Please note that the place cells have been documented and there is starting to be some indication that there is some sort of operations that allow mapping between these places, including short-cuts.
I have read in some older work with frontal eye fields (that I have been utterly able to find again!) that the saccade actually is an activated path between two projected activation patchs in the frontal eye field.
I strongly suspect that most of what we think of as mental processing and manipulation is, in fact, done with the same basic mechanisms that drive external motor movements. These “motor patterns” push activation back into the sensory streams directing what we normally think of as searching higher order mental dimensions: connections between areas/maps.
Some of this higher dimension space is learned connections as we absorb the motor behavior we call language:
In all of this please never forget that the driving force for the cortex (sensing and acting) is the older lizard brain. The cortex by itself is inherently passive.