Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie,
Speaker 1: what is the worst map that you've ever created or had?
Speaker 1: Do you use m oh man? I don't know. I
Speaker 1: love to draw maps, and so I feel like all
Speaker 1: the maps that I've created have been brilliant and places. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm not like a cartographer on the side or anything,
Speaker 1: but no, I don't I don't feel like I've done
Speaker 1: anything too crazy. My daughter recently created a map, and um,
Speaker 1: I was pretty impressed. She had China, the United States
Speaker 1: is like a blue blob, um, Europe as a yellow blob,
Speaker 1: and then butterfly Land. But yeah they had little wings. Um.
Speaker 1: So I don't know. I want to say that's the
Speaker 1: worst map, but I don't think it was very practical. Still,
Speaker 1: it's it's interesting, and we'll have to think about butterfly
Speaker 1: Land if we uh as we dive into this podcast,
Speaker 1: as we talk about brains, our brains and maps and
Speaker 1: how this map ends up informing the world around us. Um,
Speaker 1: when I think of bad maps, I've had to use
Speaker 1: probably the worst was when is that Yosemite National Park.
Speaker 1: There's like just a map that was handed not an
Speaker 1: official map, it was like handed out like maybe by
Speaker 1: somebody at the hotel that had to show different locations
Speaker 1: around this little uh town, different trails, and none of
Speaker 1: it was really to scale. So you've got to really
Speaker 1: warp sense of distance when you tried to go out
Speaker 1: and introverse any of this. I will say, map or
Speaker 1: hotel maps are pretty bad because they just want to
Speaker 1: show you the landmarks and they just are like that's
Speaker 1: all that tourists really care about. They'll they'll figure it out.
Speaker 1: Don't worry about the distances, don't worry about whether it's
Speaker 1: walkable or you need to set aside a day to
Speaker 1: travel this distance. Just just take our word for it
Speaker 1: that it's there. Yeah, yeah, you'll see it just like
Speaker 1: on the map. Is huge thing just on the horizon. Um,
Speaker 1: so of course, yes, we're talking about maps today. We're
Speaker 1: talking about how we have our own sort of autobiographical
Speaker 1: element to maps that we'll talk about and um, we
Speaker 1: should probably kick this off with allegorical maps. Yes, allegorical
Speaker 1: maps maps that are not so much of places. I mean,
Speaker 1: they can be of places. But they're they're about much
Speaker 1: more than that. When when you when you put in
Speaker 1: a location into Google Maps or Apple Maps or whatever
Speaker 1: you're using, generally you're getting a pretty ironed out idea
Speaker 1: of where point A is in relation to point B
Speaker 1: between two physical locations with an allegorical map. Point A
Speaker 1: and point B may not be things that are precisely real.
Speaker 1: They might be states of mind, states of being. Uh.
Speaker 1: They might one point A might exist in this world,
Speaker 1: point point B might exist in some mythical other world. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I was actually thinking about this in terms of Dante,
Speaker 1: particularly when I when I thought back to our previous
Speaker 1: podcast that dealt with the sins and his sort of
Speaker 1: allegorical map of how you are traversing this mountain until
Speaker 1: you can you know, scale all these different sins and
Speaker 1: wash yourselves of them. Yeah. Yeah. Certainly, with his his
Speaker 1: map of Hell, he relied on a lot of older
Speaker 1: maps and models that people have been sort of trying
Speaker 1: to figure out what the what what a hell might
Speaker 1: look like and mapping that up for some time. Uh.
Speaker 1: The Purgatory is certainly more of a purely allegorical map
Speaker 1: because it's about it. It's it's more precisely about this
Speaker 1: journey from a state of of sin, but you know,
Speaker 1: acceptable level of sin through cleanliness up the mountain and
Speaker 1: into heavens. So it's about the journey of the human soul.
Speaker 1: And there's another allegorical map I wanted to mention, and
Speaker 1: this one is called a Road to Success, And apparently
Speaker 1: this was really popular circa nineteen ten. I love this map.
Speaker 1: It is in a book called map Head by Ken Jennings.
Speaker 1: Yes that Ken Jennings, Jeopardy, jeopardy um. And it depicts
Speaker 1: an actual road winding up a mountain in a similar
Speaker 1: way that that Dante considered the landscape. And success is
Speaker 1: depicted as a leer at the very top, but at
Speaker 1: the bottom all these different things you have to go
Speaker 1: through that might prevent you from having success, including boheman
Speaker 1: is bohemianism. At the base of this mountain, it looks
Speaker 1: like a beer garden. Yes, it looks like a fun
Speaker 1: place you might stop in. But his his whole arguments
Speaker 1: you stopped in there, he might never leave, right you might.
Speaker 1: I mean you can't even get up to the you know,
Speaker 1: halfway up the mountain, right, it looks a lot more
Speaker 1: attractive than the pit of illiteracy, the pit of a literacy,
Speaker 1: which feels like tiny figures plumbing and it is dark abyss.
