barcelona's Gothic Quarter on a humid January afternoon, lost—beautifully, productively lost—in its labyrinthine complexity. Even though I was used to Porto's historic centre, the experience differed so fundamentally from the grid I was used to that it felt almost like inhabiting a different body, operating under different physical laws. The curved streets refused to yield their secrets all at once. They revealed themselves gradually, seductively, each turn opening onto a new vista, a sudden revelation of a hidden plaza, an unexpected architectural detail—a gargoyle's grotesque face, a fragment of Roman wall embedded in a medieval facade, a modernist doorway inserted into ancient stone like a temporal contradiction.

The textured stone walls engaged my senses in a way that the smooth glass of contemporary architecture rarely does. My fingertips wanted to trace the mortar lines. My hippocampus—that seahorse-shaped structure deep in the brain responsible for spatial memory and navigation—was fully activated, constructing a mental map that felt more like poetry than cartography, all curves and associations rather than coordinates and right angles.

Neuroscientist Colin Ellard has dedicated much of his career to studying this phenomenon, measuring how our autonomic nervous system responds to different urban environments. Using sensors that track skin conductance and heart rate variability, he's documented how these physiological markers shift dramatically as we move from oppressive, featureless facades to complex, "enriched" environments. His research reveals something startling, something that challenges our assumptions about efficiency and aesthetics: boring buildings—blank, monolithic walls, the modernist curtain wall stretched to infinity—trigger stress responses eerily similar to social isolation. Our bodies interpret architectural monotony as a form of abandonment. [1]

We crave complexity. Not chaos, but complexity—what researchers call "prospect and refuge," what Christopher Alexander termed "the quality without a name." [2] We crave patterns that reward attention without overwhelming it. We crave a reflection of our own organic messiness, our own fractal nature, in the structures we inhabit. When the environment offers no such reflection, when it presents only blankness or overwhelming repetition, our nervous system interprets this as threat, as wrongness, as a kind of environmental gaslighting that tells us our need for richness and variation is illegitimate.

This is neurourbanism's emotional lens, its most fundamental insight: A city ignoring the biological imperatives of the human nervous system isn't just aesthetically disappointing or stylistically unfortunate—it's an act of aggression against the body itself. The brutalist concrete block housing a thousand souls isn't merely a controversial stylistic choice, subject to matters of taste; it's a neurological decree prioritising abstract efficiency over embodied wellbeing. It declares to inhabitants, through the mute eloquence of its forms, that they are units of storage, components in a system, not beings of sensation and memory who need beauty, complexity, surprise.

Conversely, spaces designed with what's now called biophilic principles—incorporating natural light that shifts throughout the day, greenery that provides both visual interest and air purification, natural materials like wood and stone that carry associations of warmth and permanence—these spaces act as balm to our overstimulated nervous systems. They lower cortisol levels measurably. They invite the parasympathetic nervous system, our "rest and digest" mode, to take the helm from its anxious counterpart. They tell us, wordlessly but powerfully: You belong here. Your animal needs are valid. Your presence is not merely tolerated but welcomed.

III. The Urban Brain: Synapses, Strangers, and the Ballet of the Sidewalk

Moving from the individual and biological to the collective and sociological, we must consider the city as a vast cognitive network, a distributed intelligence that emerges from millions of individual decisions, movements, and interactions. If individual brains are plastic—constantly rewiring themselves based on experience, forming new neural connections while pruning unused ones—then the city is the macro-structure that facilitates or inhibits those transformations, that determines which connections form and which atrophy.

Consider what sociologist Ray Oldenburg called the "third place"—neither home nor work, but the café where regulars gather, the park where communities form spontaneously, the public library that serves as democratic commons. [3] These aren't mere amenities, pleasant additions to the urban fabric that we might appreciate but could ultimately do without. They're synapses of the urban brain, the spaces where connections form, where the isolated individual dissolves briefly into something larger and more sustaining.

In my own neighbourhood in Porto, there's a small, frankly unremarkable park—Jardim das Virtudes—with peeling benches and a fountain that only occasionally functions. By conventional metrics of urban planning, it's nothing special: no grand design, no striking features, no reason for anyone to visit. Yet every evening, particularly as the light softens and the heat releases its grip, the space transforms. People arrive, claiming their preferred spots with territorial authority. Teenagers congregate, their awkward courtship rituals playing out in full view. Parents exchange those exhausted glances of solidarity that require no translation. Students sit on the stone wall overlooking the river, books open but often ignored as the view steals their attention.

