Your Brain’s Secret Talent: Making Maps Out of Thin Air

Saturday, November 8, 2025.

If you’ve ever walked into a new grocery store and, within moments, felt you could draw it from memory—produce to the left, snacks to the right, moral collapse in aisle five—you’ve just performed a quiet act of genius.

According to new research in Cell Reports (Tenderra & Theves, 2025), people with higher fluid intelligence—that is, reasoning ability rather than rote knowledge—don’t just think faster.

They navigate reality more elegantly.

Their brains build structured internal maps of how things relate to one another, especially through the hippocampus, a region central to memory, space, and imagination.

Smarter minds don’t just think faster; they organize experience better.

Intelligence Isn’t Just Remembering—It’s Mapping

Researchers Rebekka M. Tenderra and Stephanie Theves at the Max Planck Institutes asked participants to memorize the locations of six objects scattered around a virtual circular arena. While they learned, the team used fMRI to watch how the hippocampus encoded those relationships.

The results were striking.

Higher-scoring participants displayed what the authors called map-like encoding—their hippocampal activity patterns mirrored the real distances between objects.

Lower scorers’ brains?

More like a junk drawer of memories—everything technically there, but nothing where you expect it.

This study doesn’t just redefine intelligence; it reframes how we think about thinking. Your brain may be less a filing cabinet and more a cartographer’s studio—drawing, redrawing, and connecting landmarks as you move through life.

Why Structure Matters

Fluid intelligence—your capacity to reason through novel problems (Carroll, 1993; Richland & Burchinal, 2023)—may depend less on information quantity and more on relational intelligence: the ability to link and integrate.

The hippocampus isn’t merely a storage vault; it’s an architect of meaning, weaving space, time, and value into one coherent mental map (Behrens et al., 2018; Eichenbaum, 2017; Shenhav & Buckner, 2020).

If your thoughts are a city, your hippocampus is the urban planner. Some of us get Paris—structured, elegant, easy to navigate.

Others get suburban sprawl and a perpetual sense of having taken the wrong exit.

Maps of the Mind—and Marriage

Here’s where the science becomes heartbreakingly relevant.

In couples therapy, I often see what looks like disconnection but is really map failure. Partners aren’t unloving; they’re lost. The emotional landscape has changed, and their internal GPS hasn’t updated.

When one partner says, “You’re not the person I married,” it often means, “My internal map of you no longer fits reality.”

Healthy relationships redraw their maps often—integrating new information, moods, and meanings. Struggling couples cling to outdated coordinates. In a sense, emotional flexibility is relational intelligence.

FAQ

Is intelligence fixed?
Not even close. The hippocampus is highly plastic. Activities that spark curiosity, novelty, and reflection—reading, travel, or therapy—strengthen the very neural circuits Tenderra and Theves measured (Dupret et al., 2010).

So therapy changes the map?
Yes. Couples therapy is essentially a kind of guided cartography—two partners sitting down with mismatched maps and redrawing them together. New insight feels tiring because it’s a neurological construction site.

Try This: Build Your Own Cognitive Map

Choose a recurring conflict with your partner. Mentally trace how it unfolds: who starts, where it escalates, when it cools.

Then picture it from above—a bird’s-eye view.

Where are the choke points? Where does empathy disappear?

That act of seeing the structure is hippocampal work in real time: turning raw experience into a navigable map.

The Limits—and the Promise

Tenderra and Theves can’t claim causation—smarter participants might simply use more efficient strategies. But the emerging neuroscience of cognitive mapping and reasoning suggests that flexible internal structures predict creativity, memory, and emotional adaptability alike (Woolgar et al., 2018; Schuck et al., 2023).

And that’s the quiet miracle: the same mechanism that helps you locate your keys also helps you locate meaning.

Final Thoughts

Cognitive maps aren’t just about getting around—they’re how we make sense of anything. Every time you recognize a pattern, reframe a problem, or see your partner in a new light, your hippocampus is busy redrawing its own geography.

Maybe intelligence isn’t a race to know more. Maybe it’s the willingness to keep revising the map when life keeps changing.

And if you ever find yourself lost—emotionally or otherwise—remember: every great explorer started with uncertainty and a blank page.

Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.

REFERENCES:

Behrens, T. E. J., Muller, T. H., Whittington, J. C. R., Mark, S., Baram, A. B., Stachenfeld, K. L., & Dolan, R. J. (2018). What is a cognitive map? Neuron, 100(2), 490–509. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2018.10.002

Carroll, J. B. (1993). Human cognitive abilities: A survey of factor-analytic studies. Cambridge University Press.

Dupret, D., O’Neill, J., Pleydell-Bouverie, B., & Csicsvari, J. (2010). The reorganization and reactivation of hippocampal maps predict spatial memory performance. Nature Neuroscience, 13(8), 995–1002. https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.2599

Eichenbaum, H. (2017). On the integration of space, time, and memory. Neuron, 95(5), 1007–1018. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2017.06.036

Richland, L. E., & Burchinal, M. R. (2023). Reasoning, learning, and transfer: Developmental pathways and cognitive mechanisms. Annual Review of Psychology, 74, 259–286. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-032122-041156

Schuck, N. W., Cai, M. B., Wilson, R. C., & Niv, Y. (2023). Human learning as updating cognitive maps. Nature Human Behaviour, 7(2), 184–195. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-022-01477-3

Shenhav, A., & Buckner, R. L. (2020). Cognitive mapping and value-based decision making. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 24(9), 686–700. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2020.06.007

Tenderra, R. M., & Theves, S. (2025). Human intelligence relates to neural measures of cognitive map formation. Cell Reports, 44(8), 116033. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.celrep.2025.116033

Woolgar, A., Duncan, J., Manes, F., & Fedorenko, E. (2018). Fluid intelligence is supported by the multiple-demand system not the language system. Nature Human Behaviour, 2(3), 200–211. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-017-0282-3