Weekly Review: Building Cognitive Maps, Your Social Brain, and on Being Ignored or Gossiped About

Today I’ll focus on some new research with a new way to think of brain regions — specifically the hippocampus which has now been shown to be important in functions that we do not normally associate with this region — namely action and social processes.

Building Cognitive Maps

When you go somewhere, especially when walking, your brain’s navigation system activates. More so, of course, if you’re not using any GPS device.

This has long been documented and is a key function of the brain and the famed hippocampus is primarily responsible for this navigation, saving maps of the environment and having various dedicated cells to things such as position and movement.

The hippocampus is also critical for memory formation in general but the working assumption was that it is not involved in memorising procedures i.e. habitual actions that we perform.

Not so according to research just released that show that the hippocampus is involved in creating and saving cognitive maps for actions by researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Germany.