Perhaps most tantalizing of all, an experiment conducted in 2016 introduced a far more abstract context for grid cell behavior. Researchers led by Timothy Behrens, a computational neuroscientist at the University of Oxford, had people watch the silhouette of a bird on a screen as the length of its neck, the length of its legs or both were stretched and compressed. The hexadirectional signal arose in their fMRI data, in several areas of the brain; it varied just as if the test subjects were navigating a two-dimensional “bird space,” where one axis denoted neck length, the other leg length. The finding suggested that the brain processes trajectories through physical spaces and conceptual spaces in much the same way. Now, researchers including Behrens, Bellmund and neuroscientist Christian Doeller propose that all knowledge can be plotted this way, in terms of features of interest — that different objects, different experiences and different memories can be organized and traversed with the grid code.
“The Brain Maps Out Ideas and Memories Like Spaces“ from Quanta Magazine