This space allows for what Jane Jacobs celebrated in her revolutionary "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" as the "ballet of the sidewalk"—the serendipitous collision of strangers that creates community without coercion, connection without obligation. Jacobs understood something that statistical urban planning often misses: that the unplanned encounter, the peripheral awareness of others' lives, the gradual accumulation of familiar faces is what transforms a collection of buildings into a neighbourhood, what makes a city more than the sum of its infrastructure. [4]

But modern neurourbanism, informed by advances in social neuroscience and environmental psychology, forces us to confront this density's dark side, the shadow that accompanies the light. The constant proximity to strangers—on the subway, in the elevator, walking down crowded streets—triggers the amygdala, that almond-shaped structure deep in our brain that serves as a threat-detection centre. Our ancient circuitry, evolved for tribes of perhaps 150 individuals whom we knew intimately, suddenly confronts thousands of faces daily, an overwhelming flood of social information that our wetware struggles to process.

In crowded subway cars, we engage in what sociologist Erving Goffman termed "civil inattention"—a sophisticated psychological armour where we acknowledge others' presence while studiously, almost aggressively ignoring them to preserve our own sanity. [5] Watch people on public transport: the careful cultivation of absence, the performance of not-seeing. Headphones become not just devices for entertainment but shields against the crushing weight of proximity. Smartphones transform into talismans of isolation, screens we stare at not necessarily because their content fascinates us but because they provide a legitimate excuse to avoid eye contact, to opt out of the overwhelming social field.

This constant, low-grade defensive posture—this perpetual vigilance against intrusion—can calcify into permanent alienation, crystallising into what we mistake for personality but might better understand as adaptation to a hostile environment. We become blasé, as German sociologist Georg Simmel prophetically described in his 1903 essay "The Metropolis and Mental Life," written as cities like Berlin were transforming into modern metropolises. The city dweller, Simmel observed, develops a protective organ, a mental callous that buffers against overwhelming stimulation. [6] This blasé attitude—this studied indifference, this cultivation of cool distance—isn't a moral failing but a survival strategy. The cost of this protection, however, is often empathy itself. We learn not to care too much, not to feel too deeply, because to remain perpetually open to others' suffering in the urban environment would shatter us.

This manifests most starkly in what's now called "hostile architecture" or "defensive urbanism"—design choices explicitly intended to prevent the homeless from resting. Benches divided by armrests that make lying down impossible. Spikes embedded in ledges and doorways. Slanted surfaces that refuse the horizontal human form. These design choices aren't just physical barriers; they're ethical statements cast in iron and stone and concrete. They train us, subtly but powerfully, to see our fellow citizens not as vulnerable humans deserving care but as nuisances to be managed, problems to be solved through exclusion rather than support.

The city, in this sense, teaches us how to love—or more precisely, how not to. It sculpts our moral imagination, our capacity for compassion, our willingness to see suffering and respond. Every time we step over a homeless person, every time we avert our gaze from someone in distress, we're being educated by the city in a curriculum of indifference. The architecture of exclusion becomes internalised, transformed from external design into internal attitude.

IV. The Paradox of Friction: Getting Lost as Cognitive Exercise

There's a technological dimension to urban experience that brings us to the contemporary obsession with the "Smart City"—that gleaming vision of perfectly optimised urban life. We're collectively obsessed with eliminating inefficiency, with making the urban experience frictionless. We want traffic flowing with algorithmic perfection, energy distributed with maximum efficiency, crime predicted and prevented before it happens. Data sensors on every corner. Real-time optimisation of every system. The city as a perfectly calibrated machine.

But in this drive for optimisation, in this rush toward algorithmic perfection, we risk sanitising the very friction that makes urban life meaningful, that provides the resistance necessary for growth. Friction creates heat. Friction creates the unexpected encounter, the wrong turn that becomes the right discovery, the delay that forces contemplation.

I remember getting lost in Venice, hopelessly and completely lost. I was armed with a map in my smartphone that constantly failed to locate me, growing increasingly frustrated. The heat was oppressive. My feet hurt. I was desperately seeking San Marco, that iconic basilica, following signs that seemed to lead in circles. Venice's illogical geography—streets that become canals, bridges that lead nowhere, sudden dead-ends at water's edge—felt like an elaborate practical joke at my expense.

