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b"If the 19th century belonged to engineering, and the 20th century to chemistry and physics, then the 21st might belong to biology. (The OECD said as much in a 2012 forum.) Increasingly, we\\u2019re coming to understand the nature of humans as biological creatures, including the unconscious, \\u201cspooky\\u201d wiring that shapes our behavior more than we know or are perhaps comfortable with. We process 11 million bits of information every second, and 10 million of them are visual. We react to images much faster than we do text, and often we form emotional impressions before we consciously reverse-engineer a rational explanation for why it made us feel the way it did.\\nInsights like from cognitive science have made their way into nearly every discipline\\u2014including, very prominently, advertising and product design. The stunning rise of Apple is all about psychology. Car companies get it, too. There\\u2019s one big \\u201cbut\\u201d there, though: one design field in which we\\u2019ve been remarkably slow to absorb the lessons of modern psychology. And that field is architecture.\\nThe funny thing is, we used to incorporate those lessons into architecture and urban design. We just didn\\u2019t know we were doing it. But unconscious lessons, arrived at by trial-and-error, about what kinds of places make people comfortable and bring out the best in us are responsible for the pleasing harmony and coherence of the traditional urbanism you can find in pre-modern cities all over the world.\\nIt's the reason traditional buildings so often evoke human faces in their proportions and door/window placement.\\nIt\\u2019s the reason unfamiliar places can be navigable and familiar to us even when they\\u2019re foreign. It\\u2019s the reason Ann Sussman, on a visit to Copenhagen, thought:\\n\\u201cI don\\u2019t speak Danish. There\\u2019s no signage. Yet I know exactly where to go, and I feel more at home here than back home in Boston.\\u201d\\nSussman is a co-author (with Katie Chen) of a controversial 2017 essay in Common Edge titled \\u201cThe Mental Disorders That Gave Us Modern Architecture.\\u201d In it, Sussman and Chen examine the sharp contrast between post-World War I modernist architecture and traditional European architecture, through the lens of the psychology of two of Modernism\\u2019s pioneers: Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier.\\nGropius, a World War I veteran, almost certainly suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a diagnosis that would not be available until after his death in 1969. Le Corbusier was probably autistic\\u2014again, something that was not understood during his lifetime, but that we can retroactively see the hallmarks of. In both cases, Sussman says, these men seem to have been deeply uncomfortable with the kinds of traditional urban environments that pervaded the Europe they grew up in.\\n\\u201cLe Corbusier hated the Paris street,\\u201d for example, says Sussman; he found it overwhelming and overstimulating. Gropius actually designed some features of his Lincoln, Massachusetts house in ways that evoke a World War I bunker. The house has many of the hallmarks of modernist design: you can\\u2019t find the front door at a glance. The building stands aloof from the world around it instead of engaging passersby and drawing them in.\\nIt would be simplistic to blame all of modernism on the mental quirks of two of its visionaries. But Sussman\\u2019s observations provide a fascinating springboard for understanding how traditional architecture is so effortlessly pro-social, and how much of that legacy we\\u2019ve tragically left behind in the 20th and 21st centuries\\u2014an aesthetic movement turbocharged by the policy decisions that led us to radically redesign much of our world around the automobile.\\nListen to Chuck Marohn and Ann Sussman on the Strong Towns Podcast for a discussion of this shift and more, including:\\nWhy we're wired to perceive faces in building facades.\\nWhat the ruins of Pompeii and 21st-century Disney World can each teach us about designing pro-social environments that inherently bring out the best in us.\\nHow the trauma of World War I"