Speaker 1: From how stuff works dot com. This is the stuff
Speaker 1: of life. Welcome to the Stuff of Life. I'm your host,
Speaker 1: Julie Douglas. Here be dragons. We've mapped the mountains of
Speaker 1: the Moon, the lava fields of Mars. We map the
Speaker 1: trails of migrant whales. We map the farthest stars. We
Speaker 1: map the oceans shifting shore. We've mapped the open sky,
Speaker 1: the treasure rooms of incatoons, and where the lay lions lie. Ye.
Speaker 1: Finding our way in the world is one of the
Speaker 1: most fundamental things we humans do. It's survival one oh one.
Speaker 1: Using site to guide us. Think of the strong verticals
Speaker 1: and trees, and the horizon line moving our eyes up
Speaker 1: cross it to create the most rudimentary of maps. Perhaps
Speaker 1: that's why there are so many visual nerve cells dedicated
Speaker 1: to the detection of horizontal and vertical planes rather than
Speaker 1: diagonal ones. After all, our environment is based on this
Speaker 1: x y axis. Human beings are all of us are
Speaker 1: trapped in a spatial box. I mean, everything we do
Speaker 1: takes place in a space, and wayfinding isn't just about
Speaker 1: physical space around us, that the internal space as well,
Speaker 1: Like the path that neurons take transmitting information to make
Speaker 1: memories and serve up thoughts. It's also in our body's
Speaker 1: ability to perceive itself to test our bodies mapping abilities.
Speaker 1: Fellow podcaster Holly Fry and I stumbled through a few
Speaker 1: vortex tunnels illusions at the Haunted attraction nether World. Here,
Speaker 1: darkened hallways have no x Y coordinates to fix your
Speaker 1: gaze on, and the halls reverberate in the swirl of booming,
Speaker 1: buzzing confusion. Oh my god, swirling stars around me. It's like,
Speaker 1: I'm going to see this barrel and oh my god,
Speaker 1: how's it going? Holly good? Those twisty rooms and the
Speaker 1: vortex room, they genuinely jack with your equilibrium. Losing the
Speaker 1: ability to pin yourself down in space and time can
Speaker 1: be terrifying, and perhaps this is why we can't stand
Speaker 1: to get lost, even for the briefest of moments. An idea.
Speaker 1: I took to my house to works coworkers podcaster Jonathan
Speaker 1: Strickland and senior editor Alison louder Milk. It's time for
Speaker 1: me to leave. It's time for me to go back
Speaker 1: to my hotel, grab my stuff and then go to
Speaker 1: the airport. Couldn't I get a cab to take me
Speaker 1: over to Queen's. So I was thinking, well, I've I've
Speaker 1: budgeted enough time, I will take the subway. The level
Speaker 1: of panic I experienced when I realized maps were no
Speaker 1: good to me here. It didn't give me enough information, right,
Speaker 1: I couldn't I couldn't offload that to technology. I was
Speaker 1: now dependent upon my own ability, which I had very
Speaker 1: little confidence in. Jonathan is very seldom without global satellite capabilities,
Speaker 1: but that day his way finding mission from Manhattan to
Speaker 1: Queens wouldn't have benefited from it. Anyhow. For Allison, the
Speaker 1: wilds of New York were tamed with recognizable landmarks. So
Speaker 1: I'm glad you brought up New York City. I lived
Speaker 1: there for my undergrad college experience and then um for
Speaker 1: a while after, and I noticed that the easiest way
Speaker 1: for me to get around the subway system was by landmarks.
Speaker 1: So say I'm getting out at Columbus Circle. I knew
Speaker 1: where the fountain was in the in the circle, and
Speaker 1: so I would orient myself towards that, Like, Okay, if
Speaker 1: I'm facing the circle, and that means I'm facing north,
Speaker 1: and I've come out at this entrance, and the McDonald's
Speaker 1: is on the west corner, and if I'm want to
Speaker 1: go um cross town, I need to head toward the McDonald's.