Speaker 1: There's also the mutual admiration society, in which and this
Speaker 1: is what I love, because it really is in the
Speaker 1: spirit of the times. People are telling each other things
Speaker 1: like you'll set the world on fire, You're a wonder
Speaker 1: my boy. Um. So you know you can get caught
Speaker 1: up in that. But anyway, you go up and up
Speaker 1: and up, and you go through true knowledge. Um. But
Speaker 1: you of course have to traverse lack of preparation until
Speaker 1: you go through the gate of ideals and finally you
Speaker 1: have found success. It should be a board game because
Speaker 1: it reminds me a lot of the game of Life,
Speaker 1: which in in its in its its own sense, it's
Speaker 1: kind of an allegorical map transformed into a board game. Well,
Speaker 1: and that's what I think is interesting about this is
Speaker 1: it is instructional. It is, of course, as you say,
Speaker 1: not going to tell you how to get from you know,
Speaker 1: point A to point B in terms of uh, you know,
Speaker 1: day to day, like how do I just navigate the world,
Speaker 1: But it does tell you in some sense this is
Speaker 1: the direction that you should take here of the pitfalls.
Speaker 1: But of course a lot of people are like thinking, well,
Speaker 1: an allegorical map. Again, this is a map of something
Speaker 1: that is not real. It's a map of something that
Speaker 1: is not a physical location. It doesn't really deal with geography.
Speaker 1: It's dealing with abstract ideas and things that exist only
Speaker 1: in our heads. But the crazy thing is when you
Speaker 1: start looking at maps in our history with maps and
Speaker 1: even our future with maps, that same description applies to
Speaker 1: to even are more hard boiled um maps that deal
Speaker 1: with physical locations, we're still bringing in all of this
Speaker 1: mental junk uh and and laying that out as part
Speaker 1: of the map making process. It's true, Like, think about
Speaker 1: the last time that you just jotted down a quick
Speaker 1: map for someone and gave them directions. As you were
Speaker 1: doing that, and you're saying, here's the gas station on
Speaker 1: the left. Um, you know, there's all these different memories
Speaker 1: that you have flooding your brain about that gas station,
Speaker 1: or here's the school I went to or so on
Speaker 1: and so forth. So you might be putting landmarks on there,
Speaker 1: but it's all informed by your past experience. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: even as you just find yourself like driving around town
Speaker 1: or taking the train to work, Inevitably, you're you're crossing things,
Speaker 1: You're you're passing by things that have some sort of
Speaker 1: significance to yourself, and they start ticking off in the
Speaker 1: in the in the background, you know, you're kind of like, Oh,
Speaker 1: that's the place I had that really good sandwich at
Speaker 1: that time, That's that place where that that spider leapt
Speaker 1: out of my suit. I don't know, whatever the memory
Speaker 1: may be, we can't help build an informal map out
Speaker 1: of those experiences. Yeah, I was thinking about the writer
Speaker 1: Pat Conroy as well. He's a Southern writer in the
Speaker 1: United States, and a lot of his fiction draws upon
Speaker 1: the landscape in the sort of stories it tells, and
Speaker 1: he has a some of my famous quote that says,
Speaker 1: my wound is geography. It's also my anchorage and my
Speaker 1: port of call. So if you think about this map
Speaker 1: is really storytelling, um, it's you know, drawing from our
Speaker 1: experience but also our imagination of what could be. And
Speaker 1: this is probably what we're all trying to get to
Speaker 1: you right now, is you know, the million dollar question,
Speaker 1: what is happening in our brains when we are considering
Speaker 1: maps in terms of our own personal autobiography but also um,
Speaker 1: just trying to navigate the world. I can. So when
Speaker 1: you think about ben is m is the brain and
Speaker 1: absence of the map. You know what happens when the
Speaker 1: map is is almost entirely internalized. And one of the
Speaker 1: best examples of that, the one one that we've we've
Speaker 1: actually studied scientifically, um, has to do with the London
Speaker 1: cab drivers. Yeah. I'm sure a lot of people out
Speaker 1: there have heard about this, the fact that their hippocampuses
Speaker 1: are larger than non cab drivers in London. But before
Speaker 1: we talk about that a little bit more, I wanted
Speaker 1: to just sort of lay out the landscape of London
Speaker 1: for everyone. Um, the streets that comprised the city. They
Speaker 1: sprawl beyond Greater London and they are a tangle of
Speaker 1: ancient streets and people have actually referred to them before
Speaker 1: as a plate of spaghetti. Yeah. This isn't like a
Speaker 1: modern US city where somebody came out, laid out a
Speaker 1: bunch of grid work and said, all right, you're gonna
Speaker 1: put streets here, going down, streets here, going across the
Speaker 1: park here, and that's going to be the city. Boom. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is a place that it's more like sediment city.
Speaker 1: A sediment like over the years, different layers have accumulated,
Speaker 1: and if you walk through London, you're looking over here,
Speaker 1: here's this modern skyscraper that looks like a pickle. Uh,
Speaker 1: Here's here's some ancient Roman ruins. Here's some sort of
Speaker 1: like mid um mid twentieth century sort of communist looking
Speaker 1: building that looks like just an ugly box. And it's
Speaker 1: all just a complete it. It's like history through up
Speaker 1: this city and you have to sort of navigate the
Speaker 1: chunks and have to adjust to debts that is London.
