Brain Navigates Concepts Like Physical Spaces: Japanese Study Reveals Shared Neural Mechanisms

A recent study from Japan's National Institute of Information and Communications Technology suggests that the brain employs similar processes for connecting related concepts as it does for navigating physical spaces. Published in PNAS on March 10, 2025, the research unveils a mathematical model that mirrors functions within the hippocampus, indicating how spatial and semantic information might be represented in the same brain regions. The model integrates successor representation, which anticipates movement between physical spaces, and word embedding, which captures relationships between words. When the model was tasked with navigating simulated physical or conceptual spaces, it generated patterns resembling activity in neurons involved in spatial awareness and concept recognition. This proposes that the brain might utilize a single principle to manage diverse tasks, including language processing. Tatsuya Haga, a computational neuroscientist at the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology in Japan, told Live Science that spatial representations and conceptual representations, and also semantic computing and spatial computing, seem very different, but there's a connection between those two different things. So maybe the brain, especially the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex, is using one principle to compute many things, including language.