What if the key to designing better cities wasn’t just in concrete, code, or cost, but in understanding how our brains actually work?

In this episode, I talk with Ann Sussman and Kelsey Bradley of the Human Architecture and Planning Institute (HAPI) about a subject that’s as profound as it is underdiscussed: how our unconscious biology reacts to the built environment – and how that should change everything about how we design.

Ann, architect and author of Cognitive Architecture and Kelsey, founder of Design Cause Inc., now Executive Director at HAPI, walk us through the neuroscience of placemaking. We talk eye tracking. Skin conductivity. Heart rate variability. And how our “Stone Age brains” are still calibrated for the Savannah, even when we’re stuck in a strip mall.

This episode will validate what many of us feel but can’t quite explain why some places energize us, and others quietly drain us. The answers aren’t just aesthetic. They’re evolutionary.