Speaker 1: And so I had completely populated my landscape of New
Speaker 1: York City with all these arbitrary little landmarks to help
Speaker 1: me navigate, you know, my life. Then these sorts of
Speaker 1: non GPS moments are far and few between these days.
Speaker 1: In fact, thanks to geographic information systems, we can overlay
Speaker 1: maps with just about anything, even Happiness doctors Peter Sheridan
Speaker 1: Dodds and Chris stan Forth use big data to make
Speaker 1: the case that across ten languages they surveyed, people use
Speaker 1: more positive words than negative ones. They use twenty four
Speaker 1: sources like websites, music, lyrics, fiction, and social media to
Speaker 1: build up a database of words, billions and billions of
Speaker 1: words from Twitter alone, they collected roughly one hundred billion
Speaker 1: of them. And then, in a kind of part B
Speaker 1: to this study, Dods and dan Forth created a head
Speaker 1: DNA meter happiness meter, that traces the signals of emotions
Speaker 1: in Twitter communications, and they found out all sorts of
Speaker 1: details about when and where we're happiest. So I thought,
Speaker 1: the most interesting thing about this steady, and it's one
Speaker 1: that I hadn't really thought about before, is that they
Speaker 1: found that the further people were from home, the happier
Speaker 1: they were. What do you guys think about that. It
Speaker 1: may not be so much that you're not as happy
Speaker 1: at home as you are just familiar with everything. Like
Speaker 1: if I travel to Japan, I'm sure I would be
Speaker 1: expressing wonder and awe as I traveled the country, walking
Speaker 1: around my yard. I'm not likely to do that unless
Speaker 1: something truly extraordinary has happened. Allison brings up a good
Speaker 1: point about the source of this study, social media, and
Speaker 1: whether it's a reliable barometer. I do wonder, though, in
Speaker 1: that aggregate, how much they are taking into account the
Speaker 1: fact that we try to present like our best selves
Speaker 1: book or our worst selves as the case maybe um,
Speaker 1: depending upon what you're feeling. So I wonder if the
Speaker 1: studies take that into account. Well. Also, there's this kind
Speaker 1: of echo chamber of what you're saying spiraled out among
Speaker 1: your social groups, So is that really an accurate sense
Speaker 1: of what that social group feels. Are they just reacting
Speaker 1: as we have this discussion right now, my social media
Speaker 1: feeds are absolutely consumed with the political process of the
Speaker 1: United States, and I see exactly what you're saying, Julie,
Speaker 1: I see this kind of echo chamber resonance chamber thing
Speaker 1: going on to a point where my perception of what
Speaker 1: is going to happen is largely skewed by that, so
Speaker 1: that when reality sets in a day later after, say,
Speaker 1: the primaries have you know, super Tuesday has passed, are
Speaker 1: very different from what I would have expected based upon
Speaker 1: my experience, simply because that echo chamber has has reinforced
Speaker 1: this idea, and I've created my own kind of, if
Speaker 1: you will, map of where things are going that's not
Speaker 1: at all based upon any reliable data, but rather on
Speaker 1: this this echoing uh sentiment that I'm hearing that has
Speaker 1: shaped my perception of what will be. Social media is
Speaker 1: a map of storytelling, the details of what we choose
Speaker 1: to disclose and how that shapes the overarching narrative of
Speaker 1: our autobiography, the story of our lives charted out in
Speaker 1: our imaginations. So what would Jonathan and Allison's autobiographical map
Speaker 1: look like? It literally would look like England. I'm probably
Speaker 1: a romanticized, perhaps even fantastical version of England. Price of
Speaker 1: Middle Earth worked into their I do have a Lord
Speaker 1: of the Rings tattoo on one arm, So I mean,
Speaker 1: I can't get that far away from it. But that
Speaker 1: to me, like when I think about my past, there's
Speaker 1: certain very important events happened to me while I was
Speaker 1: in England. I've only been in England a few times,
Speaker 1: but all the times I've been have been pivotal moments.
