Why Memories of Childhood Places Can Seem So Magical
Can a fondness for the places in our lives be traced to our ancestral past?
Updated March 6, 2026 | Reviewed by Lybi Ma
Please engage in a brief exercise: Try to recall a place that was important to you as a child. It can be any place—a favorite place to play, a hiding place, or maybe even a place that you were not supposed to enter. It can be indoors or outdoors. Close your eyes as you think about this special place, and see if you can revisit the sounds, sights, and smells that it conjures for you. Please pay special attention to the feelings that this place inspired in you as a child.
If you are like most people, you will find that your favorite place has several predictable “psychological” features.
Evolution Has Shaped Our Preferences for Places
Research by environmental psychologists has confirmed that the most attractive natural environments contain features that are evolutionarily beneficial for the survival of early humans, such as running water and open meadows surrounded by woods. People who were drawn to the ‘right’ places did better than those who were not, and over time, their genes were favored over those who spent too much time in sparser, more barren landscapes.
But places also exhibit more abstract evolutionarily relevant features; being drawn to the ‘right’ psychological features of places may have been just as important for our ancestors’ survival. Places that lack these inviting psychological features can be boring to us, and they may even set off our “creep detectors.”
British geographer Jay Appleton described two physical qualities that determine whether a place is attractive or frightening to us: Prospect and refuge.
Refuge means having a secure, protected place to hide where one can be sheltered from danger, while prospect refers to one’s clear, unobstructed view of the surrounding environment. In the words of Appleton, we love these places because they are, evolutionarily speaking, places where ‘you can see without being seen, and eat without being eaten.’ American landscape architect Randolph Hester has referred to such places as ‘a womb with a view.’
Our love of such spaces shows up everywhere. Universally speaking, children love building ‘forts’ and playing in enclosed spaces such as cardboard boxes, tree houses, and in bushes and dense vegetation where they feel hidden. The concepts of prospect and refuge can explain the magical allure of these spaces, the coziness of the memories we associate with them, and the richness of detail that can be recalled about them decades later.
And our fondness for hiding places persists throughout life.
An upper-floor office with a window is a highly desired job perk, and people dining in restaurants usually prefer tables in corners or nooks, especially when these locations allow them to sit with their back against a wall. We usually settle for tables in the middle of the room only when all of the most desirable seats have already been taken.
Hence, the optimally comfortable place offers a lot of prospect and refuge for us; places that provide very little prospect and refuge make us feel exposed and vulnerable.
Research has confirmed that places with bad combinations of prospect and refuge are perceived as unsafe and dangerous because they can provide hiding places for creepy-crawly people or things that might be lying in wait to get us.
Scary places also lack what environmental psychologists call legibility . Legibility reflects the ease with which a place can be recognized, organized into a pattern, and recalled: a place where we can wander around without getting lost and a place where escape can be easy if necessary.
In short, the next time you find yourself in a place that ‘just feels right’, pause and reflect on exactly what it is about that place that makes you feel so at ease, and maybe enjoy a bit of nostalgia as you reconnect with your inner child.
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Frank McAndrew, Ph.D., is the Cornelia H. Dudley Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Knox College.
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.