Thanks to Robert Mason and others at Carnegie Mellon University’s Scientific Imaging and Brain Research Center I know a way to define a concept of physical place. The CMU researchers used fMRI to study the brains of nine advanced physics and engineering students as they thought of concepts. They worked their findings into a model that linked the learning of physics to various areas in the brain and to the brain’s understanding of four fundamental concepts: Causal motion, periodicity, energy flow, and algebraic (sentence-like) representatons.*
 
Think about it: The physical nature of place can be defined by those concepts. Disagree? Let me guess. You think motion only defines places that move, and, sitting in front of your computer, you believe yourself to be in a motionless place. Not so, of course you move, even sitting still. If you live on Earth—chances are good that I’m right in this—you live on a traveling tectonic plate on a spinning planet that orbits a sun that orbits a galaxy that moves through the local group of galaxies that movs toward the Great Wall that moves with respect to other matter in the universe that, in itself, is expanding. You move. Your place moves in complex ways, and you know at least generally the causes of the motions.
 
Then there’s the periodicity thing, wavelengths of sound and the electromagnetic spectrum, maybe even the hum of your computer fan, the house fan, or the tapping or your foot as you listen to repeated strains of music.  Next, consider energy flow like the movement of heat form you to your chair, or of electrons coursing through your nervous system or neurotransmitters jumping synapses and running through computer wires and processors. And then there’s the representation of it all, place’s openness to mathematical description, or, as the CMU researchers see it, changes in velocity and even the Brownian movement that envelops you, all subject to complex algebraic  or differential sentences. 
 
The CMU researchers were interested in how the brain learns the concepts of physics, but in doing they have helped me define physical place. Now, I just need someone to teach me those nonphysical components of place and how I come to know them. What are they? They are those intangibles that cause my affinity for or rejection of place. I could, for example, understand the fundamental physical concepts with regard to Chernobyl, but since 1986 no amount of rational comprehension will convince me to go there, and I refrain from going to any place I deem unnecessarily dangerous or inimical to health and life. Nor would I go into places where I have for whatever inexplicable reasons some apprehension or some belief that I will suffer a seemingly interminable ennui during my visit. And then I would like to know why my brain is suffused with dopamine in other places, why I salivate like you-know-whose dog at the sight of some places, or why I feel joy, or peace, or elation in still other places.
 
Place is, of course, more than location, more than physical surroundings. I find myself toying not with my brain, but rather with my mind in trying to comprehend place holistically. Components are good to know, but the whole is often greater than the sum of its parts.
* http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/232765-this-is-your-brain-on-physics

Curious, I ask, “How do you recognize a place?”
 
“That’s easy,” you say. “I just see familiar objects that are usually located at the same spatial coordinates they previously occupied. Seeing is the key for sighted people.  But, honestly, I have great admiration for anyone whose sight is highly impaired and for the sightless. I can’t imagine dealing with the world as efficiently as they do. Where’s their reference? How do they determine coordinates in a place where there are either diminished or missing visual signals?”
 
“Good question,” I respond. Now imagine the problem bats have. They seem to navigate at high speed among objects without bumping into them. Birds crash into dining room windows, but not a single bat has hit the house. Maybe Dieter Vandereist of the University of Antwerp is onto something in his recent research.* He thinks that bats use ‘templates’ to orient themselves by recognizing the echo signatures of objects. That finding ties memory to navigation. But how do the bats perceive the objects they use for locating place? Dr. Goerlitz of the University of Bristol appears to have discovered a key component of echo location, the process of sonar that bats use to avoid bumping into things in the dark.** After trying to fool bats by sending out sound through a speaker to mimic echoes, Goerlitz and his colleagues realized that real objects have a signature sound aperture, sound reflection angles that ‘impinge on a bat’s ears.’ It isn’t just the size of an object and the strength of its echo that tell a bat that there’s an obstacle in its path; it’s the combination of sound reflection angles that bats use to identify and avoid an object. The bats did not avoid the virtual objects the speakers projected into their flight paths. They didn’t see the virtual objects as real objects.”
 
“Whoa!” you exclaim. “This is far too much bat science for me. What’s the use in these studies, anyway?”
 
“I guess curiosity is prime, but there is at least another reason to understand how bats recognize and maneuver to and through a place. Simon Whiteley of the University of Strathclyde says that if we can understand how bats accomplish traveling in the dark, we can apply the process to robots. Egyptian fruit bats send out double clicks that last only a quarter of a millisecond that return with less acoustic energy. Somehow the bats amplify the echoes. From an application to robot awareness of place to human  awareness: Imagine a future technology that enables blind people to recognize place almost as easily as sighted people by ‘seeing’ as bats see, that is, by hearing their environment.”
 
“As you find your way home or to some other familiar place today, think about the clues you use to make the mental maps you have created to recognize and navigate. Enhancing your awareness of your clues won’t make you a neuroscientist, an acoustic engineer, or a biologist. It will, however, help to explain the way you connect with any place. And, since you are always ‘in a place,’ your awareness can teach you something about how (and why) you became familiar with wherever you are at the moment. Those who would connect to the present to ‘live in the present’ can find no better starting point than the place where the present occurs.”
 
