Top Highlights

• The learning brain, by contrast, very slowly constructs a representation, or ‘takes a picture,’ of the landscape or configuration of the abstract universals, the temporal invariants, and the enduring symmetries that structure the objective universe of its experience.
• Instead, these high-dimensional maplike frameworks typically consist of a large family of high-dimensional prototype points and prototype-trajectories united and mutually configured by an intricate family of similarity (i.e., proximity) and difference (i.e., distality) relations.
• they are high-dimensional geometrical manifolds. They are maps.
• the fundamental unit of cognition—strictly, of occurrent or ephemeral cognition—is the activation pattern across a proprietary population of neurons.
• such specific locational information within one map can and does provoke subsequent pointlike activations in a sequence of downstream representational spaces, and ultimately in one or more motor-representation spaces,