But in that disorientation, sweaty and irritable, something shifted. I wandered through spaces I never would have found if I'd stayed on track: a quiet courtyard where laundry hung like flags of surrender above potted geraniums; a narrow sottoportego where the stone walls pressed close and cool; a tiny campo where old men played cards beneath a lone tree, their laughter echoing off the ancient facades. I passed workshop doorways revealing glimpses of craft, business, culture, life - each threshold offering a brief portal into Venetian rhythms that had nothing to do with tourism or monuments. There was a small canal where the only sound was water lapping against stone, and a bookshop so cramped its volumes seemed to lean against each other for support, and a mask-maker's atelier where faces stared from the walls with blank, beautiful mystery.

Each wrong turn became less a failure and more a discovery. The city wasn't mocking me after all—it was simply insisting I slow down, look closer, find what couldn't be mapped.

Those moments—unplanned, unoptimized, completely inefficient—provided a sensory and emotional meal that I still return to. If it worked, GPS itself would have guided me along the most "efficient" route, saving perhaps twenty minutes but costing me those encounters, those memories, those small jewels of human connection.

Neuroscience validates this intuition with hard data. Research pioneered by Eleanor Maguire and colleagues at University College London revealed that the hippocampus—that crucial structure for spatial navigation and memory—actually grows measurably larger when we navigate complex environments without technological assistance. Her famous studies of London taxi drivers, who must memorise the city's 25,000 streets and thousands of landmarks before earning their license, showed increased grey matter volume in the posterior hippocampus compared to control groups. [7] Navigation isn't just getting from A to B; it's a full cognitive workout, engaging memory, spatial reasoning, decision-making, and pattern recognition.

By outsourcing navigation to algorithms, by smoothing out every rough edge of the city, by eliminating every obstacle and inefficiency, we're literally shrinking our brains. We're trading the rich cognitive workout of wayfinding—that ancient human skill—for the passive obedience of following the blue dot. We're becoming passengers in our own lives, guided but never guiding, told where to go but never choosing the route ourselves.

A city without friction is a city without memory. The smooth route is the forgettable route. The efficient path is the one that leaves no trace. What we optimise away isn't just time but experience itself, the very texture of being alive and present in place.

V. Human Agency and Architectural Determinism

And yet, as I construct this critique—romanticising winding medieval streets, condemning glass towers, celebrating getting lost, mourning the hippocampus-shrinking effects of GPS—I must pause and interrogate my own assumptions. I catch myself tumbling into architectural determinism's seductive trap, that appealing but ultimately reductive belief that physical environment straightforwardly determines psychological outcome, that we can engineer better humans simply by engineering better buildings.

It's tempting, almost irresistible, to believe this. If we just built better buildings, we would build better people. If we planted more trees, we would cure epidemic depression. If we designed more plazas with proper human-scale proportions, we would solve political polarisation and social fragmentation. The fantasy of architecture as social engineering, of physical form as moral force, haunts both utopian visions and dystopian warnings.

But this perspective, however appealing in its clarity, overlooks the profound resilience and adaptability of the human spirit, our species' remarkable capacity for what anthropologists call "bricolage"—making do with what's at hand, repurposing, subverting, transforming.

I think of skateboarders who take the sterile, hostile concrete of corporate plazas—those spaces explicitly designed to discourage lingering, to move people through rather than invite them to stay—and transform them into playgrounds of physics and grace. Watch skaters navigate these spaces: every bench becomes a potential ramp, every set of stairs a challenge, every smooth surface an opportunity. They refuse the intended use, the "proper" behaviour, the scripted interaction with the environment. They're performing what Michel de Certeau called "tactics"—the creativity of the weak, the art of repurposing what the powerful have designed for other purposes. [8]

I think of graffiti artists who reclaim the blank, oppressive walls of the inner city—those massive sides of buildings that proclaim nothing but their own dumb massiveness—as canvases for vibrant, subversive expression. What urban planners and property owners intend as boundary, barrier, dead space, artists transform into voice, identity, and territorial claim. The city's marginalised assert their existence through spray paint, through wheat-pasted posters, through murals that insist: We are here. We matter. This space speaks for us.

I think of community gardens sprouting impossibly in the cracks of broken pavement in Detroit, in vacant lots where homes once stood before foreclosure and demolition. Residents transforming urban blight into productive beauty, wastelands into commons. The city abandons these spaces, declares them worthless, writes them off. The community replies by planting tomatoes, sunflowers, squash. By creating shared spaces of cultivation and harvest. By refusing the narrative of decline and instead enacting regeneration, however modest, however precarious.

