Meetings and Your Brain: How Physical Spaces Change How We Pay Attention

I am writing this from a coffee shop, sipping mint tea in the company of the low hum of conversation and the distant buzz of a coffee grinder — an everyday kind of experience that hasn’t been available to me for more than a year. I knew that it was doing good things for my mood, but — as Tim Harford, author of The Undercover Economist explained in a column in the Financial Times — it turns out that it’s also good for my brain.

The fact that our experience is what determines how we create and retain memories is at the root of the argument for braiding rewarding experiences into our meetings. But experience alone is not enough, Harford wrote. “A new physical space seems to be important if our brains are to pay attention.”