Well-traveled road effect

Biological Parallel

Neural compression of familiar routes is universal in navigating species. Rat hippocampal place cells fire in dense patterns during novel exploration and compress into sparse replay on familiar routes. Honeybees fly more direct return paths than outbound exploratory flights. Desert ants run compressed direct vectors home after meandering outbound foraging. Clark's nutcrackers show reduced search time with each cached-seed revisit. Wolves patrol established territory faster with fewer investigative pauses. The brain encodes less data on familiar routes, creating the perception that familiar distances are shorter.