Humans are not passive recipients of architectural signalling, waiting to be programmed by the built environment. We're hackers, bricoleurs, improvisers. We repurpose, reimagine, subvert the master planner's intentions. The "soul"—if I can use that old-fashioned word without embarrassment—isn't soft clay molded effortlessly by the city's heavy hands. It's more like a vine growing around a trellis, sometimes conforming to the structure's logic, but often breaking it, swallowing it, making it part of its own wild architecture, transforming constraint into support.

Furthermore, and I must acknowledge this even as it complicates my argument: my preference for the "organic" and "historical," for winding streets and textured facades, is itself a position of considerable privilege, a luxury afforded by able body and economic security.

For someone navigating a wheelchair, cobblestone "charm" isn't charming—it's an accessibility nightmare, every uneven surface a potential hazard, every curb without a cut a barrier to participation. The very features I romanticise as "authentic" and "human-scale" exclude whole categories of humans from full engagement with public space.

For a woman walking home alone at night through unfamiliar territory, the "mystery" of dimly lit, winding medieval alleys isn't wonder—it might be terror. The lack of sightlines, the shadows thick enough to hide threats, the disorientation that I celebrate as cognitively enriching becomes tactical disadvantage, vulnerability.

The modernist grid, for all its sterility and aesthetic poverty, for all the ways it affronts my trained sensibilities, offers visibility, predictability, and a form of democratic equality. The straight street is the legible street. The well-lit avenue provides what planners call "passive surveillance"—the sense that others can see you, that help is visible if needed. The regular grid means you can always know where you are, how to get home, which way leads to safety.

The city's "soul"—that collective consciousness emerging from millions of individual experiences—isn't singular, isn't unified. It's a fractured mosaic of competing needs, conflicting desires, and irreconcilable perspectives. What reads as charm to me reads as exclusion to someone else. What I experience as pleasant complexity someone else experiences as confusing barrier. The city that perfectly accommodates my preferences necessarily disadvantages someone else's needs.

VI. The Mirror, the Vine, and the Responsive Future

Where, then, does this cascade of considerations and complications leave us in understanding how cities reshape the soul?

We're moving toward a future where boundaries between biological and architectural blur not just metaphorically but literally, where the distinction between body and building becomes genuinely difficult to maintain. We're entering what some call the age of "responsive architecture"—buildings that breathe, literally, through sophisticated HVAC systems mimicking lungs; facades that react in real-time to pollution levels, changing colour or texture to indicate air quality; rooms that adjust their lighting, temperature, even acoustic properties based on biometric readings of occupants' stress levels and circadian rhythms.

Imagine buildings embedded with sensors reading your heart rate, your skin conductance, your cortisol levels through sweat analysis. Imagine spaces that respond by dimming lights, adjusting music, modifying colour temperature to calm your overstimulated nervous system. The city no longer a static container for human activity but a dynamic, physiological extension of our own bodies, an exoskeleton that senses and responds.

This vision inspires both excitement and unease. Excitement at the possibility of environments genuinely attuned to human needs, responsive to our actual physiological and psychological states rather than imposing abstract ideas of what we should need. Unease at the surveillance implications, the privacy violations, the potential for corporate or governmental manipulation of our inner states through environmental control.

But technology alone—no matter how sophisticated, no matter how precisely calibrated to our biology—cannot solve the existential crisis of the urban animal, cannot address the fundamental question of what it means to be human in the city. We need neurourbanism rooted not in techno-utopianism but in humility, in recognition of how much we don't know, how much we can't predict, how much emerges from complexity that defies planning.

We need architects who understand they're not just pouring concrete and erecting steel but sculpting neural pathways, creating environments that will literally reshape the brains of inhabitants. This isn't a metaphor—it's a measurable, demonstrable physical reality. The spaces we create create us in turn.

We need urban planners who recognise that the most efficient route isn't always the most human one, that optimisation has costs, that friction and delay and getting lost aren't merely problems to solve but experiences with value, moments when consciousness expands rather than contracts.

We need policymakers who understand that housing the homeless isn't just economic calculation or even moral imperative but recognition that excluding anyone from public space diminishes all of us, trains us in habits of seeing and not-seeing that corrupt our capacity for empathy.

