The brain may 'move' between related ideas as if it's moving through space

To learn our way around a new city, we often use maps and landmarks to find the quickest and most reliable route between two places. Now, new research shows that our brains might use similar processes to "navigate" between related concepts.
Researchers have developed a mathematical model to examine how the brain represents both spatial and semantic information. The latter includes knowledge about the meaning and significance of different people, places and things; brain activity related to these concepts crops up when a person sees a person, place or thing in real time and when they recall it in a memory.

The model showed how both spatial and semantic information could be represented in the same regions of the brain — and this suggests that the brain can handle both types of information in similar ways, the scientists reported March 10 in the journal PNAS.