It’s far more mathematical than expected.
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00:00Our brains hold a map of everything we know and experience, right?
00:07So does that mean if we could read that map, we could see everything we know?
00:10Well, that's what neurobiologists say they may be able to achieve, and their discovery
00:14seems to reveal how human beings internalize physical space.
00:18According to the research, when you enter a new space, your brain collects neurons to
00:21create a physical memory of that space.
00:23ScienceAlert reports those neurons are then arranged into networks called place fields,
00:27full of place cells.
00:28So researchers tracked the neural activity of rats as they experienced a new space, then
00:32modeling that activity using geometric mathematics.
00:35They came up with something that looks like this in a 2D space, though if this were 3D,
00:39each triangular subsection would actually be the same size.
00:42As the mice moved through the space, place cells were immediately created, then growing
00:46more detailed and becoming more complex as more information was taken in about the space.
00:50With the researchers writing about it, quote, our study demonstrates that the brain does
00:54not always act in a linear manner.
00:56Instead, neural networks function along an expanding curve, which can be analyzed and
01:00understood using hyperbolic geometry and information theory, meaning we're finally getting an
01:05esoteric understanding of just how our brains understand space, bringing us one step closer
01:09to unraveling a map of our memories.