From the twists and turns of the labyrinth in the Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur, to the treacherous network of hedges in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, mazes have an unmistakable and mysterious allure.

But mazes—a complex network of passages through which one has to find a way—have a life beyond the plot lines of ancient myth. They exist in scientific laboratories and even, it can be said, in the form of our route home from work.

We asked James Olds, a neuroscientist and director of the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, to shed some light on the science of solving mazes.

A maze is something that other humans have created