
There’s no homunculus in our brain who guides us - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/81/maps/theres-no-homunculus-in-our-brain-who-guides-us
======
tzs
I wonder if this works differently for people who are Guugu Yimithirr or
Sambals?

Guugu Yimithirr is an aboriginal tribe in Australia, and Sambals are an ethnic
group in the Philippines.

The Guugu Yimithirr and Sambali languages use absolute directions rather than
relative directions to specify where things are in relation to other things.

For example, imagine standing in the south end of hallway that runs
north/south, telling someone where the bathroom is. We'd say something like it
being the second door on the left.

A Guugu Yimithirr or Sambal would say it is the second door on the West.
Sambali does have words for left, right, front, back but they are mostly just
used for describing things on the body, like a left hand.

Another interesting use of absolute rather than relative direction in Guugu
Yimithirr is how they visualize time. Researches showed Guugu Yimithirr
pictures showing someone throughout that person's life and asked the Guugu
Yimithirr to order them chronologically.

When they did this, the arranged the pictures from east to west, with youngest
on the east. So if the person doing this was sitting at a table facing North,
they arranged the pictures right to left. If they were facing South, they
arrange the pictures left to right.

More detail on Sambali in this Reddit comment from a native speaker [1].

[1]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1m6l0b/til_t...](https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1m6l0b/til_there_are_languages_without_the_terms_left/)

~~~
badrabbit
Because the sun rises in the east and sets in the west I guess? Very
remarkable!

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filoeleven
I read years ago about an anklet that contained 16 tiny vibrating motors, and
whichever one was north facing at any given moment would pulse rhythmically.
Wearing this device for a few days resulted in the conscious signal fading,
but a wild increase in the accuracy of the wearer’s mental mapping and
navigation abilities.

Seems like a fun thing to try out, and probably simple to build.

~~~
rincebrain
There was an interesting experiment about this, and about the effects when you
stopped wearing it (people's internal navigation systems took a serious hit).
[1]

[1] - [https://www.wired.com/2007/04/esp/](https://www.wired.com/2007/04/esp/)

~~~
_Microft
I knew about the feelSpace belt already but this was a very interesting read
and a lot broader than I had expected it to be. Do you want to submit the
article here? You would have my upvote right away.

~~~
_Microft
I have submitted it myself now. I hope you don't mind.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22393300](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22393300)

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ivanbakel
I'm surprised scientists would ever theorize that way finding is allo centric.

I've often "stitched" together two areas that I knew were close simply by
walking from one to the other for the first time. After doing that, I tend to
stick to the first such route, even if I am consciously aware that there's a
more efficient one. Is that not a common experience? Does anyone think about
space in a way that they can plot everything absolutely and accurately
speculate about routes they've never taken?

~~~
saltcured
Your experience sounds to me like modular mapping. I also tend to have
abstracted, modular mental maps. They are modular due to gaps in my knowledge
or other practical reasons (compression?). I don't think this modularity says
anything about ones propensity to plan or navigate in a detached, third-person
perspective versus in a first-person perspective. Clearly, with a more
abstract mental map, you cannot plan in purely geometric terms. But, that
doesn't distinguish whether or not you think about your environment in a
holistic, out-of-time, out-of-body perspective.

I am sure this varies by person as well, but I think people in grid-oriented
cities or in relatively flat, open terrain are more likely to navigate and
plan in a concretely geometric way. You can reason about and infer paths on a
2D plane and benefit from having a good knowledge of relative cartesian
positions for different locations. You don't need detailed knowledge of other
routing constraints when the paths are more interchangeable.

If limited by transportation modes, you might be biased towards a more
hierarchical mental model. I.e. I know some areas abstractly by the highway,
exit, and local neighborhood without a clear model for how (if at all) several
such areas connect together via local roads. Users of public transit systems
are likely to have similarly hierarchical knowledge of trains, buses, and
transfer stations. Popular transit system maps are greatly simplified to show
this abstract topology without the full spatial complexity of the real
physical system.

When faced with challenging topography and circuitous routes, I think a more
abstract topological model is more common. I have a rough sense of position
along a route in terms of percentage completion or relative ordering of
landmarks. This includes some topological knowledge such as trail junctions,
water crossings, or ridges and saddles along this same abstract route. I don't
retain a detailed memory of every twist or switchback in a convoluted trail. I
can plan to walk around a lake or the rim of a valley without detailed memory
of the shoreline or cliff edges themselves.

However, I do also have a pretty good sense of my real orientation, i.e. where
is north, where is the sun, which way does the surface tilt, and which bearing
would take me towards other places I know (if I could fly). I have used that
to speculate and plan routes cross country without any visible trail or trail
markers. But, I am not foolhardy, so I do consult maps as well!

------
iamacyborg
Related article about London Black Cab drivers brains

[https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/london-taxi-
memor...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/london-taxi-memory/)

> Maguire discovered that London taxi drivers had more gray matter in their
> posterior hippocampi than people who were similar in age, education and
> intelligence, but who did not drive taxis. In other words, taxi drivers had
> plumper memory centers than their peers. It seemed that the longer someone
> had been driving a taxi, the larger his hippocampus, as though the brain
> expanded to accommodate the cognitive demands of navigating London's
> streets.

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todd8
The article is about how we navigate. I've noticed that some people are quite
good at giving concise understandable directions and other are virtually
unable to describe in any useful way how to drive a route they drive every
day.

I knew an intelligent, successful person that would give directions like "Turn
at the stop sign two streets before the yellow house that has the flag pole.
Then keep going, but at the train tracks you've gone too far so before that
turn at the light. After Elm street, well right there they were going to build
a house on that corner, but they didn't because the husband got a different
job in Ohio and I didn't know them that well when they moved away. But anyway
make a turn, right no left well the road kind of goes right but stay to the
left, but not at the red sign in front of the old hardware store, instead I
drive to the next street.", etc.

