How Do We Explore Ourselves? Here's What Science Has to Say

Socrates famously stated, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” The Delphic maxims urged, "Know yourself.” Modern psychotherapists, coaches, and spiritual teachers advise us to explore ourselves to gain greater self-awareness. Clearly, the concept of self-exploration occupies a huge part of psychological growth, but the talk about it largely remains on the folk level. So, what does modern neuroscience have to say about it?

Recent findings from cognitive neuroscience suggest conceptualizing our internal exploration as mental navigation [1]. Broadly, mental navigation is our ability to map and navigate our cognitive space, which consists of memories, concepts, ideas, and their interconnections. The word navigation in this context is used similarly to how navigation happens in our physical environment [2].

Source: Pexels/Pixabay

Although the concept of mental navigation is novel in the scientific discourse, the idea of exploring our mind as if it were a physical space is not a new one. Take the memory palace technique, for example, which originated in ancient Greece. This method involves using familiar physical spaces to enhance memory. By associating information with specific locations within these spaces, we can mentally "walk through" them to recall what we've learned more effectively.

Moreover, different philosophers, writers, and early psychologists were also influenced by this idea. Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, “The only journey is the one within,” and William James compared our search in memory to the search for a lost object in our house [3]. Indeed, why does the way we explore our minds so much resemble the way we navigate our physical environment? Why does this idea of an inner journey intuitively makes so much sense?

Links Between Mental and Spatial Navigation

Recent research into exploratory behavior has uncovered interesting similarities between how we navigate physical spaces and how we search for information in our minds [4]. One theory suggests that we've developed effective algorithms for locating resources in our physical environment, and we now use these same patterns to search for information within our minds [4].

What is even more interesting is that findings on the brain level support the similarity of spatial and mental navigation. Already in 1948, psychologist Edward Tolman suggested the concept of a “cognitive map” [5]. He argued that to facilitate our wayfinding, we build structured and abstract representations in the brain to reflect the environment—cognitive maps.

Later, researchers found the so-called place and grid cells in the hippocampal-entorhinal system of the brain [6]. Place cells, for example, encode particular places in the environment. To illustrate, if a rat stands in one place, a corresponding place cell will fire, and if it moves to a different place, another place cell will activate. It was suggested that this brain mapping mechanism forms the so-called cognitive maps [7].

Strikingly, it has recently been found that the same mechanism encodes not only physical spaces but also abstract concepts. For example, when people engage in a role-playing game where they need to interact with other individuals in a social space, researchers can see that the grid cells form a kind of cognitive map of social space to reflect the relationships, hierarchy, and intimacy between different characters in the social space [8]. Many more papers show a similar phenomenon in different tasks: cognitive maps of social space, musical sounds, odors, narratives, word meanings, etc. (reviewed in [1]).

A New View of Cognitive Maps

These findings reconceptualized the way researchers view cognitive maps. Perhaps, besides cognitive maps for navigating our physical environment, we also possess "conceptual maps" for mapping and navigating the space of abstract concepts in our minds (see the figure below).

Neuroscience Essential Reads

The Brain's Cholesterol Holds Promise for New Treatments

What Your Favorite Movie Reveals About Your Brain

(A) A rat navigates a maze employing the hippocampal-entorhinal system. (B) A person navigates their internal world employing the same brain structures.

Source: Nick Kabrél

After all, the cells that fire to physical space encode a concept of this place and not a place itself. Similarly, when we learn new information, we learn a conceptual abstraction. For this reason, it should not be too surprising that the same system might encode the information from different domains of our experience and structure them in cognitive maps for future use. What is interesting, though, is that our ability to navigate in space is much more ancient.

Therefore, it was suggested that our ability to construct abstract cognitive maps and navigate them mentally is the so-called recycling or reuse of the system that was previously designed for the navigation of physical environments [9]. If this hypothesis is true, then we indeed structure and navigate our mind similarly to the physical world in which we live.

Updating Our Conceptual Maps

Building on this realization, two intriguing papers have developed theories centered on mental navigation. The first paper proposes that insights or sudden "Aha!" moments occur during the mental navigation of conceptual spaces [2]. The fascinating part is that when we experience insight, it can be compared to finding a shortcut in our physical environment. This can occur, for example, when you find a link between two previously unconnected ideas.

Another research group has taken the idea of mental navigation further to explore its application in psychotherapy [10]. They suggest that people seek therapy to organize and update their conceptual maps, much like correcting or expanding an outdated physical map. According to this view, our conceptual maps might sometimes be maladaptive, and mental navigation during therapy helps identify these issues and restructure them.

Interestingly, a key aspect of psychotherapy is fostering positive change by increasing the client’s awareness. This moment of enhanced awareness can be seen as broadening one's conceptual map, similar to how a physical map is expanded when new territories are discovered.

We truly live in remarkable times where neuroscience, paired with creative thinking, can offer scientific explanations for some very ancient concepts.