For You formed my inward parts; You knitted me together in my mother's womb.
Psalm 139:13
"To navigate an environment, the brain seems to generate a mental
representation of its surroundings. This is often called a cognitive map.
In 1971, neuroscientists John O'Keefe and Jonathan Dostrovsky found the first evidence for this map in the brain.
O'Keefe and Dostrovsky had discovered place cells, and some have argued that these cells represent our internal map.
In a given environment, specific place cells correspond to specific
locations, and those neurons in a rat remain fixed on those locations
until the rat goes to a new area. Then the place cells remap to the new
space.
In 2005, researchers discovered another group of neurons that behave like place cells.
These neurons are located in the entorhinal cortex, an area of the
brain next to the hippocampus. Among other functions, the entorhinal
cortex operates as a network hub for memory, navigation, and time
perception.
Imagine how this plays out in a person’s head.
---As he walks across a large room, a given neuron in the entorhinal cortex
fires after every three meters.
---A different neuron fires more
often—approximately every meter—while another is clocking his progress
every 10 meters, and so on.
---Any location in the space elicits a unique
pattern of firing grid cells, which in turn leads to the firing of a
unique place cell.
---This combination of cells, firing sequence, and
location forms a cognitive map in the person’s head, allowing him to
interpret his surroundings in order to move across the room.
---The
integration of grid cells and place cells seems to be a key part of the
machinery behind someone’s sense of their surrounding space.
***But given the complexity of the cognitive map——it’s easy to infer that our physical existence
resulted from incredible design rather than inadvertent or evolutionary
causes." ICR