it’s all in the mind . you are your own gps.
We all have these incredible brains - they need regular feeding and watering to perform at a high level of course but they do. They do perform. Our minds are incredible.
Because I am in California (yes they let me back into the country), this post will be sprinkled with pictures of the California family garden. All this colour!!
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Are you old enough to remember the Bionic Man? The six million dollar man - in 1974. If I remember this correctly, the bionic eye in this over hauled slightly arrogant human would make a funny little electronic beeping sound as it zeroed in and mapped out a space before finding the bad guy, of course. We would watch all the graphics and sci fi stuff and laugh with delight.
Well, I think our minds are doing that all the time. Our minds code maps into our heads about everything, sources for food and escape routes, and people, the lock on the back door, the sound the floor makes outside the baby’s room, the location of the oats in a new supermarket, All the important stuff. These maps are 3D, interactive, and constantly updating. We think we’re just walking through the world but really, we’re drawing it as we go. Our personal GPS is like a search and rescue dog, allowed to be slightly out of control so he trusts his nose and follows it, but communicating with its handler constantly. Our gps search is always rogue, roving, looking around corners making new finds. Unfettered. Wild. (Wild is my favorite word this week).
When I first land into a country or city that I visit often - I send my brain a specific message to download the pertinent airport map from my personal gps. Sometimes I have to say the words to my maps out loud - no one cares they just think you are talking on your phone - people can happily talk to themselves all day long in public now. San Francisco, I say, now where is that shop with the hand cream. And up come the directions. Often we need to call up multiple airport maps in one trip with one tired brain - favourite coffee and bathroom locations, the location of the baggage carousels, the corridor that leads to the lifts, my spot to wait for the train or pick up. And as I wait for pick up at the airport I seek the interactive map of the home I am going to so I can quickly navigate the kitchen and garden and get cooking straight away. I think about the shops and how to get to them.
We all do this. We all have these incredible brains - they need regular feeding and watering to perform at a high level but they do. But they do! Our minds are incredible. There is so much storage capacity and you don’t have to pay for it.
I look in the fridge upon arrival and remind myself where the butter is (butter is critical to my cooking as we all know) and what the family favourites are - creating menus and shopping lists to reside with the map I pull up of supermarkets and good shops. These all line up in my head in a bionic man data form. There was a bionic woman too - do you remember - but I never trusted her - that hair never moved!
I have five children in five different locations in four different countries and have a peculiar knack of landing in a space when I am most needed. When Mama is most needed. So it is imperative I can hit the ground running. I must be making plans all the time.
If I don’t focus hard and physically walk my mind through all the maps of a specific location, I won’t be able to work fast. This is an inherently human function. Being prepared. Mentally storing information in a recoverable format. Which is why we devise systems to bring the information up out of the murk in a timely fashion. I can forget ordinary stuff like which side the cutlery drawer is, where the recycling goes. What day is rubbish day. Where the bins are kept. What side of the road I am meant to be on! (that is a fun one to forget !) And then to top it off the kids (who are grown ups by the way but still the kids) shift houses, and my old house maps have to be dated and archived for do you remember conversations and the new ones filed to the top of the map file.
We are all like this. We all carry maps in our minds. We are all better than any computer at retrieval if we file stuff in our brains correctly, (and stay hydrated). The trick is to keep the memory maps updated and correctly filed. In our minds. Not in our phones or on our laptops - in our own busy, clever minds.
Because if we don’t use it we will lose it and AI is waiting in the wings and nothing does it like you do.
This reminds me of the Method of Loci or Memory Palace reputed to be used by Cromwell though it originates in Ancient Greece. This system works by mentally placing information you want to remember along a familiar route or within imagined rooms so you retrieve it later by walking through the space in your mind. I tried to do this once and it worked to an extent - attaching reminders to physical objects - then I found myself filing things in my internal boxes in the rooms in my mind like I have been doing since adolescence and stopped being so Ancient Greece.