Speaker 1: It's true you have names that change just you know, suddenly,
Speaker 1: and there's not a lot of consistency with with the
Speaker 1: way that the names go and are um going through
Speaker 1: the actual city. And then you have a lack of
Speaker 1: house numbers on some streets that doesn't seem to be
Speaker 1: important to everyone um in every location. And it can
Speaker 1: take a London Cabby two to four years of training
Speaker 1: to master the twenty five thousand streets that dart out
Speaker 1: in the six mile radius from trying cross area all
Speaker 1: the knowledge that's right um. This training is a culmination
Speaker 1: and of what they will finally sit down and be
Speaker 1: tested on called as you say, the Knowledge, which I
Speaker 1: love because it just sounds like so mysterious and wonderful,
Speaker 1: like you're about to go through a portal um. But yeah,
Speaker 1: the Knowledge is basically a series of sit down test
Speaker 1: with an examiner who tells the cabby where she or
Speaker 1: he wants to go, and then the cabby has to
Speaker 1: tell the examiner the exact turn by turn route that
Speaker 1: here she will take, including the side of the street
Speaker 1: that the journey begins on. He reminds me a lot
Speaker 1: of Mark Clain's Life on the Mississippi, which I remember
Speaker 1: reading as a child and being dreadfully bored by it
Speaker 1: because it's a lot of Mark Clain talking about being
Speaker 1: on on the Mississippi and and about how one navigates
Speaker 1: the Mississippi. But it's but it was really similar in
Speaker 1: that you had these, uh, these guys that had to
Speaker 1: just memorize, just had to commit to memory all of
Speaker 1: these details of the river and about its depth in
Speaker 1: which and how navigable different portions of the river we're
Speaker 1: going to be at a given time, right, And that's
Speaker 1: actually what all of us are doing all the time.
Speaker 1: But Lendon cab drivers in particular are really paying attention
Speaker 1: to Yes, they're dealing with a very complex street system.
Speaker 1: Like you said, numbers not not aren't necessarily where they
Speaker 1: need to be. You're you're dealing with the with the
Speaker 1: various flow and flux of traffic. And as a result,
Speaker 1: their hippocampus, which is located in the brains temporal lobe
Speaker 1: and is responsible for uh navigating, starts to get bigger
Speaker 1: and bigger. And the more years that they're on the job,
Speaker 1: the bigger the hippocampus. Alright, so most people who have
Speaker 1: a job that involves sitting and might think, well, your
Speaker 1: your rear end might grow over time. The rear end
Speaker 1: of the hippocampus grows over time, swells with this knowledge
Speaker 1: if you will. Yes, it does. But when you retire,
Speaker 1: it shrinks back down to normal. That's the thing. Um So.
Speaker 1: And also this is interesting too when they found when
Speaker 1: they actually did a couple of more follow up tests
Speaker 1: because the hippocampus. It was a two thousand study and
Speaker 1: in two thousand and eight they did a follow up
Speaker 1: and they found that the hippocampus was really only activated
Speaker 1: at the beginning of a trip, and then other parts
Speaker 1: of the brain started to take over. And there have
Speaker 1: been there have been some studies to that have suggested
Speaker 1: that there's a trade off in cognitive talents that as
Speaker 1: a taxi driver becomes more and more equipped to navigate
Speaker 1: this complex road system, there their their other modes of
Speaker 1: memory kind of kind of dim just a little bit, really,
Speaker 1: so the backswells, the front portion shrinks a little Okay, well,
Speaker 1: there you go. UM. I wanted to also talk about
Speaker 1: neurons and how they are influencing the way that we
Speaker 1: actually are able to follow directions. According to Barbara Trusky
Speaker 1: in her article Distortions in Memory for maps, UM, we
Speaker 1: have neurons in our brains that are biased towards horizontal
Speaker 1: and vertical arrangements, which I think is trippy in and
Speaker 1: of itself. In fact, the neurons greatly outnumber the neurons
Speaker 1: that are dedicated to diagonal arrangement. But when you start
Speaker 1: to think about our planet, which is biased on this
Speaker 1: X Y access, it begins to make sense because we
Speaker 1: have really strong verticals in the trees that we see right,
Speaker 1: and then the ground provides a flat horizon, and even
Speaker 1: when you look out, you see the horizon. So it
Speaker 1: makes sense that we evolve to have more neurons that
Speaker 1: would appreciate this X y axis. So yeah, so we're
Speaker 1: more in line with the rook on a on a chessboard,
Speaker 1: just up and down, yes, and think right and think
Speaker 1: about those trees. This sort of proto landmarks for for
Speaker 1: all animals really, And then I was reminded of that
Speaker 1: sleight of hand trick that we discussed when we talked
Speaker 1: about the science of magicians, and um, the fact that
Speaker 1: not just magicians use this trick, but pickpocketers also will
Speaker 1: take advantage of the fact that we have this x
Speaker 1: y axis, and they do this by moving their hands
Speaker 1: uh in an arc rather than horizontally. And the reason
Speaker 1: for that is that we have cicades and these are
Speaker 1: the fast just movements in the human body, and it
Speaker 1: occurs in our eyes right, and they automatically move their
Speaker 1: gaze to the endpoint um of what they think is
Speaker 1: going to happen. So if you were to move your
Speaker 1: hand horizontally, then you could track it really well. But pipocketers, uh, magicians, illusionists,
Speaker 1: they all do this sort of arc because it's very
Speaker 1: hard to track it accurately and you're distracted. It also
Speaker 1: reminds me of zigzagging, like the whole deal and alligators
Speaker 1: chasing you, Right, what do you do? Run bag? That's right?
