Places of the Heart

only do animals have a remarkable ability to seek out the best available locations for the necessities of life, but that they are able to anticipate how a setting will serve their future needs

We still speak of the dichotomy of “hearts and minds” in much of our everyday discourse,

But when those histories become an open book, available as inputs to providers of technology that can literally put shields before our eyes, then that history will trap us. Rather than becoming an endless source of refreshment and novelty, our worlds run the risk of becoming nothing more than a series of self-reinforcing feedback loops based on something a little bit like our browser history.

Judgment, seemingly supremely rational, is deeply rooted in our states of affect.

We are everywhere all at once, broadcasting signals about who we are, how we are feeling, and what we are doing.

We are traveling beacons of personal data.

Either by design or by accident, buildings make us feel by making us do in ways that are not qualitatively different from the way that mirroring the happy smile of a toddler can make us feel good.

we must mirror what they show to feel what they feel

Similar kinds of phenomena, in which the brain quickly remaps body space to include nearby implements, have been seen in somewhat less bizarre situations. If one is given a long pointer to manipulate objects, for example, brain areas quickly remap in a way suggesting that the tip of the pointer has actually become a part of one’s own body. It’s not unlikely that the facility that we have for using all kinds of everyday technologies, including the computer mouse, arises from this kind of rapid remapping of the perceived boundaries of the space of the body.

In other words, though conventional thinking might suggest that we smile because we are happy, these findings on embodied states argue that we might also become happy because we smile (