Animal brains and behaviours have evolved in the natural world – to allow different species to meet their daily life challenges. However, our understanding of how the brain deals with such diverse conditions stems from constrained laboratory experiments – where an animal exhibits one specific behaviour in one particular task. While this approach has revealed many instances of how the brain can encode isolated behaviours, it leaves the fundamental question unexplored: How does the brain actually represent the real world – in natural and multi-animal settings? To answer this, we caught wild Egyptian fruit-bats, a highly-social mammal, and observed their group behaviour over a year in a naturalistic laboratory-based cave, while conducting wireless-neural-recordings from their brain. We found that hippocampal neurons encoded the identities of conspecifics, invariantly across different conditions – and represented key social factors, like the sex, dominance-hierarchy, and social-affiliation of other individuals. These social representations were conjoined with spatial representations, indicating that the hippocampal cognitive map evolved to also include social information – forming a socio-spatial cognitive map. We then moved from performing neural recordings in the laboratory to pioneering neural recordings in the real world – in bats navigating on a remote oceanic island. To achieve this, we developed a wireless neural-logger with high-precision GPS, and recorded neural activity from hundreds of neurons simultaneously, together with the position of the animal in the real world. We found that the head-direction system, that encodes the orientation of an animal in small rooms, functions as a global compass in the real world – maintaining a stable directional-tuning over the large spatial-scale of the island, and in the face of dynamic celestial cues (moon, stars). These experiments provide the first data from the ‘brain’s navigation circuit’ during real-world navigation. Taken together, these studies provide the first insights into the neural coding of real-world places and societies.