As scientists, doctors and journalists write about the process of human thought, humanity as a whole now knows much more about how our brains work — and how the physical components of our minds can sometimes bring us to unexpected places. If you’ve ever read a collection of Oliver Sacks’s case studies, for instance, you’re aware of the different ways that a brain injury can alter someone’s perceptions of the world.
How does human cognition map onto, well, actual maps? That’s a question the Harvard physicist John Edward Huth takes on in the new book A Sense of Space: A Local’s Guide to a Flat Earth, the Edge of the Cosmos, and Other Curious Places. In an excerpt from A Sense of Space published at Literary Hub, Huth explored the science — and the logistics — of just how human thought works in tandem with a given location.
Huth cites the example of waking up in a hotel room in the middle of the night and trying to turn on the light. A bedside lamp or light switch is probably not going to be in the same place where it is at home — which can lead to a system of trial and error as you try to match your sense of where something is with your sense of where you currently are. Huth describes this as “witnessing my brain ‘trying on’ different cognitive maps for a good fit.”
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Mark Solms on bringing Freud’s writing to a contemporary audienceThat, Huth writes, also shows the importance of the hippocampus to the way we perceive the world. That part of the brain houses, as he describes it, “memories and a mental image of an environment.” That’s why damage to the hippocampus — whether from an injury or a condition like Alzheimer’s disease — can have wide-ranging effects. And it can also help us understand why some of our memories are inexorably associated with specific places.
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