Speaker 1: Mess with their ability to determine when something is actually
Speaker 1: moving sideways. And if you think that that's not enough
Speaker 1: of a case to say that we prefer this sort
Speaker 1: of x Y access, think about the London Tube map. Yes,
Speaker 1: back to London, the the fabulous London Tube Map. Where
Speaker 1: it's really and I'm fairly new to all of this, um.
Speaker 1: I mean I've been to London, you know, I've certainly
Speaker 1: used that tube map to get around before, but but
Speaker 1: I really never stopped to realize how how important it
Speaker 1: was and how groundbreaking that map design was. And certainly
Speaker 1: you see its influence everywhere. You see various versions of it.
Speaker 1: You see other public transportation systems that mimic that style.
Speaker 1: It's it's become sort of something of a modern art motif. Yes,
Speaker 1: it's definitely iconic. Um And the reason why it works
Speaker 1: so well is that it plays again to the x
Speaker 1: Y access. Harry Beck is the person who designed this
Speaker 1: map in nineteen thirty three, or rather he did it
Speaker 1: a couple of years before that, but they didn't adopt
Speaker 1: until ninety three. And what he did is he took
Speaker 1: all the squirrely lines that played a spaghetti and tried
Speaker 1: to make sense of it by only delineating all the
Speaker 1: stations and that connecting stations in forty five degree angles.
Speaker 1: So the effect, while being really modern to the eye,
Speaker 1: I think um is that it really cleaned up that
Speaker 1: space and it made it much more logical for people
Speaker 1: to understand the system, and it really becomes one's understanding
Speaker 1: of the city. That's what what really fascinates me. I mean,
Speaker 1: you tend to sort of the fine your space based
Speaker 1: on the roads and paths you have to travel. Like, uh,
Speaker 1: here in Atlanta, we live in a pretty pretty uh
Speaker 1: non complex city as far as public transportation goes. We
Speaker 1: got north and southeast and west, We've got we've got
Speaker 1: eight and seventy five going up the center, We've got
Speaker 1: twenty going through in the middle. So it's it's it's
Speaker 1: pretty it's pretty simple. And then you have the Highway
Speaker 1: to eighty five looping, yeah, looping around and trapping everybody
Speaker 1: inside because that's our plan is that you just roar
Speaker 1: enough traffic through there and the zombies can't get in
Speaker 1: or out, depending on what the scenario is. But but
Speaker 1: but it's difficult to not think about one surroundings in
Speaker 1: those terms, like thinking about where are you in terms
Speaker 1: of the perimeter. I mean, I'm here in Atlanta. People
Speaker 1: tend to talk about things being O t P outside
Speaker 1: the perimeter, like you do not want to go O
Speaker 1: t P even if you have a friend that lives
Speaker 1: out there. God bless them, but they're O t P
Speaker 1: and they just invited you to dinner. You might have
Speaker 1: to make up an excuse that kind of thing. Uh.
Speaker 1: And then inside the perimeter is is the preferred distance
Speaker 1: of travel? Um? And then you think of it in
Speaker 1: those those different sections. That's right. The mental map does
Speaker 1: actually map to the system that is in place. And
Speaker 1: apparently this London tube map was so important to so
Speaker 1: many people that when they made changes to it, there
Speaker 1: was a big oh, like whoa, what are you doing?
Speaker 1: You've changed our reality. Basically, you've changed the thing that
Speaker 1: forms the world that we live in. Even though this
Speaker 1: map is inaccurate, right because it's not nothing that the
Speaker 1: forty five degree angle that has picked it in, it
Speaker 1: was still like, that's how I see London, at least
Speaker 1: for some people. Other people sort of said this is fine,
Speaker 1: it's more inaccurate, but you know, that's that's what happens
Speaker 1: when something becomes iconic. I suppose, Well, I think that's
Speaker 1: what's ultimately at heart when when people have this reaction
Speaker 1: to Pluto losing its planet status, you know, like ultimately
Speaker 1: nobody really cares about Pluto. Really, it's it's it's out there,
Speaker 1: it's not really really has a stake in Pluto's a
Speaker 1: long ways off and and pretty insignificant compared to the
Speaker 1: other planets. But it was part of that map that
Speaker 1: we grew up seeing. It was in that app was
Speaker 1: how we defined our place in the Solar System and
Speaker 1: in the the universe at large. And suddenly that changed
Speaker 1: and people are like, whoa, that changes everything in a
Speaker 1: small and perhaps in significant way to to normal life
Speaker 1: and the way you live your daily life. But he's
Speaker 1: still shifted your universe. Yeah. And it's funny because even
Speaker 1: though we know life is uh something that is constantly
Speaker 1: changing that we're just transience here, really, all of us,
Speaker 1: we still can't help but try to nail things down
Speaker 1: and say this is not going to change. So we're
Speaker 1: gonna map it. Yeah, We're gonna look up at the
Speaker 1: night sky and say that is belongs to us. And
Speaker 1: you know, anytime sort of those things are tinkered with,
Speaker 1: it reminds us of this transient quality of life. Yeah,
Speaker 1: anyone who has a GPS device that's not attached to
Speaker 1: their phone knows this steel because like like with me,
Speaker 1: I know that there is a way to take it
Speaker 1: and hook it up to a computer and probably pay
Speaker 1: some stupid sum of money to get the maps updated.
