The Power of Place: how our surroundings shape our thoughts, emotions, and actions

Are New Yorkers and Californians so different because they live in such different places? How do some urban settings increase crime? Why are rugged individualists drawn to extreme climes such as Alaska? How can we best use our environments to help us achieve the blissful state of "flow"? What are the most recent scientific theories connecting weak electromagnetic fields to mystical experiences, extrasensory perceptions, and even tales of UFOs? How does nature truly restore us, and why is its conservation even more crucial than we may realize? Drawing on the latest research in behavioral and environmental science, The Power of Place explores these questions and offers fascinating insights about how we can best live in the world. All of us are profoundly affected - often without being aware of it - by the many places, indoors and out, in which we spend our lives. From the time of Hippocrates to the early twentieth century, the powerful influence of our physical surroundings on our behavior and emotions was taken for granted. But the combined effects of two revolutions - the Industrial and the psychoanalytic - caused people to retreat indoors and inside themselves. Now a renewed scientific interest in the behavioral effects of environment has yielded exciting findings that will play a major role in improving our well-being, today and in the future. Our relationship with the world around us begins in the womb, a surprisingly busy, noisy place. Winifred Gallagher reports on our first environment and on the important new research that shows that even the mother-infant bond is partly environmental in nature. She discusses the extraordinary effects of light on our behavior and the problems relating to light deprivation, among them depression, insomnia, jet lag, and PMS. The behavioral effects of extreme environments, from subways to mountaintops, are described - why, for example, "the higher you get, the higher you get." From the ancient Chinese art of geomancy to the great environmental issues and urban problems of the twenty-first century, The Power of Place is an illuminating examination of connections between our internal and external worlds that affect every one of us inhabiting this beautiful, endangered planet