Theory Three: Building Blocks

This piece, by Onno Berkan, was published on 11/19/24. The original text, by Bakermans et al., is a preprint available on bioRxiv, published 06/06/24.

This Oxford study explores how the brain, specifically the hippocampus, builds and uses mental maps for learning and decision-making. The study suggests the hippocampus functions like a sophisticated Lego set for the brain. Instead of creating entirely new mental maps for each new situation, the brain combines and recombines existing building blocks of information to create new understanding.

A key finding is that this "building block" approach makes learning much more efficient. When animals encounter new situations, they don't have to learn everything from scratch– instead, they can quickly adapt by rearranging their existing knowledge in new ways.

The researchers discovered that the brain uses a process called "replay" to strengthen and update these mental maps. During replay, which often happens during rest or sleep, the brain rehearses previous experiences and combines them in new ways to improve future behavior.

The study demonstrated this through experiments where animals learned to navigate environments with changing features, such as closed doors or relocated reward points. When the environment changed, the animals could quickly adapt their behavior because they had already built flexible mental representations that could be easily reconfigured.

One particularly interesting finding was about "latent learning"—the ability to learn about an environment even without immediate rewards. The study showed that animals could explore and build mental maps of their environment before finding any rewards, allowing them to navigate efficiently as soon as they discovered something worth seeking.

The researchers also found that this system works for both spatial and non-spatial information. This helps explain how the hippocampus supports various types of learning and memory, from navigating physical spaces to understanding abstract concepts and hierarchies.

This research has important implications for understanding how the brain learns and adapts to new situations, suggesting that our ability to navigate and learn depends on our capacity to flexibly combine and recombine existing knowledge rather than starting from scratch each time.

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