From Delancey Place:
Today's selection -- from Wayfinding by M. R. O'Connor.
The brain’s hippocampus navigates both physical space and social space:
"Scientists have created a multitude of categories to try and [characterize navigation in humans and other mammals]. Vector navigation involves moving along a constant bearing relative to a cue that could be magnetic, celestial, or environmental. Piloting is defined as navigating relative to familiar landmarks. True navigation generally means wayfinding toward a distant, unseen goal. Dead reckoning, also called path integration, is keeping track of every stage of a journey in order to compute one's location.
"As it turns out, both rats and humans are the worst at path integration, which is precisely the kind of navigation that cognitive-map theorists propose the hippocampus does. In Eichenbaum's opinion, this is extremely problematic. 'One of my complaints about the path integration theory is how bad we are at it,' he said. Dead reckoning is applicable in short distances at local scales, but it is a strategy that isn't actually advisable in real-world navigation because it is so prone to accumulated error (except, it would seem, for those who have mastered complex environments like the Arctic tundra or Australian desert). Can the navigational capacities of humans be fully explained by the cognitive map theory of the hippocampus, or is there more going on?
"Eichenbaum most readily describes navigation as what it is not. 'I think navigation is not about Cartesian maps,' he offered. 'It's a story or memory problem.' The hippocampus is not so much about spatial memory, he said, as it is about 'memory space.' Parsing this distinction is important. True navigation, in his opinion, is what happens when we travel to an unseen place. It requires planning a future (envisioning the place we want to go), calculating or remembering the route to get there (a sequence or narrative), and then orienting to ensure we are on the right track, often by comparing our memory (or perhaps a description we've been told) to our real-time perception of movement through space. 'There are huge memory demands to solving the problem of navigation,' he said. 'Memory steps in at every moment.'...
....MUCH MORE
