The Same Brain Regions Help Us Map Physical Space and Social Connections
Curious researchers learn how we mentally map our social relationships and that those who excel often become influential
Hiya!
Achieving social success depends not just on what you know, but also on who you know. This is as true now as it has been for as long as we’ve formed social groups.
However, real social success comes not just from who we know, but how well we understand the invisible threads that make up the web of our social world. Knowing who is close to whom, who they don’t like, who is popular, who belongs to which social group, and who is rising in the ranks toward power goes a long way in helping us climb social ladders.
Keeping track of the answers to such questions provides an undeniable social advantage, and neuroscientists and researchers have long wondered how this social mapping happens in the brain. Now, after many studies and years of research, a very dedicated scientist may have figured it out.
The Curiosity
Oriel Feldmanhall — an associate professor of cognitive and psychological sciences at Brown University, Director of the FeldmanHall Lab at Brown, and a member of the University’s Carney Institute for Brain Science — has dedicated years to understanding how our minds represent our social world.
In a recent opinion piece published in Science American, Feldmanhall discusses recent research by her lab that shows how our mental social webs, or “cognitive maps,” shape many of our social skills, including helping us rise in influence, decide when to talk about what and to whom, and choose who to form tighter bonds with within our social circles.
And last year, Feldmanhall and her team even learned where this cognitive social map resides in our brain, but I’ll tell you about that part in a bit.
First, in her Scientific American article, Feldmanhall points out that mapping our mental “social architecture,” as she calls it, is anything but simple or easy, given that our real-world social networks are huge, with hundreds to tens of thousands of possible connections.
And it’s a challenging mental task to keep track of the various relationships, not to mention continually updating our mental database whenever a social connection is formed or broken. Feldmanhall explains in her article,
“My colleagues and I wanted to understand what type of cognitive map would enable you to constantly keep stock of the changing social landscape. And perhaps more importantly, we wanted to know why someone would take the time and effort to mentally track the web of connections that surrounds them.”
And it seems that over time and much exploration, Feldermanhall and her colleagues and students have done just that.
Mapping Social Connections
In her lab, Feldmanhall and her colleague, Apoorva Bhandari, a cognitive neuroscientist at Brown University, conducted a series of studies to investigate how we build cognitive maps to better understand our social navigation.
Given that being socially strategic and popular often results in social influence, the researchers investigated how this occurs in real time.
Influence
In a June 2025 study published in Science Advances, Feldmanhall and her team sought to evaluate real-time cognitive social mapmaking skills and see how the skills relate to a person’s social influence.
Ideally, the researchers could observe a large group of people who had never met before, but who live in close proximity to each other. Such ideals are typically hard to find, but that is precisely the situation every new college student faces. And so, the researchers chose to focus on first-year undergraduate students at Brown University for their study.
In a news release by Brown University, Feldmanhall explained,
“When students arrive on campus, they have no friends, but by winter break, they have a rich social world where many friendships have been created and other ties have dissolved. By studying members of the Class of 2026 living in three first-year dorms, my team was able to observe a brand-new social network as it developed.”
For a year, Feldmanhall and her team documented the friendships that formed and faded, creating a real-time social network of approximately 200 students. Each student completed a survey about their personality, with questions such as “Do you like to socialize, or are you more of a wallflower?”
The students were also shown pairs of classmates and asked whether the pairs were friends, and they were asked how they thought various other students were socially connected, which the researchers graphed and tracked as social connections developed.
By repeatedly asking students who their friends were throughout the year, the researchers could quantify which students were most well-connected to other well-connected students and thus identify the most influential within their social network.
They found that, initially, students in the middle of the graphs had the most connections to other well-connected peers, whereas students at the edges of the graphs had fewer friends and fewer ties to their more well-connected peers.
By the end of the academic year, however, the researchers’ graphs showed that the students who ended up in the more “influential” center differed from those at the beginning of the year.