Speaker 1: My honeymoon was in England, for example. I spent a
Speaker 1: week with very close friends in England where we all
Speaker 1: learned interesting things about one another and got hopelessly lost.
Speaker 1: All of these moments just kind of pulled back. And
Speaker 1: even though I've spent more, way more time out of
Speaker 1: England than in it, I feel like I could cram
Speaker 1: pretty much everywhere else I've been into this fictional map.
Speaker 1: I think that mine would like a little bit like Phillery.
Speaker 1: And I don't know if you guys have read the
Speaker 1: Musician's trilogy, which is wonderful. Just finished up the last
Speaker 1: one and I'm sad love grossmend right more. Please. My
Speaker 1: map is hand painted, and it's hand lettered, and it's
Speaker 1: probably a little bit off scale. And the house where
Speaker 1: I grew up in is kind of Castle Lake, and
Speaker 1: they're various figures who are important in my life back
Speaker 1: then and still are today, and they're kind of gathered
Speaker 1: around the castle, and then we go out into the wilds.
Speaker 1: You know, here's New York City, a tiny dot that
Speaker 1: was pretty pivotal in my growing up years, my twenties. Uh,
Speaker 1: and here's Atlanta. I mean, actually, I think it would
Speaker 1: be a map of the east, the East coast, but
Speaker 1: it would be lovely. It would be a lovely map
Speaker 1: of the East Coast of the United States, and one
Speaker 1: that really has no relevance for anyone else. I think
Speaker 1: Alison's map features Philary and this place is similar to
Speaker 1: mine in that Narnia is a fictional place and it
Speaker 1: figures as a backdrop in my life. Map The Lion,
Speaker 1: the Which and the Wardrobe was one of the first
Speaker 1: places my mind could reliably retreat to a fantasy land
Speaker 1: that explored what it was like to be a child
Speaker 1: shaped by the forces around her. And in that respect,
Speaker 1: each of us has a bit of the fictional world
Speaker 1: woven into our autobiography. Yeah. Well, if I had to
Speaker 1: make an autobiographical map of my life, in terms of
Speaker 1: what it would look like, I would think back to
Speaker 1: earlier medieval maps, where fast expanses of the known world
Speaker 1: hadn't been explored or discovered yet, so you'd have these
Speaker 1: old maps with vast expanses of empty land and empty
Speaker 1: ocean where it was blank, nothing was really there um
Speaker 1: And usually those parts of the maps are where you
Speaker 1: would find all of these monsters. Um. They kind of
Speaker 1: represented the unknown, so they were placed in the unknown
Speaker 1: portions of maps. That's Toronto based artists Bailey Henderson. She
Speaker 1: brings mythological secreatures from medieval and Renaissance maps to life
Speaker 1: in her ongoing sculpture series Monstrom Marines. In her research,
Speaker 1: Bailey was struck by one particular map, the Carter Marina,
Speaker 1: drawn by Alls Magnus. In it features a bestiary of
Speaker 1: marine animals, the kinds that sailors would trade stories about,
Speaker 1: beasts said to tear a ship asunder and plunge it
Speaker 1: into the briny depths. One such beast is Zivious. This
Speaker 1: bronze sculpture depicts a bird faced worka with a dorsal
Speaker 1: thing that can slice boats in half. And it turns
Speaker 1: out that this kind of land and sea animal mashup
Speaker 1: is common and the Renaissance it was a common belief
Speaker 1: that all of the animals presented on land had their
Speaker 1: counterpart in the sea. So on a lot of early
Speaker 1: maps and text you would see creatures like a sea pig,
Speaker 1: or a sea dog, sea lion, a seahorse. They are
Speaker 1: just completely ridiculous creatures that obviously didn't ever exist. But
Speaker 1: it's quite an amazing, uh, the imagination that early artists
Speaker 1: ad when they were depicting these creatures. Here with these
Speaker 1: maps we see Bailey's imagination working spatially, willing these two
Speaker 1: D beasts into a three D sculptural existence, which is
Speaker 1: in stark opposition of what we do in real life.
