Welcome to Quantum Magazine's podcast.

Each episode we bring you stories about developments in science and mathematics.

I'm Susan Vallett.

We humans have always experienced an odd and oddly deep connection between the mental worlds and

physical worlds we inhabit, especially when it comes to memory. We're good at remembering

landmarks and settings, and if we give our memories a location for context, hanging on to them

becomes easier. To remember long speeches, ancient Greek and Roman orators imagine wandering through memory

palaces, full of reminders.

Modern memory contest champions still use that technique to place long lists of numbers, names,

and other pieces of information.

But how does the brain encode that memory?

That's what scientists are starting to uncover.

Philosopher Emmanuel Kant said the concept of space serves as the organizing principle by which we perceive and interpret the world, even in abstract ways.

Kim Stakenfeld is a neuroscientist at the British Artificial Intelligence Company, Deep Mind.

It's really beautiful. There's all these quotes that people sprinkle into their talks about how

riddled our languages with spatial metaphors for reasoning and for memory in general. I was at a

talk recently and somebody quoted the phrase, I couldn't place him as like I couldn't remember

where it came from. We use spatial metaphors for housing our memories. We read little short stories

in English class about how somebody was

navigating the rooms of their memory as they were getting dementia. That is nice when these

conceptual cognitive ideas really start to connect with the very low-level neural data.

In the past few decades, research has shown that for at least two of our faculties, memory

...