After evaluating their graphs and the students’ surveys, the team found that the students who rose to the top of the social hierarchy weren’t the most extroverted or charismatic, as one might expect.
Instead, the students who excelled were the best social mapmakers, quickly identifying how their peers were connected.
Isabella Aslarus, who conducted the research as a manager in FeldmanHall’s lab and authored the study, said in the news release by Brown University that,
“Participants often told us that it felt like they were just guessing who is friends with whom, but in reality, some individuals are remarkably perceptive of the structure of their social world, and over time, this knowledge enables them to end up at its center.”
Being good at developing a social cognitive map makes it easier to determine who belongs to which group and to identify potential gaps in a social network that you can strategically leverage. In contrast, Feldmanhall writes in her article,
“people who were initially quite influential — connected to many other well-connected people — but who did not have accurate mental maps of the network did not stay influential for long.”
Ultimately, the researchers discovered that contrary to popular belief, the number of people a person knows isn’t what makes them influential. In the news release, Aslarus explains,
“What matters are your connections to other well-connected peers. These more powerful social ties give you a number of benefits that together add up to what we call influence.”
There’s one strategy the researchers identified for tracking our continually evolving social landscape that’s likely as old as language — gossip. So, the researchers decided to investigate that, too.
Gossip
In another study, this one published by Nature in July 2025, only a month after the Science Advances one, Feldmanhall, Bhandari, and their colleagues explored the role that gossip plays in our cognitive social mapmaking. In her Scientific American essay, Feldmanhall explains that,
“While spilling the tea often gets a bad rap, the humdrums of life get spiced up through the stories we hear or tell others, and it can be an efficient way to quickly learn about the ins and outs of the community.”
A glance at practically any history book shows the power gossip has to instigate social change, whether in civil rights movements or in royal or political coups. As such, paying attention to the flow of gossip is likely a worthwhile strategy — not just the content of the gossip, but also who spreads it.
In her essay, Feldmanhall points out a particularly interesting point about our relationship with gossip as a species. That we rarely get caught in the act, even though research suggests over 65 percent of our conversations are about other people.
To better understand how we achieve such success with gossiping, Feldmanhall and her team wondered whether our social mapmaking skills help us predict where and how information will spread via gossip. However, calculating which paths, or through which people, gossip might travel is quite the mental challenge. As Feldmanhall reminds us in her essay,
“You can’t just know the ties among your friends; you also need to grasp the connections between your friends’ friends and beyond.”
Still, there are at least benefits to the mental strain of keeping our social cognitive maps up to date and understanding how information will likely flow throughout them.
For instance, knowing how popular someone is and how close they are to the subject of gossip helps quickly gauge whether a person would make a good confidante — someone who is far enough away from the target of gossip that it won’t get back to them, but connected enough to others for the information to be spread effectively.
So far, the two studies we’ve discussed affirm what we’ve already observed — that keeping track of social webs benefits us socially by helping us gain social influence, and that gossip is an effective way to acquire and spread information.
But how do our brains create these social cognitive maps?
Social Mapping in the Brain
In September 2024, nearly a year before the influence and gossip studies, Feldmanhall, Bhandari, and their colleagues investigated how our brains develop social maps.
They write in the resulting study, published in Nature, that,
“Here we find that people immediately cache abstract knowledge about social network structure as they learn who is friends with whom, which enables the identification of efficient routes between remotely connected individuals. These cognitive maps of social networks, which are built while learning, are then reshaped through overnight rest.”
In other words, as we go about our days, our brain produces a rough sketch of the social relationships around us, which it then refines when we rest — but that’s when things get interesting.
When we sleep, our brain engages in what’s known as “replay,” in which it replays the events of our day, while sorting and storing them as memories. During this process, our brain also has time to reflect on the possible social connections around us.
If you’re like me, you may have assumed that rest allows the brain to turn a rough sketch of our social webs made during the day into a detailed blueprint as we sleep. However, if so, we’re both wrong.
