Summary: Radical Embodied Relation at any Scale, from Remembering to Navigating (by Hiott, 2025)

Overview

This philosophical and neuroscientific paper challenges fundamental assumptions about neural representations in cognitive science. Hiott argues that recent hippocampal research forces us to reconceive representations not as "findable" objects stored in brains, but as communicative assessments scientists create to understand dynamic, embodied processes.

Central Thesis

The paper's core claim is provocatively simple yet counterintuitive: neural representations exist, but not in brains. Rather, they are communicative tools—like weather maps representing weather patterns—that help us understand ongoing brain-body-environment interactions that cannot be absolutely located or represented.

The Hippocampal Shift

Hiott builds her argument around recent discoveries in hippocampal research. The hippocampus, long associated with memory formation, was discovered in the 1970s to also function as the brain's "GPS," crucial for spatial navigation. For decades, scientists treated these as separate functions. However, contemporary research reveals they are the same underlying process assessed differently:

  • When we remember, we navigate "conceptual space"

  • When we navigate physically, we move through geographical space

  • Both involve the same hippocampal mechanisms of positioning and pattern-matching

This finding undermines traditional dichotomies between mental (cognitive) and physical (locomotive) processes. As Hiott puts it, we "think in the same way we navigate"—by habitually aligning with regularities encountered through sensory experience.

Way-Making: A Unifying Framework

To escape either/or binaries, Hiott introduces "way-making" as a term encompassing both traditionally "cognitive" activities (thinking, remembering, imagining) and "locomotive" activities (navigating, wayfinding). Way-making reframes cognition as the ways any designated body moves through its ongoing encounter—whether that encounter is a physical landscape, a conversation, a memory, or abstract thought.

This framework eliminates hierarchical assumptions (that "higher" cognition requires different mechanisms than "basic" navigation) and instead treats these as different scales of assessment of a continuous embodied process. The body develops its ability to "make way" through conceptual terrain using the same fundamental processes by which it learned to crawl toward a cookie jar.

Representations as Communication, Not Storage

Traditional neuroscience has long assumed neural representations are stored engrams—essentially hieroglyphs inscribed in brain tissue. Hiott argues this conflates our communicative tools (fMRI images, neural firing patterns, cognitive maps) with the dynamic processes they represent.

She draws an analogy to weather: We don't search for "70 degrees" inside the weather itself; rather, we create weather maps as representations to communicate about atmospheric dynamics. Similarly, neural representations are not in brains but are assessments scientists make of ongoing brain activity. These representations are real and useful—"adequate for purpose"—without requiring location within the brain.

This view aligns with recent critiques in neuroscience that warn against confusing observer perspectives with what is observed (as noted by researchers like Buzsáki and Brette). The representations we create to study memory or navigation are necessarily static and localized for communication purposes, but the living processes they represent are continuous, dynamic, and unlocatable.

Challenging the Scaling Problem

Radical embodied cognitive science (REC) has long questioned whether its anti-representationalist approach can "scale up" to explain complex cognition like imagination or abstract thought—the so-called "representation-hungry" problem. Hiott's solution is elegant: all scientific assessments are representation-hungry because representation is how we communicate understanding.

However, the representations remain communicative rather than engrammatic. There's no hierarchy where navigation is "basic" and episodic memory is "higher." Instead, these are different positions from which we assess the same embodied process of making way through encountered regularities. The body doesn't "have" levels or scales; we create those divisions through our assessments.

Implications for Cognitive Neuroscience

This reconception requires abandoning the search for locatable memory traces while still using neural representations as research tools. Scientists can continue mapping brain activity patterns without assuming those patterns are stored as discrete units. The patterns emerge from continuous agent-environment interaction—what Hiott describes as the body's ongoing "habituation of regularities."

When we study memory, we assess how bodies position current sensory input relative to all previously encountered regularities (their path-dependency). When we study navigation, we assess similar positioning in geographical space. Both are real phenomena studied through representations, but neither requires findable engrams.

Philosophical Foundations

Hiott draws on radical embodiment, ecological psychology (Gibson's affordances), process philosophy, and Daoist concepts of "way-making." Her approach avoids collapsing into either pure substance or pure process metaphysics. Instead, she holds the tension: representations are simultaneously real (as communications) and illusory (as supposedly located entities).

This parallels the observation that we can use representations to understand there are no representations in the traditional sense—stored, locatable mental objects. The goal is moving beyond either/or thinking (either we have internal representations or representation is meaningless) toward understanding representations as interactional and communicative throughout.

Conclusion

Hiott's paper offers a radical reorientation for cognitive neuroscience. By taking hippocampal research seriously, we must acknowledge that memory and navigation share mechanisms, that cognition and locomotion are continuous, and that neural representations are communicative assessments rather than findable brain contents. This preserves the usefulness of representation in science while avoiding misleading searches for "memory engrams" or cognitive maps literally inscribed in neural tissue.

The framework suggests new experimental paradigms focused on dynamic agent-environment interaction rather than isolated internal processing. It also extends radical embodiment beyond simple perception-action couplings to encompass the full range of human cognitive abilities, all understood as ways bodies make through their encounters—whether navigating cities, conversations, or memories.