In July of 2025, top athletes competed in a kilometers-long race, but it had no set path.
That's because it was the World Orienteering Championships, and participants equipped with only maps and compasses were expected to find their way between far-off checkpoints at high speeds, weaving between trees, sprinting over rocks, and skirting cliffs.
This might sound a little daunting, but whether you identify as a way-finding whiz or get lost returning from the grocery store, your brain has a built-in navigation system that facilitates spatial skills from sensing which direction is north to map reading and route learning.
It consists of two major parts, the striatum and the hippocampus.
The striatum is clued into sensory inputs like nearby landmarks.
With repetition, it comes to associate specific stimuli and actions with certain responses and outcomes, linking these cues with set routes.
This forms navigation habits, for example, when you automatically take the same sequence of turns on your way home.
The hippocampus, meanwhile, constructs continuous dynamic mental maps of your environment.
It helps you figure out how to get somewhere even if you've never been or haven't taken that exact route before.
Researchers realized the hippocampus' importance in mental mapping in the '70s while observing rats' brain activity and noticing that specific neurons in the hippocampus fired when the rats were in certain spaces.
