The Metric Slingshot: Navigational Reuse as Width-Optimal Structural Decoupling in Continual Learning

Abstract

Abstract The mammalian brain, most extensively studied in rodents and bats, solves an enormous variety of nonspatial cognitive tasks using neural circuitry, including grid cells, place cells, and hippocampal indexing, that originally evolved for physical navigation. We formalize the above observation within the local Urysohn width (LUW) framework for continual learning. The central construct is the metric slingshot, a learned embedding ϕ: X→Z that maps an arbitrary learning problem into a navigational latent space Z where pre-evolved contraction maps (grid cells) already provide the metric machinery, so that only the topological indexing subproblem must be solved de novo. We prove three results. First, the optimal spacing of multiscale grid cell modules is a geometric series whose ratio is determined by the Ω(w log w) sample complexity bound of the LUW framework; for ecologically plausible parameters, optimality yields r*≈ 1.4–1.7, matching electrophysiological measurements in rodent medial entorhinal cortex. Second, the slingshot preserves the width hierarchy with a Lipschitz-controlled transfer bound: a contractive embedding into a fine-resolution navigational space reduces the effective number of contexts the learner must discover. Third, the anatomical separation of the ventral (“what”) and dorsal (“where”) visual streams achieves the structural decoupling required by metric-topology factorization (MTF) by architecture, without gradient-routing mechanisms. We demonstrate that a metric slingshot is applicable to both perception cognition and motor control. Together, these results provide a unified, complexity-theoretic account of navigation in nonspatial domain, grid cell multimodularity, and hippocampal-neocortical complementary learning as consequences of a single exaptation principle: metric slingshot.