>“Cognitive spaces are a way of thinking about how our brain might organize our knowledge of the world,” Bellmund said. It’s an approach that concerns not only geographical data, but also relationships between objects and experience. “We were intrigued by evidence from many different groups that suggested that the principles of spatial coding in the hippocampus seem to be relevant beyond the realms of just spatial navigation,” Bellmund said. The hippocampus’ place and grid cells, in other words, map not only physical space but conceptual space. It appears that our representation of objects and concepts is very tightly linked with our representation of space.

That is certainly how I think I think ... I think :) As an experiment two years ago, I bootstrapped an IDE from an html file with just textarea that could overwrite it's own source on a webserver (it would restart the server if the server code was changed) in the browser. Eventually I got it to the point that it laid out the editors for individual files in an infinite plane of 2d space (akin to something like placing editor windows in a google maps like scrollable ui) and saved their locations between refreshes.

I still really miss the spatial sense that the file that controls the editors is up over there, and the file browser code is right over at that location, (and they slightly overlap their tests and other supporting files).

I had this vision of this sort of becoming a system wherein everyone could choose to see all the files in the system being edited in a shared global space (or perhaps space of workspaces). So if you wanted to see what so and so was working on you'd just navigate over to area where the files they are working on are located. By default if you were editing a file in this system in a public repo, since it was browser based it would be publicly viewable.

Juggling editor tabs and re-opening and reorganizing windows, and not being able to create workspaces of editor layouts since then has kind of sucked. It's like having this glimpse of a system that was from some future time but then having to abandon it.