Nature Neuroscience, Published online: 01 July 2026; doi:10.1038/s41593-026-02366-1
Planning is a cognitive process that is thought to be grounded in hippocampal sequences, but recent studies have suggested that a simpler mechanism, fundamentally incompatible with those planning hypotheses, underlies these sequences. Two studies in this issue of Nature Neuroscience provide the first steps to resolving that controversy.