Speaker 1: In real life, we survey our three D surroundings an
Speaker 1: attempt to freeze them into a tableau, compressing the details
Speaker 1: to what we wanted to look like. And in this
Speaker 1: way there's an interplay between one is real and what
Speaker 1: is fiction. To me, all maps are fictional. It's important
Speaker 1: to when you look at a map to kind of
Speaker 1: ask yourself the question, what has he or she decided
Speaker 1: to leave out? What rhetorical messages being given, even the
Speaker 1: ones that people think are you know, this is the
Speaker 1: most scientifically accurate piece of cartography. I'm John Hessler. I'm
Speaker 1: a specialist in modern cartography and geographic information sciences Here
Speaker 1: at the Library of Congress, Geographic Information System g i
Speaker 1: S is changing the way we take in details from
Speaker 1: the world. It's like mapping on steroids, allowing us to question, analyze,
Speaker 1: and interpret data to understand all sorts of relationships, patterns,
Speaker 1: and even trends. So g i S and and modern
Speaker 1: mapping are really an attempt to kind of abstract from
Speaker 1: this huge, complex, multidimensional um mess that is the world
Speaker 1: um and to visualize what's actually happening. An example here
Speaker 1: is crisis mapping in after a devastating earthquake hit Nepal,
Speaker 1: it took only forty eight hours for volunteers to map
Speaker 1: incredibly useful data, like areas that had passable roads to
Speaker 1: get supplies to and from, and areas that had given
Speaker 1: way to landslides. This is a kind of humanitarian ground
Speaker 1: swell of technology. My interest in cartography has always been,
Speaker 1: at least in modern cartography, is how do we use
Speaker 1: this data to help people. My involvement with crisis mappers
Speaker 1: UM and and and the humanitarian mapping world is all
Speaker 1: about that, to kind of plan for things that are unexpected,
Speaker 1: things that are happening and changing rapidly. Almost everything that
Speaker 1: we humans do is never an equilibrium. It's always changing.
Speaker 1: A city is a thing that used to be thought
Speaker 1: of this kind of the stable UM place, but it's not.
Speaker 1: It's the transportation is moving, there's energy going in and out,
Speaker 1: there's all kinds of things happening. UM. How do we
Speaker 1: plan that to make people's lives better. That's not to
Speaker 1: say this kind of technology is perfect. While on the
Speaker 1: one hand, there's this this really beautiful side of you know,
Speaker 1: what can we do to UM use this technology in
Speaker 1: order to improve people's lives, to plan better, to figure
Speaker 1: out how to deliver fresh water to people better, to
Speaker 1: um plan all of those kind of resources and agricultural
Speaker 1: land use and all of that stuff. There's also that
Speaker 1: that negative side that the more of this data that
Speaker 1: gets out there, of course, the more information that that
Speaker 1: other people have about us UM government agencies and and
Speaker 1: that kind of thing marketers UM. So there's the there's
Speaker 1: the double edged sword there in this sense. G I
Speaker 1: S mapping is Pandora's box. Will never be able to
Speaker 1: stuff it back in and close the latch, and we
Speaker 1: probably wouldn't want to do that even if we could.
Speaker 1: After all, it's changed the way that we move through
Speaker 1: the world. People use it to pick hotel rooms. They
Speaker 1: go and they look at what the orientation of the
Speaker 1: hotel is, and they, you know, decide what room in
Speaker 1: a hotel they might want to stay in based on
Speaker 1: the view that they can see on Google Earth. UM.
Speaker 1: And so I think it's taken the difficulty of wayfinding
Speaker 1: out um. In other words, the space of wayfinding, the
Speaker 1: anxiety of finding your way has has kind of disappeared.
Speaker 1: Where we're all on our phones, um, looking for the
Speaker 1: Starbucks that's a block away with our little GPS and
Speaker 1: our smartphone owns or or anything like that. We we
Speaker 1: no longer have to wander about looking for anything. And
Speaker 1: the spatial aspect of mapping has exploded, spiraling out and
Speaker 1: influencing every sector of technology, even game design. Take Minecraft,
Speaker 1: for example, a game that looks deceptively simple with its
Speaker 1: basic survival premise and block architecture to build shelters with.
