You arrive in Ubud, Bali. The air is thick with the scent of incense and fresh flowers from morning ceremonies. Children ride past on motorbikes in matching school uniforms. Women in lace kebayas carry woven baskets of fruit offerings across the street to the temple. You breathe in deeply, and something in you softens. You’ve only just arrived, but a part of you already feels at home.
This is place attachment. It’s not just about liking a place. It’s about feeling emotionally connected to it. And neuroscience is helping us understand why these connections can be so powerful.
What is Place Attachment
Place attachment is the emotional bond that forms between people and specific locations. While it might sound poetic, it’s a deeply biological experience. Neuroscience shows that place attachment activates multiple regions of the brain including:
Amygdala which is responsible for emotional processing
Ventral striatum which handles reward and motivation
Hippocampus which encodes long-term memory and spatial navigation
The hippocampus in particular plays a central role. When we revisit a place or spend extended time somewhere, our brain builds a cognitive map of that environment [1]. We associate it with memories, people, smells, routines, and emotions. This mental mapping helps us feel safe and oriented, laying the foundation for attachment.
Why Travel Deepens Emotional Bonds
When you return to a favorite destination or spend more than a few days in a place, your brain has time to encode and connect the sensory and emotional experiences to that geography. These repeated interactions with a location help strengthen your neural pathways associated with safety, familiarity, and joy.
A study published in Cognitive, Affective & Behavioral Neuroscience found that environments connected with personal significance activate the brain’s reward circuitry including the ventral striatum and medial prefrontal cortex in similar ways to social bonding and nostalgia [2].
Place Attachment Builds a Sense of Belonging
In our increasingly mobile world, a sense of home can feel fragmented. But place attachment offers a portable form of belonging. You may not have grown up in Portugal or Vietnam or Argentina, but after enough sunsets, markets, meals, and conversations in one place, your nervous system recognizes it as safe and significant.
This isn’t just an emotional impression. A 2019 fMRI study showed that people experience different neural activity in the default mode network (associated with introspection and memory) when viewing familiar vs. unfamiliar places [3]. Simply put, our brains register familiar places as emotionally rich and meaningful.
Connection to Self and World
Place attachment supports both personal reflection and global empathy. When you become emotionally bonded with a place, you start to care more about its culture, ecology, and people. You notice changes over time. You build friendships. You become a steward of that environment in your own way.
At the same time, being deeply present in a location helps you learn more about yourself. Which places make you feel most alive or at peace? Which ones overwhelm or exhaust you? Noticing these patterns can help you make intentional choices about how and where you travel.
How to Cultivate Place Attachment While Traveling
Stay longer in one place to allow your brain and body to settle
Develop small rituals like visiting the same café or walking the same path daily
Engage with your surroundings by learning local history, language, or cultural practices
Notice your emotional responses to different places and settings
Journal or voice-note your experiences to reinforce memory and meaning
Return to places you love and track how your relationship to them evolves
Travel isn’t just about ticking off destinations.
It’s about building relationships with the world. The emotional bonds we form with places stay with us long after the trip ends. And thanks to neuroscience, we’re learning that these bonds are not only real but vital to our sense of identity, meaning, and connection.
References
Epstein, R., & Vass, L. K. (2014). Neural systems for landmark-based wayfinding in humans. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 369(1635). https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2013.0564
Ferris, J., et al. (2019). Nostalgia and reward circuits: An fMRI study of the neurobiological underpinnings of meaningful place memory. Cognitive, Affective & Behavioral Neuroscience, 19, 1325–1341. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13415-019-00726-0
Brodt, S., et al. (2018). Fast track to the neocortex: A memory engram in the posterior parietal cortex. Science, 362(6418), 1045–1048. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aau2528
