Remarks on fMRI Research on Conceptual Brain Directionality

I came across a rather unique research paper yesterday and recorded my thoughts on Twitter in the following order. (I will copy the series of posts here because I believe taken together they are duly coherent as to my meaning.)

A "compass" in the brain to navigate thoughts

Thoughts as a physical substantial manifestation was first elucidated by Riemann. See Gauss unit normal mapping function.

The research paper is here.

From the paper:  "To conclude, here we report that a network of regions in the human brain represents the directions existing between elements of a conceptual space. Among them, the precuneus and the retrosplenial cortex seemed to play a crucial role in our experiment. Our results extend the current theoretical accounts that see the processing of the geometry of conceptual spaces as mainly dependent upon the activity of the hippocampal formation and medial-prefrontal cortex, and support the view that the parietal cortex might also play a crucial role in representing relational knowledge between concepts in memory using spatial codes."

 

There is still another dimensionality that will yet be required as more abstract concepts become untethered from physical sensation, but this is indeed a remarkable advancement. For instance the physical corelative of ironic "fugal" juxtaposition of seemingly incongruent ideas that leads to new knowledge must have a "space" in the brain. In other words newly minted creative ideation must also be substantial.

See my post.