Recent studies by MIT neuroscientists have found that the brain uses the same cognitive representations both to physically navigate in space and mentally. This means that when you think about the route to work or the supermarket, your brain activates cognitive maps stored in the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex.
How does mental navigation or the “Google Maps” of your brain work?
Our brain creates cognitive maps not only when we physically move, but also when we think about sequences of experiences, without any physical movement or sensory input. An experiment with animals demonstrated that the entorhinal cortex hosts a cognitive map of the experiences lived by animals as they used a joystick to explore a sequence of images. These cognitive maps are also activated when the animals think about these sequences, even without seeing the images.
This study is the first to show the cellular basis of mental simulation and imagination in a non-spatial domain through the activation of a cognitive map in the entorhinal cortex.
Mehrdad Jazayeriassociate professor of brain and cognitive sciences and a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, says
: “These cognitive maps are recruited to perform mental navigation, without any sensory input or motor output. We can see a signature of this map present itself as the animal mentally goes through these experiences.”
The researchers now plan to study what happens in the brain if the landmarks are not evenly distributed, or if they are arranged in a ring. They also hope to record brain activity in the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex as the animals first learn to perform the navigation task.
Have you ever tried to remember a route without physically moving? Tell us your experience in the comments!
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