Our brains give us the remarkable ability to make sense of situations we've never encountered before -- a familiar person in an unfamiliar place, for example, or a coworker in a different job role -- but the mechanism our brains use to accomplish this has been a longstanding mystery of neuroscience. Now, researchers have demonstrated that our brains could process these new situations by relying on a method similar to the "pointer" system used by computers. "Pointers" are used to tell a computer where to look for information stored elsewhere in the system to replace a variable.