The Brain Navigates New Spaces by 'Darting' Between Reality and Mental Maps
18 comments
·October 8, 2025delichon
cantor_S_drug
Is this also the reason why darting eyes movements can be linked (and is predictive of or can detect) to mental health issues like schizophrenia, etc?
mallowdram
It's a mechanism of intelligence, not consciousness. Intel is built up from path-integration, short-cuts, vicarious trial and error that begins in very tiny local areas and expands to landmark and non-landmark navigation. This switching between vision and hippocampus has always been theorized about as the fundamental sharp wave ripple threshold of how intelligence is built as most mammals can do this, so it's not the "algorithm of consciousness".
AlbertoGP
A particularly interesting part that I did not expect from the title:
> Before the rats encountered the detour, the research team observed that their brains were already firing in patterns that seemed to "imagine" alternate unfamiliar mental routes while they slept. When the researchers compared these sleep patterns to the neural activity during the actual detour, some of them matched.
> “What was surprising was that the rats' brains were already prepared for this novel detour before they ever encountered it,”
e40
Seems to support the idea that freams are rehearsals for real life.
mycall
> The same brain networks that normally help us imagine shortcuts or possibilities can, when disrupted, trap us in intrusive memories or hallucinations.
There is a fine line between this an wisdom. The Default Mode Network (DMN) is the brain's "simulation machine". When you're not focused on a specific task, the DMN fires up, allowing you to daydream, remember the past, plan for the future, and contemplate others' perspectives.
Wisdom is not about turning the machine off; it's about becoming the director of the movie it's playing. A creative genius envisioning a new world and a person trapped in a state of torment isn't the hardware, but the learned software of regulation, awareness, and perspective.
Wisdom is the process of learning to aim this incredible, imaginative power toward flourishing instead of suffering. Saying "trap us in intrusive memories or hallucinations" is the negative side where there is also a positive side to it all.
mallowdram
Wisdom is an arbitrary concept. The drive to avoid suffering is built from sensory and affective affinities and networks funnlled into the cog-mapping motor systems. Calling this wisdom is simply a simplistic narrative.
AndrewKemendo
This matches my hypothesis on Deja vu
https://kemendo.com/Deja-Vu-Experiment.html
I think it also supports my three loops hypothesis as well:
https://kemendo.com/ThreeLoops.html
In effect, my position is that biological systems maintain a synchronized processing pipeline: where the hippocampal prediction system operates slightly “ahead” of sensory processing, like a cache buffer.
If the processing gets “behind” the sensory input then you feel like you’re accessing memory because the electrical signal is reaching memory and sensory distribution simultaneously or slightly lagging.
So it means you’re constantly switching between your world map and the input and comparing them just to stabilize a “linear” experience - something which is a necessity for corporeal prediction and reaction.
shomp
I think we should be careful about materialistic reductions of awareness. Because some rats dreamed detours that ended up being correct in waking rat life, it does not follow that all instances of deja vu are misfirings. It's a tempting connection to draw, but it does not actually explain how the detours were dreamt to begin with, and this points to a deeper question about awareness in general. If I were pressed for an analogy, I might say something like "just because all books have ink does not mean that all ink lives in books." You know what I mean? There's a superset of experiences that cannot be easily explained away by caching, as tempting as it might be.
Antibabelic
Materialistic reduction has gotten us quite far in science.
mallowdram
Not exactly. We don't know where optic-flow reactions that integrate senses, emotions, motor systems in the slightest. Study neural reuse or coordination dynamics. Some relationship between the brain and the world that isn't easily found in the brain alone is responsible.
mallowdram
VR cannot be essential to decoding the brain as it deals in topological maps and affinities.
OgsyedIE
Your work seems pretty good to me, have you seen Steven Byrne's blog theorising about symbol grounding in the brain?
AndrewKemendo
No I havent, I’ll have to look it up, thanks for the recommendation.
forinti
This takes me to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Your physical experience of something has to be analysed in accordance with your mental model of it in order to attain a diagnosis (in the book it was a motorcycle engine).
My take on this is, especially in regard to debugging IT issues, is that you have to constantly verify and update your mental model (check your premises!) in order to better weed out problems.
N_Lens
Going to new places is really therapeutic (Barring somewhere obviously adverse), since that 'darting to reality' creates a sense of presence.
I often find myself lost in my mental maps in daily life (Living inside my head) unless I'm in a nice novel environment. Meditation helps, however.
aatd86
The way it is phrased, looks like a pre computed model confronted to real data. So... our current AIs except we have incremental continuous training (accumulated experience)?
And dreams are simulation-based training to make life easier, decision-making more efficient?
What kind of next level machinery is this?! ;D
_spduchamp
I wonder if this also relates to playing music.
My theory is that this darting is the mechanism of consciousness. We look inward and outward in a loop, which generates the perception of being conscious in a similar way to how sequential frames of film create the illusion of motion. That "persistence of vision" is like the illusion of persistent, continuous consciousness created by the inward-outward regard sequence. Consciousness is a simple algorithm: look at the world, then look at the self to evaluate its reaction to the world. Then repeat.