Imagine you are in the middle of an unknown town. Even if your surroundings are initially unfamiliar, you can explore around and eventually create a mental map of your environment—where the buildings, streets, signs, and so on are in relation to one another. This ability to construct spatial maps in the brain is the basis of even more advanced types of cognition in humans: For example, it is theorized that language is encoded in a map-like structure in the brain.
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