Neuroscience reveals how building design shapes our behavioral, brain, and body responses I approach my research in an interdisciplinary manner because that is how my mind works. When I was growing up, I looked for patterns in my environment to help me make sense of my surroundings. When I was 2 years old, my parents took me on a car trip through Tasmania, an island state southeast of mainland Australia. I had not started speaking; yet, out of nowhere, I began singing “E-I-E-I-O” from the nursery rhyme Old MacDonald Had a Farm. This refrain turned into a reoccurring performance at random intervals, which caused my parents some confusion. Then they detected a pattern. The melody chimed from the backseat each time that we passed signage for a McDonald’s restaurant. Often, the melody alerted them before they had noticed the sign along the road. A few years later, my kindergarten teachers reported that I would spend hours creating my own environments with wooden building blocks. Unlike other children, who would flit between activities, I fixated on incrementally building my own world and filtered out all other distractions around me.