How Your Brain Organizes Information

To try everything Brilliant has to offer—free—for a full 30 days, visit The first 200 of you will get 20% off Brilliant’s annual premium subscription. My name is Artem, I’m a computational neuroscience student and researcher. In this video we talk about cognitive maps – internal models of outside world that the brain to generate flexible behavior that is generalized across contexts. Patreon: Twitter: OUTLINE: 00:00 - Introduction 02:08 - Edward Tolman 03:48 - Zoo of neurons in hippocampal formation 06:40 - Non spatial mapping 08:21 - Graph formalism 12:21 - Latent spaces 17:22 - Factorized representations 21:51 - Summary 24:47 - Brilliant 26:19 - Outro REFERENCES (in no particular order): 1. Behrens, T. E. J. et al. What Is a Cognitive Map? Organizing Knowledge for Flexible Behavior. Neuron 100, 490–509 (2018). 2. Constantinescu, A. O., O’Reilly, J. X. & Behrens, T. E. J. Organizing conceptual knowledge in humans with a gridlike code. Science 352, 1464–1468 (2016). 3. Aronov, D., Nevers, R. & Tank, D. W. Mapping of a non-spatial dimension by the hippocampal–entorhinal circuit. Nature 543, 719–722 (2017). 4. Whittington, J. C. R., McCaffary, D., Bakermans, J. J. W. & Behrens, T. E. J. How to build a cognitive map. Nat Neurosci 25, 1257–1272 (2022). 5. Whittington, J., Muller, T., Mark, S., Barry, C. & Behrens, T. Generalisation of structural knowledge in the hippocampal-entorhinal system. CREDITS: Special thanks to Crimson Ghoul for providing English subtitles! Icons by and Brain 3D models were created with Blender software using publicly available BrainGlobe atlases () This video was sponsored by Brilliant