How Your Brain Organizes Information

To try everything Brilliant has to offer—free—for a full 30 days, visit http://brilliant.org/ArtemKirsanov/ The first 200 of you will get 20% off Brilliant’s annual premium subscription. ===== My name is Artem, I'm a neuroscience PhD student at Harvard University. 🌎 Website and Social links: https://kirsanov.ai/ 📥 "Receptive Field" neuro-newsletter: https://artemkirsanov.substack.com/ ✨ Support me on Patreon to get access to Discord community: https://patreon.com/artemkirsanov ===== 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. 🕒 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 📚 FURTHER READING & REFERENCES: 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. ===== Special thanks to Crimson Ghoul for providing English subtitles! Icons by biorender.com and freepik.com Brain 3D models were created with Blender software using publicly available BrainGlobe atlases (https://brainglobe.info/atlas-api) This video was sponsored by Brilliant ===== *Disclaimer:* This channel is my personal project. The views and content expressed here are my own and are separate from my research role at Harvard University. #neuroscience #cognitivemaps #brain _Description remastered: February 2026. Links & Bio updated; original context preserved._