Speaker 1: But that's a lot of trouble and money I don't
Speaker 1: want to spend, so I end up with old maps.
Speaker 1: So you know, it'll occasionally send us in a direction
Speaker 1: that towards the street that is no longer there, or
Speaker 1: will ignore a street that it doesn't know exists yet
Speaker 1: and there, but there's there is something troubling about it.
Speaker 1: You're like, why are the roads changing? Why is the
Speaker 1: world changing around me? The map should have kept it
Speaker 1: as it is. Yeah, that happened to me recently. And
Speaker 1: the road just dead ended and it was supposed to
Speaker 1: go for like another twenty miles. And nothing makes you
Speaker 1: feel more helpless than relying on, you know, a clunky GPS.
Speaker 1: Uh to feel like a rube in the middle of
Speaker 1: nowhere and appreciate maps, at least the written ones. So um,
Speaker 1: I did want to bring this up about Americans and
Speaker 1: their apparent ability to excel at directions. Okay, geographer hom
Speaker 1: Debuge has made the claim that we Americans and he's Dutch, correct,
Speaker 1: he's German, we have a better sense of direction than
Speaker 1: our European counterparts that live in these sort of spaghetti
Speaker 1: streeted cities, be because we have exercise that part of
Speaker 1: our brain, because we are so used to this grid
Speaker 1: like system in the United States, where most major cities
Speaker 1: are very logical and planned out on this x y acxis.
Speaker 1: I think you can make a case for that, certainly
Speaker 1: in something like when you go to a city like Savannah, Georgia.
Speaker 1: You know where they have to like it's pretty laid
Speaker 1: out on a grid, or the main part of the
Speaker 1: city is anyway, and you have here's a street, and
Speaker 1: here's a street coming from the other direction, here's a park.
Speaker 1: Here is I mean, it's just it's like a grid
Speaker 1: where it's like a it's like a board for a
Speaker 1: card game. Yeah, And even though they have the parks,
Speaker 1: they have successive parks, and so there's a pattern of that,
Speaker 1: and so you know that you're going to have to
Speaker 1: go around these parks and x y Z configuration. So yeah,
Speaker 1: there you go. But I think it's surprising to people
Speaker 1: because when you think about Americans and you think about maps, um,
Speaker 1: and our ability to actually find other countries on the map,
Speaker 1: it's pretty dismal. Well, you know what we've talked before
Speaker 1: about how much our brain likes to find patterns and
Speaker 1: recognized patterns with these pattern recognition engines. So there's something
Speaker 1: comfortably comforting about knowing that, all right, well in another street, UM,
Speaker 1: I know, what about what's gonna happen. There's gonna be
Speaker 1: a park up there, or another couple of streets, there's
Speaker 1: gonna be this or that. You know, it's a you
Speaker 1: want this regularity in your world around you. Yeah, and um,
Speaker 1: for all the people out there when you go on
Speaker 1: vacation and you're the map person, this is for you. UM.
Speaker 1: I don't know if you guys like to do this,
Speaker 1: but I love to study the map beforehand so that
Speaker 1: I do start to create some sort of reality of
Speaker 1: this new city for myself and my brain and orient
Speaker 1: myself as quickly as possible. I tend to wait more
Speaker 1: towards the last minute to do that, but I do
Speaker 1: find something. There's something satisfying about it, Like when you're
Speaker 1: actually on the like flying into this city and the
Speaker 1: so the city in a sense is about to become
Speaker 1: real to you. Then I engage with the map and
Speaker 1: I started looking at it, and I see where I'm
Speaker 1: going to be, what's around it, what where I can eat,
Speaker 1: in the general vicinity and in the place becomes a
Speaker 1: little more real before I get there. Uh, And I'm
Speaker 1: already imagining that, which we'll talk about in a moment.
Speaker 1: We're gonna take a break. When we get back, we
Speaker 1: are going to talk about this idea of maps from
Speaker 1: our imagination that become completely real to us. All right,
Speaker 1: we're back, and we're going to talk about maps as
Speaker 1: they relate to storytelling in the creation of unreal places
Speaker 1: in memory and memory. We've talked before about the memory palace,
Speaker 1: of course, and this is the method where you use
Speaker 1: our fabulous gift for spatial processing and use that to
Speaker 1: create an imagined place full of the things that you
Speaker 1: need to memorize. Yeah, and think about it this way too.
Speaker 1: When you go into a room and you perceive a room,
Speaker 1: you're not just getting an image of your room. What
Speaker 1: that you know, what you're perceiving is actually your mind
Speaker 1: creating those dimensions of a room for you. So that's
Speaker 1: very important in terms of how we remember things and
Speaker 1: how we map at our worlds. Yeah, like the anytime
Speaker 1: you check out a new restaurant, restaurant, right, your your
Speaker 1: brain has to develop that map to the bathroom. And
Speaker 1: then once you have that data, it's it's it's important,
Speaker 1: it's it's valuable, and you share it with other people.
