Our brains give us the remarkable ability to make sense of
situations we’ve never encountered before—a familiar person in an unfamiliar
place, for example, or a coworker in a different job role—but the mechanism our
brains use to accomplish this has been a longstanding mystery of neuroscience.
Now, researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder have
demonstrated that our brains could process these new situations by relying on a
method similar to the “pointer” system used by computers. “Pointers” are used
to tell a computer where to look for information stored elsewhere in the system
to replace a variable.