Ultimately, the city is a mirror—but not a simple, flat reflecting surface. It's more like those funhouse mirrors that distort and exaggerate, revealing truths that flat reflection conceals. When we look at skylines, we see the jagged readout of our collective ambitions, our fears, our inequalities made visible in stone and glass and steel. The heights we reach for. The depths we ignore. The divisions we enforce through zoning, through property values, through the thousand subtle and unsubtle ways we separate ourselves from each other.

To reshape our cities, then, is to embark on the terrifying, necessary work of reshaping ourselves—confronting our assumptions about efficiency, progress, beauty, belonging. Acknowledging that every design choice encodes values, makes claims about who matters and who doesn't, creates winners and losers even when we pretend neutrality.

VII. Coda: Recognition and Reciprocity

I walked through Porto again this morning, through the same streets I traversed as a child four decades ago, though everything has changed and nothing has. The calçada still rushes toward the river in those same vertiginous drops. The tiled facades still echo voices. The stone still smells of damp and age after rain.

But I looked up at the taller, more modern buildings—new since my childhood, intrusions some call them—not with the overwhelming vertigo of youth, not with the critic's dismissive contempt, but with something like recognition. They are hard, yes. Cold in their glass perfection. Lacking the texture and irregularity I've spent this essay celebrating.

But in their surfaces, I saw clouds moving, reflected and distorted. I saw the distortion of my own face, warped but recognisable. I saw the possibility that even in this landscape of steel and efficiency, something soft, something vital, still struggles stubbornly to take root. Vines literally growing up the sides of buildings, green persistence against smooth surface. Community groups turning rooftops into gardens, reclaiming vertical space for cultivation. Artists projecting images onto blank facades, temporarily transforming them into screens for collective dreaming.

The city shapes the soul—this much is a demonstrable fact, supported by neuroscience and lived experience. Our brains are plastic. Our environments matter. The spaces we inhabit inhabit us in turn.

But the soul—wild, adaptive, enduring, remarkably resistant to total determination—also shapes the city. We are not simply victims of architectural decisions made decades or centuries ago. We are active participants in ongoing conversation between body and building, self and city, individual consciousness and collective form.

The question isn't whether cities will continue reshaping us—they will, inevitably, as long as we continue choosing or being forced into urban life. The question is whether we'll bring consciousness to that reshaping, whether we'll demand cities that serve human flourishing rather than abstract efficiency, whether we'll insist on environments that respect our evolutionary heritage while enabling our cultural aspirations.

The conversation between stone and soul continues, has always continued, will continue as long as humans gather in density and build upward and outward. I'm simply trying, in these words, to make that conversation explicit, to name what we feel but rarely articulate: that cities aren't just where we live but how we live, not just containers for existence but architects of consciousness itself.

And perhaps that recognition—that conscious acknowledgement of reciprocal influence—is the first step toward building cities that honour rather than assault our embodied humanity, that enable rather than constrain our capacity for connection, memory, wonder. Not a return to some romanticised past, but a synthesis: ancient wisdom about human scale and material texture combined with modern understanding of neuroscience and social dynamics. Buildings that breathe. Streets that invite wandering. Spaces that allow for the serendipitous encounter that changes everything.

The soul walking through the city. The city walking through the soul. Both transformed by the passage, neither emerging unchanged. This is what it means to be urban, to be human, to be present in these landscapes of stone and longing that we've built and that build us in turn.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

[1] Ellard, C. (2017). A new agenda for urban psychology: Out of the laboratory and onto the streets. Journal of urban design and mental health, 2(3).

[2] Alexander, C. (1979). The Timeless Way of Building. New York: Oxford University Press.

[3] Oldenburg, R. (1989). The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Community Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts, and How They Get You Through the Day. New York: Paragon House.

[4] Jacobs, J. (1961). The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Random House.

[5] Goffman, E. (1963). Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings. New York: Free Press.

[6] Simmel, G. (1903/1950). The metropolis and mental life. In K. Wolff (Trans.), The Sociology of Georg Simmel (pp. 409-424). New York: Free Press.

[7] Maguire, E. A., Woollett, K., & Spiers, H. J. (2006). London taxi drivers and bus drivers: a structural MRI and neuropsychological analysis. Hippocampus, 16(12), 1091-1101.

[8] de Certeau, M. (1984). The Practice of Everyday Life (S. Rendall, Trans.). Berkeley: University of California Press.

🔴 Viewpoint is a random series of spontaneous considerations about subjects that linger in my mind just long enough for me to write them down. They express my own often inconsistent thoughts, ideas, assumptions, and speculations. Nothing else. Quote me at your peril.