Is Spatial Thinking the Foundation of All Thought?

Sometimes illumination comes to our rescue at the very moment when all seems lost; we have knocked at every door and they open on nothing until, at last, we stumble unconsciously against the only one through which we can enter the kingdom we have sought in vain a hundred years – and it opens. —Marcel Proust, The Past Recaptured

Suddenly finding the solution to a problem we have been thinking about for a while is a particularly pleasant experience. It could be solving an anagram, remembering where you left your keys, or figuring out the missing piece of a complicated mathematical equation. We go at a problem from every angle, until – aha! – we find a way through. The writer Marcel Proust puts this mental experience rather beautifully. Something striking from the quote is the richness of spatial imagery when describing abstract thought: We are lost, in a corridor in which every door opens to nothing, and then, we stumble through a door that opens to a kingdom of illumination.

Spatial metaphors are abundant also in our everyday language. We look up to our role models, we look back to our mistakes, we fall into despair, or our spirits soar. But what if this connection went beyond metaphors? What if spatial thinking really was the foundation of our thinking across conceptual, temporal, or social dimensions?

This is something already hinted at by the philosopher Immanuel Kant in his essay “What does it mean to orient oneself in thinking?” Kant argued that orienting oneself in logical thinking was quite similar to orienting oneself in one’s house at night. We have an understanding of how elements relate to each other, and we feel our way through. More recently, the idea that spatial thinking is the foundation of many other forms of thinking has been pursued by the eminent psychologist Barbara Tversky in her book Mind in Motion.

The idea has also received critical support from several neuroscientific experiments. We have known for a while that, in mammals, the hippocampus and surrounding regions store cognitive maps – stable representations of the environments we travel through. As it turns out, those same regions also store maps of social, temporal and conceptual spaces.

Source: Photo by Humphrey Muleba on StockSnap

For a long time, sociologists have employed affiliation and power as two central dimensions to frame social relations. Your boss – and your cat if you have one – has power over you, and you might have power over your subordinates. And you can easily place the people you know closer (best friend) or further (random acquaintance) to you in terms of affiliation. In a very clever experiment, Rita Tavares and colleagues tapped into these two dimensions to uncover how our brains map social space.

Participants in the experiment had to play a role-playing game. The graphics were not unlike the Pokémon games of my childhood. Different characters appeared on the screen, and participants had to choose how to interact with them (e.g. whether to comply with or defy their boss at work). Inadvertently, what the participants were doing was navigating social space by tracking how different characters moved across the power and affiliation dimensions.

Participants who were good at tracking these dimensions had higher social skills, as evidenced by personality questionnaires. Here is where it gets really interesting: the participants did all this while being inside a brain imaging scanner. What they found is that activation in the hippocampus was tracking power, modulated by affiliation. That is, the same region that is central to mapping physical space is also central to mapping social spaces.

Neuroscience experiments using similar paradigms have now discovered the same regions mapping conceptual and temporal dimensions as well. And last summer, a meta-analysis by Li and colleagues using the BrainMap database (not yet peer-reviewed) found that these spatial regions (rather than e.g. language regions) are active when we navigate logical space, giving further support to the intuition that Kant had back in the 18^th century: spatial thinking is the foundation of many other forms of thought.