~~~
jvanderbot
This person navigates by visual sequences and landmarks. Others navigate by
direction and distance. You may be interested to learn that there is a large
gender-correllated divide between the two methods. Learning about these two
methods has made me much better about communicating directions, because
unfortunately people dont often grok the "other" way.

It is tempting to tell a "just so" story about this, but I do think direction
/ distance instructions helps two groups rendesvous or coordinate in new
areas, whereas landmarks are natural ways to find things in known areas.

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/14607168/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/14607168/)

~~~
GuB-42
These two ways of navigating are formalized in pilot training (VFR).

The first one involves landmarks, and the training consists of finding good
ones. They need to be highly visible, not ambiguous, and preferably referenced
on maps. Following highways is a good strategy.

The second, called dead reckoning, uses the watch and compass. With knowledge
of your airspeed, wind speed, and heading, you can estimate your position
after a set amount of time.

Usually, a combination of the two is used: dead reckoning between landmarks.

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carapace
I don't really understand what the argument is about here.

Different people organize their knowledge in different ways.

From cybernetics we have the Law Of Regulatory Models, to wit: every good
regulator of a system must be (contain) a model of that system. (Conant and
Ashby, 1982)
[http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ASC/LAW_MODEL.html](http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ASC/LAW_MODEL.html)
(In humans this model (in the mind, there are others, e.g. homeostasis) is
called the "ego".) A mobile entity situated in a physical environment and
capable of navigating around it in repeatable ways is also a system so the
regulator (in the brain of the entity) _must_ contain a _model_ of the
physical environment.

I would be really surprised if, at any time, using any method, you could find
anything that looked like a map inside the brain of a human, even while
visualizing a map.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeostasis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeostasis)

~~~
kyuudou
>I would be really surprised if, at any time, using any method, you could find
anything that looked like a map inside the brain of a human, even while
visualizing a map.

No but there's probably a specific part of the brain that does deal with
visual mapping.

I read this excellent article some years back about the test that aspiring
London cabbies, the ones that drive the black cars, take and the preparation
required "The Knowledge" to pass this difficult test. Since London's road
system is so byzantine and requires lots of insider knowledge, it is unlikely
that the cabbies will in the near future ever be supplanted by companies like
Uber or Lyft.

Anyway turns out the gray matter in the posterior and anterior hippocampus of
some of these guys were tested before and after studying for the test and
there was significant growth. Perhaps this would be the place to start to pin
down a neural equivalent to a real-world map.

[https://www.wired.com/2011/12/london-taxi-driver-
memory/](https://www.wired.com/2011/12/london-taxi-driver-memory/)

~~~
carapace
> there's probably a specific part of the brain that does deal with visual
> mapping.

Sure! In fact, you could say that the eyes are the part of the brain that has
a close isomorphism to (a tiny subset of the EM manifestation of) the real
world. Once you get about 2-3 cm from the retinas, though, I think that
information has been encoded in ways that make it unrecognizable from the
outside. I'm saying I doubt we'll ever be able to decode a model (let alone a
map) of London from studying a cab driver's hippocampus.

~~~
hackinthebochs
This is probably not true. There have been experiments where faces have been
reconstructed by measuring the neural responses of monkey's when seeing faces:
[https://www.bbc.com/news/science-
environment-40131242](https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-40131242)

~~~
carapace
Wow, that's cool! Cheers!

I have to adjust me "priors", as a Bayesian might say. Still, monkeys aren't
humans, and faces aren't London. Recognizing faces and their expressions has
been a thing since faces first evolved, eh?

~~~
hackinthebochs
Place cells have recently made the rounds in popular science which are
basically the cognitive topological maps being discussed. The fidelity of
these maps remain to be seen. Some examples:
[https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms14531](https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms14531)
[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-08550-1](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-08550-1)