*Dieter Vanderelst et al, Place recognition using batlike sonar, eLife (2016). DOI: 10.7554/eLife.14188; Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2016-08-echo-templates-aid-mental.html#jCp
** Holger R Goerlitz, Daria Genzel & Lutz Wiegrebe (2011): Bats‘ avoidance of real and virtual objects: implications for the sonar coding of object size. Behavioural Processes, online first. www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0376635711002245 ; Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2011-11-path.html#jCp
*** Tuesday 11 May, in IOP Publishing's Bioinspiration & Biomimetics http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-3190/5/2/026001

True story. Not kidding. Local baseball game in a very rural setting: Vast expense of land with no more than a village’s worth of population scattered widely along a single two-lane country road. Summer evening with a pleasant temperature: This rural area is in the local highlands. The field borders the property of the local church, a mountain stream, and a public Commons with a playground and picnic pavilion. Some fans, mostly relatives, and some locals are present. Playoff game in the area’s men’s league. Peaceful.

No fence in right. A visiting team player hits a long fly to right beyond the running reach of the right fielder. The baseball hits the ground just inside the foul line maybe 340 feet from home plate, far enough in most stadia to be a homerun over a typical right field fence. The ball rolls, and rolls, and rolls, coming to rest under a truck beyond the playing field. The umpire declares ground rule double. Okay. The play continues.
 
Later in the game a home team player hits a ball to right. He hits it well. The visiting right fielder goes back. The ball hits the top of his glove and lands on a dirt pile. He picks up the ball and throws hard back to an infielder. The umpire declares “homerun.”
 
Brouhaha. Big time. One fan, sitting along the third base line, there to support the visiting team, complains—loudly, very, very loudly. “How can you call the one a double and that one a home run? Go back to umpire school if you ever went to one!” Then—how should I write it? “!@!@!@@@@@!!!”
 
A home team fan, sitting far down the right field line, yells in return. The argument traverses the more than 300 feet between the two fans. It gets louder. The umpire, following league rules and standing closer to the irate visitor, takes offense at the language, and says, “Sir, you will have to leave.”
 
You can guess. The visiting fan goes into a tirade against the umpire and the distant home team fan simultaneously. Eventually, he walks away, but, instead of going to his car and leaving, he chooses to walk the right field line to confront the guy in the distance. They argue. People gather to see there’s no physical contact. The home team fan has to the uneducated eye an apparent heart attack. The ambulance arrives. The home team players and a couple of the visiting players try to restore some order, but the heart attack victim is one of the player’s relatives. That player needs corralling to keep him from going after the visiting fan in anger. The visiting fan gets into his car and leaves, still irate. The police arrive. No doubt someone will file a lawsuit. No doubt the police will have to investigate further. A couple of lawyers not even present at the game are going to make some money. No doubt.

Seems silly, doesn’t it? A brouhaha over an umpire’s call in a peaceful, beautiful rural setting has permanently altered lives. Not just the lives of the arguing fans, but the lives of their loved ones, also.
 
Again, the setting: Vast beautiful rural area with a gathering of the only species in the universe known to have the capacity for complex rational thought and the ability to overcome primal urges through peaceful conflict resolutions. A game—a seemingly pleasant diversion of exercise and fun to distract from the harsh realities of daily life—takes place beside what are literally a “babbling brook,” a country church, and a village Commons.
 
Get Google Earth now: Pull away at increasing distances. The field gets smaller and smaller. You see the entire village, the sparsely populated landscape, and farmland. Look down till all of the rural area occupies no more than a pixel on your screen. See that tiny pixel? Peaceful no more. Beautiful no more.

Now pull away even farther till Earth occupies a single pixel. Brouhahas in a pixel.

The next architectural wonder in Dubai will be an observation tower designed by Santiago Calatrava. It’s a new “Eiffel Tower,” more graceful looking than the original and taller. It’s an observation tower that will exceed the height of previous structures. If it were much taller, visitors might need a space suit.
 
It will, like the Eifel Tower, become “iconic.” Strange. In a land surrounded by a culture opposed to icons, a building will become one. But that’s us. Just about all of us have something we consider iconic, and now we have icons on our monitors, phones, and tablets. We’re long past the simple use of a saint’s image. Even our fictional heroes and heroines are iconic. We use the word freely: Iconic music, iconic musicians, iconic art, iconic this, or that, or something else. Icons are more than likenesses in a stained glass window; they represent, if not the best of a kind, then the culturally accepted standard of a kind.
 
Build Calatrava’s Eiffel into this. Mere size warrants iconic status. “Taller,” “larger,” “more voluminous,” and even “long lived,” these quantities qualify iconic. Wait! I have an idea. I know why we have so many icons. Earth is an iconic human planet. My goodness! We’re living on an icon.