The Brain Maps Out Ideas and Memories Like Spaces | Quanta Magazine

Behind the scenes, our sensory areas ceaselessly compute with probabilities, and only the most likely model makes it into our consciousness. It is the brain’s projections that ultimately give meaning to the flow of data that reaches us from our senses.

When you think about the world, you are recalling sequences of patterns that correspond to the way the objects in the world are and how they behave, not how they appear through any particular sense at any point in time.

story structure may also be the basic manner in which brain organizes experience.

Neuroscientists are building a powerful case that metaphor is far more important to human cognition than has ever been imagined. Many argue it’s the fundamental way that brains understand abstract concepts, such as love, joy, society and economy. It’s simply not possible to comprehend these ideas in any useful sense, then, without attaching them to

Many psychologists and neuroscientists posit that human learning and memory takes place within what are called “conceptual networks” of linked ideas.