Our Cartographic Brain

Abstract

The human brain is in effect a cartographic engine that creates and maintains in real time an internal map of the perceived world, which we take to be reality. Perception is not an immediate process, though the brain maintains an almost perfect illusion of immediacy: such indirection is necessary to prevent us from being swamped and enslaved by the torrent of sense data that we receive, but more importantly it permits the brain to interpose its own data - the process we call imagination. Our world is an imagined world, but evolution has ensured that it corresponds sufficiently closely to the material world for us to survive in it.