Radical Embodied Relation at any Scale, from Remembering to Navigating

Abstract Recent developments in the study of the hippocampal formation call old ideas of representation into question and are forcing a change in the way we understand the study of memory and navigation, opening the path towards a radical interpretation of the cognitive map. Through this lens, we can now assess the body’s cognitive abilities (such as thinking and remembering) through the same process by which we assess the body’s abilities of locomotion (such as navigating and wayfinding). In so doing we benefit from already established ideas in radical embodiment to move beyond traditional dichotomies of mental and physical. This gives us an understanding of representations not as ‘findable’ or ‘locatable’ in any hierarchy in the natural world. Rather, the scaling happens in our assessments: Representations are the ways we communicate those assessments to one another, and to ourselves; they are real, and they are interactional.