Your Sunday Brain Mix: 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.

Using virtual reality and brain scanning, participants learnt new procedures and then had to select them to complete various tasks and they saw an interplay with the hippocampus and the motor cortex that actually initiates the action.

This challenges classical models of memory and shows how instrumental the hippocampus is for all sorts of memory be that linguistic, navigation, or our own autobiographical memories.

Indeed another piece of research recently published also showed that the hippocampus was involved in another area we do not associate with this seahorse shaped region deep in our brains: namely social interactions.

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New Targets for the Social Brain

Various aspects of the social brain are regularly researched, and you will know that I have regularly reported on various interesting new research on this - and I have also reviewed the social brain itself. But research moves quickly and this new piece out gives us more food for thought, particularly on the regions involved.