Speaker 1: The other person the table goes to get up there,
Speaker 1: like where's that You know where the bathroom is? And like, yeah,
Speaker 1: let me share that mental map with you. Yeah, you're like, okay,
Speaker 1: see that fabulous mustachioed man over there, take a right,
Speaker 1: and so on to forth. See how it becomes a
Speaker 1: very much a part of what sticks out to your
Speaker 1: in your memory. And this is one of the uh
Speaker 1: bedrocks of this memory palace idea of how you can
Speaker 1: create a whole world in your mind and remember a
Speaker 1: bunch of random things by tagging them to these surreal
Speaker 1: objects of this story that you tell yourself. I also
Speaker 1: can't help but be reminded of of the mandala, which
Speaker 1: comes from the Sanskrit for circle. And this is a
Speaker 1: motif you see again and again especially in the Tobetan Buddhism,
Speaker 1: where it is the essentially one uses this image to
Speaker 1: help build this virtual place in one's mind. You have
Speaker 1: a map on on paper or on canvas or in sand,
Speaker 1: and you use that to form this spiritually significant map
Speaker 1: in your mind and it's and then that's used for uh,
Speaker 1: you know, for meditation. So what I think is interesting
Speaker 1: about this is that you're basically talking about the intersection
Speaker 1: between reality and imagination. And we've seen this used not
Speaker 1: necessarily the mandala per se, but the idea of this
Speaker 1: transposing um, your imagination onto reality and fiction. Yes, um,
Speaker 1: And I was thinking about token and how important that
Speaker 1: is as a narrative device to create this world for
Speaker 1: the readers that you can begin to reference because you're
Speaker 1: taking a bird's eye view of this world that Token
Speaker 1: has created. Yes, definitely, the maps of Middle Earth in
Speaker 1: The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, those were
Speaker 1: those are really big for me early on before where
Speaker 1: I was able to read those books because my my
Speaker 1: dad had him in these like tattered paperbacks. I remember,
Speaker 1: like in third grade probably even younger, getting those out
Speaker 1: and I would look at the maps and the maps
Speaker 1: amazed me, you know, because you're you're pouring over this
Speaker 1: data and you're looking at things like Mirkwood and uh,
Speaker 1: you're looking at um at you know, the the place
Speaker 1: where the Hobbits live. You're looking at where the the
Speaker 1: the evil creatures live and more door and you're you're
Speaker 1: forming this, uh, this world view. And then as you
Speaker 1: you get older and you deal with these maps too,
Speaker 1: you're trying to figure out, well, what what what is
Speaker 1: this model? After it's what is this representing the real world,
Speaker 1: either geographically or politically? Because you're building a players of
Speaker 1: this world, right, Yeah, so you're you're looking like, all right,
Speaker 1: how do I how do I interpret this map in
Speaker 1: terms of of the actual earth? How do I interpret
Speaker 1: it in terms of the world as as the author
Speaker 1: was seeing it? Uh in those days. Uh, it's it's
Speaker 1: really fascinating and it's become a hallmark, certainly of any
Speaker 1: kind of world creating fantasy. Be it. Um. The works
Speaker 1: of St. George are Martin is really big right now.
Speaker 1: Game of Thrones, Uh, the TV series based on his work,
Speaker 1: actually starts off with a map. It's like a sweeping
Speaker 1: computer animated map of the world in which the show
Speaker 1: takes place. UM. Other big examples of that are Scott
Speaker 1: Baker's Um Second Apocalypse books. He has a really awesome
Speaker 1: map with the three c's in there, so you're you're
Speaker 1: pouring over that and you're trying to figure out, all right,
Speaker 1: what is this this portion of the map. This is
Speaker 1: kind of his Middle East, I guess, and this is
Speaker 1: this is kind of his Baltic region. And then and
Speaker 1: then this is where he's put the the the iconic
Speaker 1: evil portion of the of the of the planet. UM.
Speaker 1: It's it's it's fascinating to think of all that that stuff.
Speaker 1: And also it's also interesting to think of the authors
Speaker 1: who create a map but don't actually share that with
Speaker 1: the readers. UM. Because certainly, if you're if you're creating,
Speaker 1: you're engaging in world creation. You're you're creating a new planet,
Speaker 1: new cultures, new geography. All of the stuff needs to
Speaker 1: come together in a form that the author understands in
Speaker 1: order to write about it. So, like a lot of
Speaker 1: the stuff that that later came out from Tolkien, it's
Speaker 1: stuff that he never intended for a wider audience to view.
Speaker 1: He wrote that for himself so that he could create
Speaker 1: these books. So a map for yourself so that you
Speaker 1: the writer, could then write the story. I think it's fascinating. Yeah.
