This is Mind Bites, a series for philosophy bites with me David Edmonds.

And me Nigel Woberton.

When I cycled to Central London this morning, I followed my usual path, but had to take a detour at one

stage because of road works. How does the mind represent space? How are we able to

navigate our way around? Are there maps in our brains? Kate Jeffrey is a behavioral

neuroscientist at University College London. She studies how rats find their

way around. Kate Jeffrey, welcome to Mind Bites.

Hello.

The topic we're going to focus on is concepts and representation.

What is a concept? Well, a concept probably means different things to different people,

but the way that I think about it is that it's an internal representation

that the

internal representation that the brain has made of something that's out there in the real world. So it doesn't involve the idea that you are able to reflect on that concept

so I can I can reflect on my concept of philosophy or I can reflect on my concept of a microphone because I'm conscious.

Well the way that I think about it in my research is not reflecting on the representation

so much as just having a representation. And even that's been quite a controversial idea

in psychology for a long time, the idea that the brain actually has an internal

representation of the world instead of just operating directly on it.

But it's become apparent in the last few decades because we've been able to look into

the brain with our electrodes

and so on and we can see that there's very clearly operation of internal

representations and I like to think of those as concepts.

...