Spatial Computing - Laura Kurgan - GPS for the Brain: Cognitive Maps Revisited

GPS for the Brain: Cognitive Maps Revisited

Laura Kurgan

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Dynamic Cognitive Map: interpretive view linking grid cells to place cells in a multidimensional trajectory of one individual across New York City. Image credit: Adeline Chum.
Spatial Computing
October 2025










Notes
1

Carl Schoonover, Portraits of the Mind, Visualizing the Brain from antiquity to the 21st Century (New York: Abrams, 2010), 7.

2

“Speed Read: Exposing the Forest,” The Nobel Prize, September 16, 2009, . Italics mine.

3

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2014 press release, The Nobel Prize, October 6, 2014, .

4

This work is extensively documented in my book: Close Up at a Distance: Mapping Technology Politics (New York: Zone Books, 2013) 58–85.

5

Lawrence K. Altman “Nobel Prize in Medicine Is Awarded to Three Who Discovered Brain’s ‘Inner GPS’,” October 06, 2014, .

6

May-Britt Moser and Edvard I Moser, “WHERE AM I? WHERE AM I GOING,” Scientific American 314, no. 1 (January 2016): 26–33.

7

Edward C. Tolman, “Cognitive Maps in Rats and Men,” The Psychological Review 55, no. 4 (1948): 189–208.

8

Ole Kiehn, Award Ceremony Speech for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2014, The Nobel Prize, December 10, 2014, .

9

Edvard I. Moser and May-Britt Moser, “A Journey Into Entorhinal Cortex,” interview, posted January 25, 2011, by NTNU University, YouTube, .

10

Moser and Moser, “A Journey Into Entorhinal Cortex.”

11

Moser and Moser, “A Journey Into Entorhinal Cortex.”

12

Mo Costandi, “The Brain Takes a Guided Tour of London,” Scientific American, March 21, 2017.

13

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2014 press release.

14

Itai Palti and Moshe Bar, “A Manifesto for Conscious Cities: Should Streets Be Sensitive to Our Mental Needs?” The Guardian, August 28, 2015, .

15

Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960), 4.

16

Don Norman, The Design of Everyday Things (Basic Books, 1988).

17

Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review, no. 146 (July/August 1984).

18

Jameson, “Postmodernism,” 92.

19

Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal et al., Neural Networks (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2025), 55.

20

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2014 press release.

21

Moser and Moser, “WHERE AM I?,” 32.

22

For a good explanation of neural networks, see Fangfang Lee, “What is a Neural Network?” IBM, September 10, 2025, .

23

Beth Coleman, Reality Was Whatever Happened: Octavia Butler AI and Other Possible Worlds (Berlin: K. Verlag, 2023).







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