In 2014, the Nobel Prize in Medicine honored three researchers—John O'Keefe, May-Britt Moser, and Edvard Moser—for their discoveries of cells that constitute a positioning system in the brain. This internal GPS does more than just orient us in space. It etches places into our memory with an intensity that other senses don't achieve. The question these works pose is both simple and dizzying: why do the places of our childhood retain an emotional hold that nothing erases—neither time, nor distance, nor the thousands of other places we've visited since?
The answer lies at the intersection of neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and memory science.
The brain's GPS encodes much more than coordinates
When O'Keefe first recorded signals from "place cells" in rats in 1971, he understood that these neurons did more than just record a geographical position. They constructed an internal map of the environment, according to the Nobel Committee. Thirty-four years later, the Mosers completed the puzzle by identifying "grid cells" in the entorhinal cortex—a hexagonal coordinate system that functions like a grid under the map.
What fascinates neuroscientists is that this system does more than just map. Work published in Nature Neuroscience in 2025 shows that place cells become more stable and numerous with continued exposure to an environment. The brain doesn't take a frozen photograph of a place. It weaves it, layer after layer, visit after visit, emotion after emotion. A familiar place from childhood—home, school, a shortcut—has benefited from thousands of these successive layers. Its neuronal representation reaches a density that places discovered in adulthood rarely match.
The secret highway between smell and memory
Marcel Proust, by dipping his madeleine in linden tea, had stumbled upon a neurobiological mechanism confirmed more than a century later. Olfaction has a unique privilege among the senses: olfactory signals bypass the thalamus—the central relay through which sight, hearing, and touch pass—to connect directly to the hippocampus and amygdala, the two structures of memory and emotion.
A team from Northwestern University showed in 2021 that this connection is the most powerful among all primary senses. "A direct highway between smell and the hippocampus," summarized the researchers led by Christina Zelano in Progress in Neurobiology. Smells don't trigger an isolated memory: they reactivate the entire context—the place, the light, the sounds, the emotion of the moment. Specialists call this contextual memory: not a fact, but a complete environment resurrected.
For childhood places, this mechanism is formidable. The smell of cut grass, of wet stone after rain, of cooking on a Sunday: each of these olfactory imprints is wired into the circuits of spatial memory. A scent is enough to rediscover not just a memory, but an entire place. Not an image—a feeling of being there.
Why childhood leaves deeper traces
Cognitive psychology has identified a troubling phenomenon: the "reminiscence bump." Adults over forty spontaneously produce more autobiographical memories from the 10-30 age period than from any other decade of their lives, according to a systematic review published in PLOS One (2018). These memories are more vivid, more detailed, and more emotionally charged.
Events from this period are often "firsts"—first move, first trip without parents, first deep friendships. Novelty stimulates mnemonic encoding. Researchers Janssen and Murre showed as early as 2008 that neither novelty alone, nor emotional charge, nor positive or negative valence fully explain this phenomenon. What explains it is identity construction. The memories of the reminiscence bump are those that shaped who we are.
Places play a central role in this construction. Harold Proshansky, an environmental psychologist at CUNY, defined "place identity" as early as 1983 as "a potpourri of memories, conceptions, interpretations, ideas, and feelings associated with specific physical environments." Childhood places are not the backdrop of our memories. They are their architecture.
A bond as real as attachment to people
Researcher Robert Hay observed this in 1998 by studying the sense of place across the lifespan: people who grew up in a place develop a deeper rootedness and sense of belonging than those who settle there later. A child who grows up in a stable environment forms an "internal model" of the place—an unconscious imprint that conditions their relationship to spaces for the rest of their life.
Leila Scannell and Robert Gifford, from the University of Victoria in Canada, formalized this mechanism in 2010 with their PPP model: Person, Process, Place. Attachment to a place involves a person (with their history), a process (cognitive, affective, and behavioral), and a place (with its physical and social characteristics). Maria Lewicka's review, published in 2011 after analyzing hundreds of studies, concluded that despite globalization and increasing mobility, attachment to places remains a universal and powerful phenomenon.
According to a study by Wildschut and colleagues, nearly 79% of surveyed participants reported feeling nostalgic at least once a week. And this nostalgia is not a fragility. Research published in 2024 by Naidu and colleagues in Social Psychological and Personality Science shows that nostalgia—including nostalgia for places—increases psychological well-being, strengthens the sense of belonging, and fosters optimism. Remembering a beloved place is not looking back at the past. It is an act of resilience.
A vocabulary lacking in France
Japan has a word for this relationship to one's place of origin: furusato. The concept is so central to Japanese culture that government programs encourage returning to one's native village. Aboriginal peoples of Australia speak of "Country"—the territory is not a backdrop; it is an extension of the self. Portugal has saudade, Korea has jeong: words that recognize the deep connection between an individual and a place.
France, despite often claimed regional attachment—from Brittany to Corsica, from Alsace to the Basque Country—has not coined an equivalent. Urban planning policies consider spaces in square meters and population flows, rarely in memory and emotion. The psychology of place attachment remains an almost absent field in French public debate, even though INSEE data shows that the residential mobility rate, though declining, still displaces millions of people each year far from the places that shaped them.
Neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and research on place attachment converge on the same conclusion. Our childhood places are not mere coordinates in our biography. They are neuronal architectures, sensory reservoirs, pillars of identity. Every place cell activated in the hippocampus is a fiber of the bond that connects us to a place in the world—and to the person we were when we lived there.
What research suggests, urban planners, therapists, and decision-makers are beginning to hear. Destroying a neighborhood, transforming a landscape, erasing a familiar place is not just modifying a physical environment. It is touching the memory of those who grew up there. And this memory, as neurosciences confirm, does not fade.
Sources
1. Nobel Committee — Press release, Nobel Prize in Medicine 2014 (nobelprize.org)
2. Nature Neuroscience — Formation of an expanding memory representation in the hippocampus (2025)
3. Zelano, C. et al. — Human hippocampal connectivity is stronger in olfaction than other sensory systems, Progress in Neurobiology (2021)
4. Janssen, S.M.J. & Murre, J.M.J. — Reminiscence bump in autobiographical memory, Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology (2008)
5. PLOS One — Understanding the reminiscence bump: A systematic review (2018)
6. Proshansky, H.M. — Place-identity: Physical world socialization of the self, Journal of Environmental Psychology (1983)
7. Hay, R. — Sense of place in developmental context, Journal of Environmental Psychology (1998)
8. Scannell, L. & Gifford, R. — Defining place attachment: A tripartite organizing framework, Journal of Environmental Psychology (2010)
9. Lewicka, M. — Place attachment: How far have we come in the last 40 years?, Journal of Environmental Psychology (2011)
10. Naidu, E. et al. — Reliving the Good Old Days: Nostalgia Increases Psychological Wellbeing Through Collective Effervescence, Social Psychological and Personality Science (2024)
11. Wildschut, T. et al. — Nostalgia: Content, triggers, functions, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (2006)
