The stereotypical image of psychotherapy shows a patient lying on a couch, exploring their deepest traumas. This leads to awareness of unconscious habits, thoughts, and drives and has long been a cornerstone of psychotherapy. However, the cognitive processes underlying the new awareness that emerges—what’s actually happening in the patient’s brain on that couch—remain a mystery.
“Part of the problem with psychotherapy is that we haven’t had good insights into the mechanistic problems,” said Jaan Aru, an associate professor at the University of Tartu, in an interview with the Observer. “So, it’s very hard to design a therapy.”
In a 2025 paper in Perspectives on Psychological Science, Aru and Nick Kabrel, Aru’s graduate student at the University of Zurich, wrote that becoming aware of unrecognized psychological and behavioral challenges is the most crucial mechanism in conversation-based psychotherapy. Furthermore, they argue that becoming aware can be best framed as a process that expands one’s cognitive map and changes the way one navigates through the mind. This framework also provides a testable theory about the neural correlates behind successful psychotherapy.
Kabrel came to this theory through personal experience. He noticed how a therapist’s questions could prompt him to search through his memories and beliefs, and the introspection was surprisingly powerful. He wondered what was happening in his brain in those moments and noticed something that sparked his interest.
“When I search through memory or search in my mind, it always feels as if I am navigating in some kind of environment,” he said.
As he looked into this idea of mental navigation, he realized he was not alone. In a 2024 paper, he and Aru showed that patients and therapists used more spatial language—such as “this is unexplored territory” or “I’m going in circles”—during psychotherapy sessions than during everyday conversation.
In the new paper, Aru and Kabrel proposed a framework based on how individuals construct their internal worlds in the form of cognitive maps: structured representations of phenomena like objects, concepts, people, and memories, and the relationships among them. Research revealing how the brain represents three-dimensional space helped inspire how this navigation may occur in the brain (O’Keefe and Dostrovsky, 1971; Hafting, 2005). In the hippocampus, place cells fire when animals are in a specific location, while the entorhinal cortex’s grid cells act like a coordinate map. More recent research revealed these cells also encode abstract concepts, such as time, sound, social hierarchies, and word meanings (MacDonald, 2011; Aronov, 2017; Park, 2021; Solomon, 2019; Viganò, 2021).
“The brain is highly likely to make use of this mapping system in these other domains, too,” Aru said. “This idea of mental navigation could be a very general framework to understand thinking and abstract cognition.”
Framing introspection in this way may help people realize that changing the way they navigate through their thoughts could help them out of a pathological way of thinking.
For example, someone suffering from depression might think they are flawed, and any interaction with someone else that ends negatively will be interpreted as their fault because of these perceived flaws. As they continue to view the world through this same negative lens, this thought pattern gets reinforced. It’s analogous to hiking through a forest: The more a path is used, the wider it gets and the more likely it is to be used again.
But a therapist helping them see a different interpretation—a different navigational route—may allow them to reframe their thoughts and not see everything as their fault. Kabrel recommends a psychotherapist say something like, “This is the place where we are stuck. We come back here every time, but we need to expand this.”
Aru thinks this idea is not just for people with mental illness, but for everyone.
“Often the problem is that people have very narrow maps, very narrow ways of thinking. And it’s a very general problem,” he said. “Our goal as a society could be to expand the way people actually think.”
On a smaller scale, the goal of the paper is to encourage psychological scientists and neuroscientists to design experiments to test this new framework and the possible neural correlates involved. In the meantime, Aru knows that some scientists may be doubtful.
“It’s completely understandable if there are scientists who would say, ‘Oh, you’re stretching it too far. How do you know that it’s really related to grid cells?’” he explained. “For me, this is the fun thing about science. You can try to make these links, and sometimes these links are actually there. Then suddenly we might be understanding something that we previously didn’t, and we might be expanding our own mental maps with that.”
References
Aronov D., Nevers R., Tank D.W. (2017). Mapping of a non-spatial dimension by the hippocampal-entorhinal circuit. Nature, 543(7647):719-722.
Hafting T., Fyhn M., Molden S., Moser M.B., & Moser E.I. (2005). Microstructure of spatial map in the entorhinal cortex. Nature, 436, 801-806.
Kabrel N., & Aru J. (2025). Becoming aware through internal exploration: Understanding psychotherapy on conceptual and neurobiological levels. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 0(0).
Kabrel M., Tulver K., & Aru J. (2024). The journey within: Mental navigation as a novel framework for understanding psychotherapeutic transformation. BMC Psychiatry, 24, Article 91.
MacDonald C.J., Lepage K.Q., Eden U.T., Eichenbaum H. (2011) Hippocampal “time cells” bridge the gap in memory for discontiguous events. Neuron, 71(4):737–49.
O’Keefe J., & Dostrovsky J. (1971). The hippocampus as a spatial map. Preliminary evidence from unit activity in the freely-moving rat. Brain Research, 34(1): 171-5.