Speaker 1: One of my favorite authors is a guy named Brian McNaughton,
Speaker 1: and he wrote a book called Throne of Bones, which
Speaker 1: all takes place in the same dark fantasy setting. And
Speaker 1: I am told that he and I understand from from
Speaker 1: what I've read about him, he did have a map
Speaker 1: of this world that he'd created, but it's it's no
Speaker 1: one's there. It's never been published. As far as I know,
Speaker 1: no one outside of a small number of people have
Speaker 1: ever seen it. Because his characters were not the kind
Speaker 1: of people who engaged in a sweeping understanding of their
Speaker 1: own world, whereas ay Gandalf, Lord of the Rings, like,
Speaker 1: he's the kind of guy who would watch whatever Middle
Speaker 1: Earth's version of BBC News was, you know, he he'd
Speaker 1: be the one who tune anim I wonder the weather's
Speaker 1: gonna be tomorrow, I wonder what's going on in uh
Speaker 1: up there in Hobbit Country. You know, he would even
Speaker 1: have that wider understanding, whereas the characters in um in
Speaker 1: Brian McNaughton's book, they were more concerned with their day
Speaker 1: to day and maybe figuring out what they were going
Speaker 1: to eat in the next hour, or whatever their own
Speaker 1: petty sufferings happened to be. The reader didn't need the
Speaker 1: bird's eye in that sense. Um. I was thinking about
Speaker 1: how places so incredibly important in fiction in our own
Speaker 1: lives obviously, um. And then I was thinking about as
Speaker 1: a guy named often Tappen right, and he is someone
Speaker 1: who took his childhood creation of a country called Islandia
Speaker 1: into adulthood with him. So I don't when you were younger,
Speaker 1: did you ever create a sort of fantasy world or yes, um,
Speaker 1: all the time, Because I m pretty early on I
Speaker 1: got into Dungeons and Dragons, which the various supplements you
Speaker 1: would get into dungeons for Dungeons and Dragons would come
Speaker 1: with maps, which we're all pretty fascinating. I remember one
Speaker 1: supplement in particular had had treasure maps. Yeah, that you
Speaker 1: could do, and so I would. I wouldn't inevitably end
Speaker 1: up plotting out my own little scenarios in a little world.
Speaker 1: So I would draw out all these maps, and then
Speaker 1: later when I got into actually writing and attempting to
Speaker 1: write fiction, I would also envision these fantastic worlds and
Speaker 1: try and map them out. On paper and also in
Speaker 1: my own head and I guess i've I'm still doing that. Well.
Speaker 1: My brother and I also did this, and we came
Speaker 1: up with Marijuana Island. We did not know what marijuana meant.
Speaker 1: But Cranga was this this ape who uh ruled this island. Well,
Speaker 1: that sounds like that would be a great bit of
Speaker 1: slang for it, you know, yeah, like going to Marijuana
Speaker 1: Island to get some cronja. Yeah yeah. Um. But you know,
Speaker 1: we never sort of took this world with us into adulthood.
Speaker 1: But this guy that I talked about, Austin Tapp and
Speaker 1: right his Islandia he took from his boyhood and he
Speaker 1: spent twenty years off and on developing this world, um
Speaker 1: and talking about it. It's really exhau postively, like the geography,
Speaker 1: the people, the language he made up a language for them, um,
Speaker 1: the politics, the laws and um. This he said was
Speaker 1: a small kingdom at the southern tip of the Korean subcontinent.
Speaker 1: And he really put a ton of thought into this.
Speaker 1: He created maps for it. And at the time of
Speaker 1: his death at forty eight, he was in a car
Speaker 1: accident and unfortunately, um he had twenty three hundred long
Speaker 1: hand pages dedicated to this world that he made up,
Speaker 1: this country actually, and his wife and then later his
Speaker 1: daughter paired it down to one thousand pages and published
Speaker 1: it in ninety two. It was a sensation because it
Speaker 1: really captured people's imaginations. I mean, here's someone who made
Speaker 1: such an authentic world for others to enjoy. He did
Speaker 1: not intend that, of course, it was his own personal obsession.
Speaker 1: But I do think it's fascinating that he was able
Speaker 1: to weave together uh this this uh country to the
Speaker 1: point where people just wanted to go there. And and
Speaker 1: he even said on his own travels across the world,
Speaker 1: he would he would look at something and his family
Speaker 1: said that he would look out at the mountains and say, oh,
Speaker 1: that reminds me of Islandia. That's how real it was
Speaker 1: in his brain. Well, and then it makes you wonder too.
Speaker 1: We were talking about how the world around us forms
Speaker 1: a map, but in the maps that we have formed
Speaker 1: that world for us. So to what extent is this
Speaker 1: created world of his more real than the real world
Speaker 1: that he inhabits. You know, the more he knew, he
Speaker 1: knew it better than the actual real world. I think
Speaker 1: he did. I mean, think about this. It started in
Speaker 1: his childhood, let's say, around ten years old up until
Speaker 1: he was forty eight years old, dominated the most of
Speaker 1: his life. He reminds me a little bit of this
Speaker 1: author by the name of M. A. R. Barker, and
Speaker 1: he was a professor of Urdu and South Asian studies.
Speaker 1: Really really brilliant man, you know, just steeped in the
Speaker 1: lore and history and geography of of Asia. And he
Speaker 1: created in his spare time. His full time professor most
Speaker 1: of his career, but in his spare time he created
Speaker 1: a fantasy setting called uh Teco Mel and that's t
Speaker 1: e Ku in the l is a really cool website
Speaker 1: that has all the stuff on it, and he ended
Speaker 1: up writing a few different sort of pulpy but very
Speaker 1: creative fantasy novels set there, and also one of the
Speaker 1: earliest like a contemporary of Dungeons and Dragons role playing game.