Instead, the researchers found that when our rest includes sleep, rather than refining the social map into greater detail and precision, the brain makes it “fuzzier” and more abstract. In Scientific American, Feldmanhall explains,
“This might sound problematic, but this fuzziness actually helps reveal the overall shape of the network by making it more abstract.”
As counterintuitive as it might seem for our brain to make our cognitive social maps fuzzier rather than more refined, it’s actually quite a brilliant strategy. Feldmanhall reminds us in her essay,
“Abstraction, by design, naturally highlights the most important structures in the network—just as impressionist Claude Monet used broad, choppy brushstrokes to reveal the important elements in his paintings, letting his lily pads come into focus when viewed at a distance.”
Making our cognitive maps more abstract emphasizes the strongest highways, or major arteries, of our social web connections. This way, she says,
“If the brain needs to quickly figure out where gossip might spread, knowing where the popular people are positioned, or the key relationships that bridge otherwise disconnected communities, allows us to chart the sequence of ties that can efficiently cross the network.”
The Millennial in me is reminded of an episode from the 1990s sitcom Friends, specifically season 3, episode 16, which centers on two characters, Ross and Rachel. The two have an on-off relationship throughout the show, but in this episode, the couple is “on a break,” and Ross sleeps with someone else, only to learn that Rachel wants to get back together.
Not wanting Rachel to find out about what he did, Ross confesses to his male friends, who urge him to follow “the trail,” referring to the list of people between the woman he slept with and Rachel. Ross then spends the day identifying the significant relationships between the two women and tracking down the gossip trail, in an attempt to prevent news of his tryst from reaching Rachel. (Spoiler: he fails and she finds out.)
While it didn’t work out so well for Ross, identifying key relationships and likely pathways for information to travel among people helps us make strategic decisions about how to navigate our social relationships more quickly than by evaluating every detail of every relationship.
More Coming
Incredibly, in addition to everything Feldmanhall, Bhandari, and their teams have discovered so far, they have another study, currently undergoing peer review, in which they’ve identified the neurological machinery behind our social navigation.
More specifically, the researchers learned that our hippocampus (a small region with a significant influence over our memory and learning) is involved in carrying our social maps. This isn’t too surprising since our social cognitive maps involve, you know, learning about relationships and then remembering them.
But the team identified another, more surprising, brain region that also seems to play a significant role in carrying our social mind maps: the entorhinal cortex, which helps us navigate physical space. It seems, then, that in addition to monitoring our physical space, the entorhinal cortex helps us keep track of the metaphorical distance in social relationships. Feldmanhall wrote in Scientific American,
“[S]trategic wayfinding isn’t only for physical space. It is just as necessary to be able to effectively navigate through our social landscapes. Armed with a deliberately fuzzy atlas of our social community, skilled social navigators can do what no GPS can. They see the bridges before they’re built, steer around the storms of rumor, and chart a course to common ground.”
Perspective Shift
I admit to being slightly confounded by Feldmanhall’s initial curiosity regarding “why someone would take the time and effort to mentally track the web of connections that surrounds them.”
I mean, a glance at history or even modern relationships reveals that doing so not only serves a socially strategic purpose but also another reason I didn’t see Feldmanhall mention — survival.
After all, knowing who the power players are and who their relationships are with can keep you alive by telling you who to trust, who can help, and who we should keep our distance from.
Still, Feldmanhall and Bhandari's research is valuable for revealing how our brains manage the complex task of creating social maps, keeping them up to date, and making them easier for us to reference when we’re crunched for time.
I’m particularly fascinated by what they found in their newest study, awaiting peer review, that the same brain region responsible for managing our physical space also helps manage social distance between people. One brain region that tracks two types of “space” is wild, and it makes me curious how many others do something similar. I suppose we’ll have to wait a little longer before finding out.
That’s really interesting. I wonder what differences might appear if introverts and extroverts were viewed separately. I’m not great at either spatial or social relationships. Maybe that’s not a coincidence.