This is why I think 2D and 3D languages are the future (and of course, are a big part of the present and past, just not in traditional programming languages). Human minds are highly evolved to work in 2D and 3D.<p>Further reading: 1972 - Mark Wells' A Review of Two-Dimensional Programming Languages<p><a href="https://github.com/breck7/wells/blob/main/wells1972.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/breck7/wells/blob/main/wells1972.pdf</a>
I think it will be interesting to see what develops as we learn more and more about the mechanisms of our brain and how they intersect with the subjective experience of our mind. I feel reasonably certain we’re going to be able to unlock new capabilities that were previously either undiscovered or not reliably available to humans. Things like the ability for some people to essentially be a human calculator, and others to have photographic memories.<p>The possible downside however is that we will likely be able to quantify the capabilities of any particular brain based solely on an assessment of its physical attributes. That seems like a dark place.
There is a company that takes this concept and lets you take notes in "spaces".<p><a href="https://www.nototo.app/" rel="nofollow">https://www.nototo.app/</a>
We've been taking advantage of this for at least 2500 years.
Our languages show this ("in the first place, in the second place", in Latin, in Greek, ...)
What blows my mind is the concept of sensor fusion and how it works in the brain.<p>How you can infer the shape of an object by progressively touching it with your fingers even if you cannot see it. Try to implement an algorithm or ML solution that does this and you'll know how insanely hard this problem is.
Wouldn't be surprising since spatial memory would be one if not the first recalling system for survival.. piggybacking on it for abstraction would be structurally efficient.
One of the ancient Greek craft of mnemonics is to spatialize what you wish to remember. For example, use the rooms of a house to contain sequential items of a speech.
Place Cell/Grid Cells/Head Cells/etc... might be not mapping space but cortex location (i.e., the "where" in the hippocampal complex isn't referring to physical space but from/to cortex location the "when" is recalled or should be stored). Rodent specific navigation abilities might be driving us toward the wrong interpretation of HC complex?
I'm always super skeptical when I see a blanket statement like this about how "the brain" works. Maybe many brains do but there are too many incredibly fundamental variations of how peoples' brains work to generalise too much. Aphantasia, variations in inner monologues, different sensory processing... we really are all our own unique creatures.
It somehow always irks me when VCs talk about "spaces" in reference to markets and how "spaces" are "crowded", and how that limits their thought into what's possible.<p>To me a market isn't a space that can be occupied in the same sense of occupying a finite physical space.