Abbas and colleagues provide a broad physiological map of neuroarchitecture, assembling research on architectural perception, emotion, navigation, learning and healing around structures including the anterior cingulate cortex and parahippocampal place area. The paper’s iconic idea is that architectural experience is not a superficial aesthetic reception but a distributed cognitive event involving orientation, memory, affect, empathy and sensorimotor interpretation. As a narrative review, it synthesises findings concerning light, colour, spatial layout, cognitive maps, place cells and wayfinding, extending them toward educational environments, ageing and therapeutic design. Its value lies primarily in conceptual accessibility and interdisciplinary connection rather than in establishing causal design rules: heterogeneous evidence from neuroscience, architecture and environmental psychology is brought into one explanatory landscape. The methodological operation is synthetic, translating specialised neural mechanisms into spatial questions without a single experimental protocol. Its wider bridge is to embodied cognition, where architectural perception becomes inseparable from movement, anticipation and situated action, and where the built environment participates continuously in the organisation of cognitive experience.