Speaker 1: But it turns out that Minecraft is really sophisticated and
Speaker 1: it requires a lot of spatial and problem solving skills.
Speaker 1: It's taking advantage of a certain cognitive way we perceive spaces. Um.
Speaker 1: One thing, when you build a Minecraft space you're kind
Speaker 1: of moving through it. And I think that's an interesting,
Speaker 1: uh cognitive way to look at at at mapping. Mapping
Speaker 1: usually is a space that someone is moving through, that
Speaker 1: people are moving through, but in Minecraft, um it's especially
Speaker 1: important that that people can move through the space that
Speaker 1: you're building. Disability to throw off the shackles of space
Speaker 1: may help to explain the fanaticism of Minecraft players. And
Speaker 1: I think it really does compartmentalize a certain um, a
Speaker 1: certain fantasy we have about breaking out of what is
Speaker 1: our normal spatial box. Um. Humans have always wanted to
Speaker 1: kind of like throw off space, throw off this this
Speaker 1: this geometric thing that kind of keeps us down and
Speaker 1: keeps us in place. That one thing that humans can't
Speaker 1: do is flyes. And I think these things kind of
Speaker 1: play on that. John's life is in maps, and this
Speaker 1: has changed the way that he sees the world. Now
Speaker 1: we can do real time mapping, Now we can do
Speaker 1: stuff that's updating itself, you know immediately, and and and
Speaker 1: looking at that, and the way that changed my worldview
Speaker 1: is is that I now look at the world as
Speaker 1: never in equilibrium, that there's never anything that's not changing.
Speaker 1: Everything is in motion, everything is happening um. Everything is interactive,
Speaker 1: everything is connected. Maps are contours of the human experience,
Speaker 1: laid out on an emotional grid, And in those contours
Speaker 1: we consider location, distance, history, people, and whether we want
Speaker 1: to go there or have been there, whether we once
Speaker 1: stood on a mountaintop picking out the Big Dipper from
Speaker 1: a wreath of brilliant stars hanging overhead, or whether we
Speaker 1: dreamed it or flew over it on Google Earth, moving
Speaker 1: through space and time in our minds. Think of all
Speaker 1: the ephemeral maps you leave behind each day, the physical
Speaker 1: and digital footprints marking your paths, and the stories these
Speaker 1: routes tell about where you are in your life and
Speaker 1: who you are in your life, the outward evidence of
Speaker 1: your inner wayfinding. We've mapped the bloody universe and pinned
Speaker 1: it in a net, but as for dots of humans,
Speaker 1: we've made no progress. Yes, The Stuff of Life is
Speaker 1: written and co produced by me Julie Douglas. Original music
Speaker 1: and sound design is by co producer Noel Brown. This
Speaker 1: episode also featured tracks from the album Mechanical Advantage by
Speaker 1: The Cubists. Editorial oversight is provided by Head of production
Speaker 1: Jerry Rowland. Excerpts of hireby Dragons is by Felix Dennis.
Speaker 1: We'd like to thank John Hessler for revealing the illuminating
Speaker 1: ways in which we map the world. You can find
Speaker 1: out more about John's work at Warping History dot blogspot
Speaker 1: dot com. Thank you to Bailey Henderson for discussing your
Speaker 1: research into medieval and Renaissance maps. Check at her sculpture
Speaker 1: series Monstro Marines at Bailey Henderson dot com. And thank
Speaker 1: you to Alison Ladermilk and Jonathan Strickland for sharing your travels,
Speaker 1: real and imagined. If you like what we do here
Speaker 1: at the Stuff of Life, visit us on Facebook and Twitter.
Speaker 1: In the meantime, email us a drawing or a description
Speaker 1: of your autobiographical map at the Stuff of Life at
Speaker 1: Housta works dot com.