SOCIAL ROAD MAPS IN OUR BRAINS. There is firm evidence that our brains use ‘maps’ to understand and work with social relationships – how distant or close individuals are to one another (affiliation) and where we and others sit on our social network (hierarchies and other relationships). The ‘structural school’ of family therapy observed and described this in the nineteen sixties and seventies but now we know some of the basis in brain function for these essential functions and skills. The authors of this very fine Scientific American article ask: “Can flawed mapping processes explain psychiatric dysfunction?” Perhaps flawed mapping can sometimes occur as a result of physical damage (e.g. traumatic brain injury, frontotemporal dementia) and sometimes as a result of repeated and cumulative damaging experiences in childhood development (now understood as ‘complex trauma’)
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/in-search-of-the-brains-social-road-maps/