Most of us take it for granted that our thoughts have meaning. You can think about a dog, a holiday, or the square root of 144 — and somehow, your brain just gets it. Cognitive science has long explained this by saying the brain uses internal representations: mental models that stand in for things in the world.

But not everyone agrees. Some researchers say we’ve got it backwards — that meaning doesn’t come from internal models, but from how we move through and interact with the world.

So which is it? Are our minds built on internal maps — or is meaning something we do, not something we store?

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