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[MUSIC PLAYING] NANCY KANWISHER: In a very deep sense, the brain is who we are. And so by looking at what it's made up of, what it's pieces are and what each piece does, I think that's starting to sketch for us a picture of the mind. SARAH HANSEN: Today on Chalk Radio, we're exploring our most critical biological asset, our brain. I'm your host, Sarah Hansen. My guest this week is a scientist and MIT Professor who studies the architecture of the brain. NANCY KANWISHER: I'm Nancy Kanwisher, and I'm an investigator in the McGovern Institute for Brain Research and a member of the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. And I study the human brain and how it's organized at a very macro scale level. I'm interested in big parts of the brain and what they do. SARAH HANSEN: In addition to being an investigator, Nancy Kanwisher is a founding member of the McGovern Institute, which is a community of neuroscientists who are working to better u...

[SQUEAKING] [RUSTLING] [CLICKING] NANCY KANWISHER: So we're talking about navigation-- how you know where you are and how you can get from here to wherever else you want to go. And last time we talked about just the general problems that arise in navigation, and we talked about the parahippocampal place area and other parts of the brain that are involved in navigation. So today we're going to continue that, but we're going to talk more about the actual populations of neurons in your head that are involved in doing this. And we'll talk about a particular aspect of the problem of navigation, which is called reorientation. That is what happens when you lose your bearings, and you need to figure out where you are again. Reset your internal map of where you are. And then we'll talk about the idea that this whole system for navigation, cool as it is and fascinating as navigation itself is, is even more interesting because there's increasing evidence that...

[SQUEAKING] [RUSTLING] [CLICKING] NANCY KANWISHER: Here's the agenda for today. As usual, a bunch of announcements in red. Assignment 4 was graded. There will be comments showing up online on Stellar soon on any of you who didn't get a near-perfect score on it. And I'll also be going over a little bit of it in a moment. And then once we do that, we're going to talk about navigation-- how we know where we are, and how to get from here to someplace else, which is much more awesome than it sounds at first, as you will see. OK. So quick review. OK. So what was the key point? Why did I assign the Haxby 2001 article for you guys to read? It presents this important challenge to the functional specificity of the face area and the place area. What was that challenge? What was Haxby's key point? Yes, Isabel. AUDIENCE: Well, he was just attacked-- it just has a preference for rectilinear and not seeing if it's actual scanning for. It's not truly detecting...