Forgetting and remembering - a metaphor

Forgetting something and then later working your way back to it is like wayfinding, which is interesting all by itself. The more signposts and roads we place, the less likely that our memory will disappear.

This article about how we might encode this information seems to say this is more than just a metaphor - that the encoding mechanism we use for physical space may be the same as the one we use for concepts. Our mental way-finding maps may exist after all. Which sort of makes sense, it’s unlikely we have dozens of different ways of storing and retrieving information when one general one would do. We understand so little about ourselves on this level, though.

Sometimes, metaphors are more than just correspondence, they can be useful in how we model, store or use data.