La geometria della mente

Two facts: brain processes a lot of informatio every second, and mostly this information is
implicit and unconscious and we can't access it directly. For instance there are parts of our
brain that monitor blood pressure that we do not control, and the same goes for the
neurons in our visual cortex that constantly work, and for the part of our brain that
processes the syntax of sentences. These are some examples of "implicit learning". On
the other hand, there's another form of storing information called "declarative learning",
which is all that we can learn directly and link rationally (for example we know who Einstein
is, we understand some aspects of the Universe...).

We create cognitive maps not only of the environment (not only spatial maps), but also
conceptual. There are two regions of the brain that are very important in playing this role.

1) Hippocampus. From studies on mammals (especially on rodents) we know that the

hippocampus hosts "place cells", neurons which increase the fire in relation to space.
(experiment with a rat doing a foraging task)
Entorhinal cortex. It hosts "grid cells" that also help creating spatial maps but cover
broader activation fields and organize in hexagonal grids.

The patient Henry Molaison was treated because of seizures and his two hippocampi were
removed. He recovered from epilepsy, but there was collateral damage: he wasn't able to
develop declarative knowledge anymore (that is, to form memories), even though he could
store unconscious information. Therefore, it seems likely that hippocampus is the key to
declarative learning. An important question is: to hippocampal neurons encode not only
space, but also time? Experiments on rats running on treadmills (so that the position stays
the same) show that some neurons fire in sequence. However, these "time cells" are also
"place cells", because they also fire when the rat leaves the treadmill. Therefore these
cells encode variations of dimensions. Other experiments were run on athe cognitive
response of rats to pitch.

Two ways to study cognitive maps in humans is by fMRI and VR. It was shown that if one
moves across the diagonal of the hexagon (that corresponds to a specific region in space),
one encounters more firing neurons. An experiment links space processing to scent
processing (navigating space requires the same brain structures needed to "navigate
odours"): people were asked to smell different compositions of pine and banana scents.

2) Parietal cortex. It accounts for the encoding of spatial information with respect to the
person. Positioning objects is possible allocentrically (that is, without any dependancy from
the viewer) or egocentrically, which is what the parietal cortex is for.

Algorithms exists based on machine learning that read brain signals that process distance,
both spatial and temporal. It is particularly interesting that the same algorithm is able to tell
if you're looking at someone that is emotionally close to you or not.

A possible hypotesis is that the more human brain gets complex with evolution, the more
you start thinking about abstract concepts and stop creating new brain structures. Instead,
humans adapted pre-existing brain structures (for example, place and grid cells for
managing social networks and relationships). In fact, experiments have shown that people
tend to link space to time using gestures when asked to tell a story (revealing a so-called
"mental timeline", for example moving hands to the left when talking about past events and
to the right when talking about future events). People were also asked to list numbers
between 1 and 20 in random order and the movement of their eyes was tracked with
infrared rays, showing that when switching to a smaller number eyes tend to move to the
left and vice versa. This shows that we generally use brain structures related to space to
process things that are not spatial.

Dementia. How does someone realize that they have Alzheimer's disease? One of the first
symptoms is getting lost, and they gradually lose their cognitive maps and their capability
of storing declarative information. In fact, mice models of AD (created by accumulating tau
protein on brain tissues) show that the illness starts in the entorhinal cortex. Researchers
are trying to find non invasive technology to use the activity of grid cells to diagnose AD at
early stages. Anyway, it is hard because EEG works best on the surface of the brain, but
hippocamus and entorhinal cortex lie in the middle and the signal from there is noisy.

AI. Cognitive maps representable in low dimensional schemes (like space) allow
extrapolation. For example, hotels generally have SPA's underground at -1 floor, even
though hotels are all different one from the other and can be described with many more
dimensions, but we can "extrapolate", that is generalize, these unidimensional pattern to
all hotels. Conversely, it is possible to reduce the dimensionality of a problem by
interpolation, in order to build artificial intelligences.