Park S. A., Miller D. S., & Boorman E. D. (2021). Inferences on a multidimensional social hierarchy use a grid-like code. Nature Neuroscience, 24(9), 1292-1301.
Solomon E. A., Lega B. C., Sperling M. R., & Kahana M. J. (2019). Hippocampal theta codes for distances in semantic and temporal spaces. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(48), 24343-24352.
Viganò S., Rubino V., Di Soccio A., Buiatti M., & Piazza M. (2021). Grid-like and distance codes for representing word meaning in the human brain. NeuroImage, 232, 117876.
Journal
Perspectives on Psychological Science
Article Title
Becoming Aware Through Internal Exploration: Understanding Psychotherapy on Conceptual and Neurobiological
Quitting a job. Buying a house. Everyone at some point in their lives will make a risky choice that may have a cascading effect on their life path. However, with increasing globalization and technological advancements, choices in today’s world are rapidly shifting—seeming more plentiful and complicated than ever. This poses a challenge for researchers who are looking to make sense of how people deal with risk and uncertainty.
In a 2025 study in Psychological Science, researchers went beyond the lab to gather data, asking everyday people about their risky choices. They were curious to learn which aspects were particularly relevant and challenging in modern society—all to build a stronger foundation for behavioral and decision-making research.
“Our basic goal was really to try to tap people’s actual experiences from real life,” said Renato Frey, a coauthor of the study and professor of psychology at the University of Zurich. Previous research exploring risk and decision making has been done in a “top-down manner,” he said, meaning that researchers themselves often come up with scenarios that they consider to be risky. But because those scenarios are usually built on theories and paradigms developed decades ago, “pun intended, there’s the risk that we study outdated phenomena,” he said.
To build an inventory of today’s risky choices, Frey and colleagues recruited multiple samples of participants in Switzerland. Their aim was to create a large and diverse population sample that varied in gender and captured a wide range of ages. Overall, the team surveyed more than 4,380 participants.
“And then in a relatively straightforward way, we just asked our study participants to report a single risky choice,” Frey explained. The question was phrased differently between participants to gain a wider range of choices. Some participants were asked to list a choice that they had personally encountered. Others were asked for one made by someone in their social circle. The question also varied in the ultimate decision made: Some participants were asked to describe when they took the riskier option and others for when they opted for the safer choice.
The term “risky choice” was intentionally left undefined to capture two broad types of choices. The first were choices that involve elements of randomness, such as playing roulette, which some researchers refer to as a “decision under risk.” The second were choices with entirely unknown consequences, such as founding a startup, which some researchers refer to as a “decision under uncertainty.”
The study’s researchers then analyzed this collection of risky choices, first to identify how many unique choices existed, and then to classify and condense. The result is 100 of the most common risky choices faced by modern-day Swiss citizens.
This inventory has information on how common a risky choice is and what life domain it’s often linked to (i.e., occupational, financial, etc.). The result is an instrument that researchers can use to dig into bigger questions.
For instance, because of the timing of the study, Frey and his colleagues could assess whether risky choices shifted before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. They found that “by and large, the distributions of these risky choices to different life domains stay fairly constant,” Frey said. This means that the types of risky choices people experience at different moments in time, known as the ecology or landscape of risk, is “surprisingly stable.”
For instance, across multiple assessments, the study authors found that occupational risky choices, like starting a new job or quitting an existing one, are consistently the most cited risks. This was followed by health-related, financial, social, traffic-related, and recreational choices (e.g., traveling alone).
“That was quite an interesting finding,” Frey said. He noted that researchers sometimes prioritize health or recreational choices when assessing how frequently people engage in real-life risky behaviors. “But according to our data, it seems to be a bit like vice versa. First and foremost, people think of occupational risky choices,” he said.
The new research also pinpointed some gender- and age-related patterns. For example, job-quitting is a common risky choice for younger adults, whereas older populations tend to be more worried about whether to accept a new job. “These more nuanced patterns help us understand essentially which subgroups of the population are exposed to which risky choices,” Frey explained. “I think this helps policymakers better understand whether people of particular subgroups of the population need support or decision aids.”
This inventory of choices can also aid future research. It can provide a foundation for scientists to develop, validate, and calibrate new measurement tools related to risk and uncertainty, Frey said.
Finally, the study shows that although psychology often focuses on testing theories in a lab, it is also about discovering the everyday experiences of people. “I think this [study] could serve as kind of a blueprint for how, at least every once in a while, we should probably reach out and do this more discovery-oriented, data-driven, bottom-up research,” Frey said. “We really need both parts in psychological science.”
Reference
Frey, R., & Fischer, O. (2025). Mapping the ecology of risk: 100 risky choices of modern life. Psychological Science.
Journal
Psychological Science
Article Title
Mapping the Ecology of Risk: 100 Risky Choices of Modern Life
Article Publication Date
16-Nov-2025
