A Map of Social Space in Your Brain

The video proposes a conceptual ladder showing how hippocampal cognitive maps, originally evolved for physical navigation, become progressively abstracted to represent conspecifics and, in humans, purely relational social space.

Bats performing an observational learning task reveal that hippocampal neurons can encode the position of another individual, not just the animal’s own location, forming “social place cells.”

Experiments comparing tracking of conspecifics vs inanimate moving objects reveal that hippocampal neurons treat other animals as special, not just as generic moving stimuli.

Human hippocampus and related regions appear to encode abstract “social space” using a 2D coordinate system defined by power (dominance) and affiliation (warmth), as shown in fMRI experiments with interactive narratives.