Speaker 1: Uh And it's just like really really rich setting, kind
Speaker 1: of like imagine Lord of the Rings, except instead of
Speaker 1: based upon Western and Norse models of mythology, based entirely
Speaker 1: upon Uh Eastern motifs and models. And that's basically the
Speaker 1: world that M. A. R. Barker created. He sadly died
Speaker 1: I think last year, but but certainly created one of
Speaker 1: those worlds where you feel like this world was more
Speaker 1: real for him, Um, maybe by by only a certain margin,
Speaker 1: but still it almost as real as the real world
Speaker 1: that he can earned himself with. And I think it's
Speaker 1: interesting how we can't help but create this sort of map,
Speaker 1: whether or not we're doing it. No, no, that we're
Speaker 1: doing it, you know what I'm saying, Whether or not
Speaker 1: we know that we're sitting down like Austin Tapp and
Speaker 1: right and creating this whole mythology, or just in our
Speaker 1: heads when we're randomly thinking about our lives, you know
Speaker 1: how much of that is this sort of map construct
Speaker 1: um And we will talk more about maps um, the
Speaker 1: history of maps, and a bit more about the science
Speaker 1: of it in a couple of their podcasts, but we
Speaker 1: wanted to touch on this um idea of maps as storytelling,
Speaker 1: So I'm gonna leave you with a little quote from
Speaker 1: map head from Ken Jennings. He says, and he, of
Speaker 1: course is someone who loves maps, is a map head
Speaker 1: Um pieces maps are just too convenient and too tempting
Speaker 1: a way to understand place. There's a tension in them.
Speaker 1: Almost every map will show us two kinds of places,
Speaker 1: places where we've been in places where we've never been. Been.
Speaker 1: Nearby in the far away exists together in the same frame,
Speaker 1: our world, undeniably connected to the new and unexpected. We
Speaker 1: can understand at a glance our place in new universe,
Speaker 1: our potential to go and see new things, and the
Speaker 1: way to get back home afterward. Very nice. All right, Well,
Speaker 1: let's call the robot over here and we'll read a
Speaker 1: quick listener mail. All right, this one comes to us
Speaker 1: from Scott, who's writing about our bats episodes. He s,
Speaker 1: it's high guys. I love the podcast. I listen while
Speaker 1: I'm at work all alone on the second shift, and
Speaker 1: it informs me as well as entertains. I love the
Speaker 1: show about bats. The first thing I thought of about
Speaker 1: when I go mountain biking at night in the woods,
Speaker 1: bats will swoop down and fly along in front of us,
Speaker 1: staying in the beam of our head helmet lights. Sometimes
Speaker 1: they are twenty feet away, and sometimes they are close
Speaker 1: enough to see the hairs on their body and hear
Speaker 1: their leathery wings flapping. It doesn't happen all the time,
Speaker 1: but a half dozen times a year is thrilling. Second,
Speaker 1: when we were kids, we would throw pebbles up in
Speaker 1: the air at dusk and watch the bats come zipping
Speaker 1: in to intercept the pebbles, probably thinking it was a
Speaker 1: juice bug meal. I know it sounds cruel now, but
Speaker 1: we were kids and we and we didn't hurt the bats.
Speaker 1: We didn't throw anything at them. Last I live in
Speaker 1: an old house and once every few years we'll have
Speaker 1: a bat visitor, usually in early summer, flapping around the house.
Speaker 1: My surefire way to safely remove them is to hold
Speaker 1: up a sheet or blanket and slowly walk them into
Speaker 1: a corner, and then gently lower the blanket before pick
Speaker 1: it up and ever so gently bring it outside and unfurled.
Speaker 1: I haven't lost a bat yet this way. Thanks again,
Speaker 1: Scott all right catcher. Yeah, so, if if you guys
Speaker 1: have anything you would like to share, certainly about bats
Speaker 1: and catching bats safely in your household that kind of thing,
Speaker 1: or about maps. What's your relationship with maps? Do you
Speaker 1: have memories of like, like I feel a lot of
Speaker 1: us do, of looking at these maps as a kid,
Speaker 1: before you really had any understanding of the world, trying
Speaker 1: to piece it together from that that map on the wall,
Speaker 1: looking at far away places, wondering what it's like, or
Speaker 1: certainly the old maps. I remember we had one of
Speaker 1: these old world maps in the wall when I was
Speaker 1: a kid, where all the all the all the continents
Speaker 1: are kind of malformed and kind of weird, and there
Speaker 1: may have been a dragon or two. Uh will therapy
Speaker 1: dragons right? Um? Let us know what you think about
Speaker 1: all that, And if you're into fantasy, what do you
Speaker 1: think about about the fantasy worlds that your favorite authors create?
Speaker 1: In that form, what are some of your favorite maps
Speaker 1: of unreal places? We'd love to hear about it. You
Speaker 1: can find us on Tumblr and Facebook. On both of
Speaker 1: those we are stuff to Blow your Mind, and you
Speaker 1: can also find us on Twitter, where our handle is
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