For centuries we’ve been told geometry is a gift of human reason. Pure. Abstract. Special.
Plato said so. Kant echoed him. It feels intuitive enough. Who else cares about parallel lines?
Maybe not the fish swimming past us right now.
But New York University psychology professor Moira says this view is outdated. She published a new analysis in Trends in Cognitive Sciences that flips the script entirely. The roots of geometric thought aren’t locked behind a human-only firewall.
They are shared with rats. Chickens. Fish.
“Our understanding of geometry may very well come from wandering rather than from worksheets,” Dillon explains.
This isn’t a new debate. Philosophers have argued over the source of spatial reasoning for ages. But experimental science only got into it recently. Most people assumed the Language-of-Thought Theory was correct. This hypothesis suggests the brain has built-in mental languages. One for math. One for music. One for geometry.
According to this model, humans are born with Euclidean rules hardcoded into our brains. Parallelism? We get it. Perpendicularity? Native.
D Dillon disagrees. She argues those mental languages are a myth when it comes to spatial tasks.
Instead, look at how we move through the world.
How do we find our way home? How does a rat escape a maze? How does a baby locate their parent?
This leads to her Wanderers Hypothesis.
It’s not about a special math module in the skull. It is about navigation. Systems designed to survive. To move.
These systems approximate geometry. They capture distance, direction, and shape.
But they don’t replicate Euclidean geometry perfectly. That’s the point. Animals simulate these paths to plan routes without physically traveling every inch. Babies do this too.
In fact, a 2023 study by Dillon showed infants can outperform AI on certain cognitive tasks because they use this flexible, navigational thinking.
So, if the hardware is shared across species… why do humans do calculus and the rat does not?
It isn’t the geometric intuition itself. The raw ability is the same.
It’s language.
Human language acts as a translator. It takes that primal, bodily sense of navigation—this innate wanderer logic—and allows us to externalize it. To discuss it. To use it without moving.
We can solve problems in our heads. We can “mentally wander” without ever leaving our chair.
Other animals cannot do that. They feel the space. They navigate it. They live inside the geometry.
We have names for the lines.
And those names changed everything.
