Creation Moment 9/17/2024 - Mental Maps

I will praise Thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made:
marvellous are Thy works;
Psalm 139:14

"As you travel your usual route to work or the grocery store, your

brain engages cognitive maps stored in your hippocampus and entorhinal cortex. These maps store information about paths you have taken and locations you have been to before, so you can navigate whenever you go there.

New research from MIT has found that such mental maps are also created and activated when you merely think about sequences of experiences, in the absence of any physical movement or sensory input.

This is the first study to show the cellular basis of mental simulation and imagination in a nonspatial domain through activation of a cognitive map in the entorhinal cortex.
"These cognitive maps are being recruited to perform mental navigation, without any sensory input or motor output. We are able to see a signature of this map presenting itself as the animal is going through these experiences mentally," says Mehrdad Jazayeri, an associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences, a member of MIT's McGovern Institute for Brain Research, and the senior author of the study.

A great deal of work in animal models and humans has shown that representations of physical locations are stored in the hippocampus, a small seahorse-shaped structure, and the nearby entorhinal cortex. These representations are activated whenever an animal moves through a space that 

--it has been in before, 

--just before it traverses the space, 

--or when it is asleep.
"The brain goes through these bumps of activity at the expected time

when the intervening images would have passed by the animal's eyes, which they never did," Jazayeri says. "And the timing between these bumps, critically, was exactly the timing that the animal would have expected to reach each of those, which in this case was 0.65 seconds."

The researchers also showed that the speed of the mental simulation was related to the animals' performance on the task: When they were a little late or early in completing the task, their brain activity showed a corresponding change in timing." 

MedicalXpress