Cartography of the Mind: How Your Brain Maps Out Your Social Networks

Ever walked into a bustling party or a new workplace and felt completely lost—not because you didn’t know where the bathrooms were, but because you couldn’t figure out who’s friends with whom, who’s in charge, or where you fit in? You’re not alone. Our brains build mental maps of the spaces and relationships around us, but as our worlds get bigger, faster, and more complex, those maps might be hitting their limits.

GPS in the Brain

The story starts in the 1940s when a scientist, Edward Tolman, found that rats didn’t just memorize which way to turn — they seemed to build an internal map, helping them find cheese at the same location even when the maze’s layout changed (Tolman, 1948). Tolman called this remarkable ability a “cognitive map”: a mental sketch of space that helps us navigate and adapt. Decades later, in 2014, neuroscientists John O’Keefe, May-Britt Moser, and Edvard Moser won the Nobel Prize for discovering the neurons behind this talent, the brain’s internal GPS: place cells that mark specific locations (like your favorite coffee shop) and grid cells that create a hexagonal coordinate system, like invisible graph paper guiding your path (Moser et al., 2008).

The Social GPS

For decades, scientists thought cognitive maps were just for getting from point A to point B. But it turns out, our brains use the same tricks to navigate social life. In a groundbreaking experiment, people embarked on a virtual adventure, interacting with characters in a new town. As they made social decisions—like choosing whom to approach based on perceived power and warmth—researchers tracked their movements in a 2D social space. Brain scans revealed the hippocampus—the same region that guides us through physical landmarks—was tracking their paths through this social map (Tavares et al., 2015). This finding indicates the hippocampus doesn’t just guide us spatially, it also charts abstract social spaces, helping us keep track of office hierarchies and friendship networks.

When Maps Warp: Beyond Euclidean Social Spaces

But you might wonder: what if a coworker you see daily feels more distant than a faraway friend who truly understands you? Here’s where things get interesting—and messy. Unlike city streets, social worlds don’t follow neat grid-like maps, instead, they warp with perspective and context. Indeed, Michael Peer and Shahar Arzy from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have found evidence that different brain regions separately encode social distance (how many degrees of separation) and the traits of others (Peer et al., 2021). Meanwhile, scientists like Lara Stefano Fusi and Johnathan Freeman from Columbia University have realized that social spaces are higher-dimensional than physical ones—we track not only location, but also traits, relationships, and conceptual associations (Boyle et al., 2024; Freeman & Lin, 2025).

As a result, our cognitive maps—once imagined to be precise and Euclidean, like a GPS—are anything but. We tend to assume that social mapping is straightforward, like following a street grid, but that assumption is wrong. Neuroscience shows these maps are actually full of fuzzy heuristics, shortcuts, and distortions. Sometimes we focus on connections—who knows whom (Jolly et al., 2023)—while at other times, we anchor on features like shared hobbies or history (Son et al., 2021). And as we get to know people better, our mental maps expand and become more detailed, but also more complicated to update. This challenges the tidy narrative that social mapping is just a matter of inputting the right data—our brains aren’t built for perfect geometry. They’re built to adapt and improvise, which is exactly what real life demands.

Why Should You Care?

If you’ve ever struggled to keep up with social drama, or felt lost in a sea of unfamiliar faces, you’ve experienced the limits of your cognitive map. These limits aren’t just personal quirks—they affect how we build communities, design our digital platforms and even diagnose mental health issues. For example, people higher in neuroticism show weaker hippocampal connectivity after navigating social tasks; older adults, meanwhile, struggle to update social maps when a friendly avatar suddenly turns hostile, revealing how aging can make it harder to adapt in dynamic social environments. These glitches don’t just cause awkward coffee breaks; they can deepen loneliness and harden stereotypes.

Yet if we understand this system, we can leverage it. Some researchers believe social navigation challenges might be early warning signs of cognitive decline—similar to how getting lost on a familiar street can presage Alzheimer’s. And this isn’t just theory: therapists already use relationship mapping to help clients spot cognitive distortions, and app designers could build interfaces that make it easier to create and update social maps—crucial in a world of Slack threads, global teams, and algorithm-tuned timelines.

Where to Go Beyond Accuracy

Scientists haven’t reached a consensus on whether our brains use neat grids or messy webs to chart social relationships. The truth is, our minds might be more flexible—and more flawed—than anyone expected. But social navigation isn’t about perfect accuracy. Tolman’s rats never needed flawless maps—just good enough ones to sniff out cheese. Likewise, at your next bustling party, you don’t need to memorize every relationship. What you need is an adaptive map—one that updates with experience, highlights key landmarks (like whom to trust), and helps you infer the routes that lead to meaningfulness and understanding.

In the social maze, accuracy matters, but adaptation is what gets you home. After all, life’s most rewarding moments rarely come from following a precise map; they come from discovering new routes in the rich, uncharted territory of human connection. So the next time you feel lost at a party, remember: our brains are wired to chart a course through social complexity. Every awkward introduction or heartfelt conversation is data for our inner map-making. We are all, in a sense, mental cartographers, finding our way in the vast landscape of human relationships.

References

• Boyle, L. M., Posani, L., Irfan, S., Siegelbaum, S. A., & Fusi, S. (2024). Tuned geometries of hippocampal representations meet the computational demands of social memory. Neuron, 112(8), 1358-1371.e9. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2024.01.021
• Freeman, J. B., & Lin, C. (2025). A high-dimensional model of social impressions. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2025.04.011
• Jolly, E., Sadhukha, S., Iqbal, M., Molani, Z., Walsh, T., Manning, J. R., & Chang, L. J. (2023). People are represented and remembered through their relationships with others. OSF. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/bw9r2
• Moser, E. I., Kropff, E., & Moser, M.-B. (2008). Place cells, grid cells, and the brain’s spatial representation system. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 31, 69–89. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.neuro.31.061307.090723
• Peer, M., Hayman, M., Tamir, B., & Arzy, S. (2021). Brain Coding of Social Network Structure. The Journal of Neuroscience: The Official Journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 41(22), 4897–4909. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2641-20.2021
• Son, J.-Y., Bhandari, A., & FeldmanHall, O. (2021). Cognitive maps of social features enable flexible inference in social networks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(39). https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2021699118
• Tavares, R. M., Mendelsohn, A., Grossman, Y., Williams, C. H., Shapiro, M., Trope, Y., & Schiller, D. (2015). A Map for Social Navigation in the Human Brain. Neuron, 87(1), 231–243. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2015.06.011
• Tolman, E. C. (1948). Cognitive maps in rats and men. Psychological Review, 55(4), 189–208. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0061626