Ad libbing space

So. What if we didn't really have any kinds of maps in our heads? What if we just kind of made things up as we went along? Somebody recently asked me why I have to train an animal to judge distance. Why do we perform simple tasks so poorly without practice? I'd always assumed it was because we need to tune muscles, movements, kinesthesis. But maybe it isn't. Maybe it's because we're inventing the script in the moment. What we do next depends on what just worked. I see this all the time in experiments. We dispense with the early trials because they're messy, filled with noise. But maybe that's where the real story lies.