When as I travel to our next location you and I will metaphorically fold the beautiful colourful updated maps along their well worn creases and file them in the newly sorted appropriate box in a room in my mind. Then we move to the next box with the next map. I find if I do this all intentionally, almost meditatively, I can roll from one home and one job to the next with ease and grace and little bother.
As long as I give myself that in between moment to archive and then download. That in between time to call up the next map.
Remembering all this sounds exhausting right? But our incredible brains remember a ton of stuff - often using emotions and scents and memory locators as markers.
We all have a built-in GPS. It is called the hippocampus with ‘place cells’ that literally activate when you are in a specific location. Keeping information on hold until needed.
The raw data in your brain needs hooks for retrieval so it ties places to emotions, smells, sounds, colors, patterns. Your memory of the place and your feeling about it are deeply entwined so when you step into a room, your feelings activate the map to help you speed up your navigations. Your fight or flight or cook.
I remember places as maps - (actual maps of corridors and roads - like line drawings sometimes with color but I am not so good at remembering colours, (I was drawing these maps in my head long before Google maps was a thing). (Yes,I am that old). Many brains don’t memorize places as a bird’s-eye view, some memorize in a video game format - maybe your brain stores places using landmarks and sequences — like: “left at the big rock, right at the gate we saw the magpie that time”. This makes your navigation memory more experience-based than method based, which is why you might struggle to draw a map, but can still get there easily in a car. I follow a map in my head. A real one that I can see in my minds eye. I am pattern based.
Do you remember maps in pictures or patterns or experiences or something totally different. This is a fun question to think about.
I blame my Dad - he had such a love of maps that he wall-papered our toilet in maps, then varnished the walls so we could not pick them off and replace them with the Doobie Brothers or something - we spent many a contemplative visit to the toilet memorizing maps. Not too contemplative though as there were eight of us in that house on the beach and only one toilet. My dad even put the toilet light linked to the fan on a timer (5 minutes to black out and near suffocation) to encourage quick visits! Yet, I still have an early 70’s world map in my childhood brain file and there have been many redrawing and renaming of countries since then.
Though this is way off thread I also remember smells in bar codes. Each smell has a different width in the barcode with different arrivals and different codes within the smell. This makes travelling on a plane for long periods a bit daunting. I always have a scarf to cover my nose - or my brain gets too active decoding and logging each part of every scent.
Though since my one and only bout with Covid my nose is not what it used to be, which frankly is a bit of a relief.
I hope to be dropping in to write to you more often as I travel - with no babies to carry about I will have more morning time. Sorry daughter. And now I will drag on slightly damp - from this mornings swim- little black swimsuit - that we would call togs in New Zealand - and slide my hot body into the cold water of the swimming pool.
I just reread the sentence above. ⬆️ Why can I not write a simple sentence. Sometimes I think my writing is like the crossword in the newspaper - the more you get to know the author the easier it is to decipher the clues. Do real people even write crosswords anymore?
What’s next for you? Do you have maps in your head? What do they look like?Are you swimming today?
Lots of Love
Celi
Please feel free to Share this post with your friends. I want to know what the maps in their heads look like too!
I love maps and refuse to use GPS. I look at the route in advance, then memorise it or maybe draw a simpfied version to put on the car seat, then off I go, happily navigating.
I have an incredibly horrible sense of direction, always have, but I do have a very detailed memory for landmarks or odd things, and that is how I remember my way around. late in life, my sister and I discovered (she has this same issue), that we have something called Dyscalculia, which has to do with spatial skills, some math, directions, sequential steps, etc. it manifests itself in different ways in different people. kind of like dyslexia but dealing with math instead of literacy if you will. a group of British researches finally figured this out. one woman was actually married to a cartographer who thought she was crazy, people think you aren't trying, etc. You are intelligent, just heavier on the literacy/creative side of the brain and you learn to adapt as we have. Interesting to know -)