You take a photo with a phone, and through the magic of GPS, the phone tells you where and when you took the picture. Think about that. If you had the storage space on your smart phone, you could travel the world snapping photos as fast as your finger could hit the button. Want to relive the trip? Just view the pics. Put the camera on panorama, and you’ll get almost as much a view as the one you acquired with your brain’s camera.
There they are, all those megapixels of where you have been now readily available and stamped with a date, a time, and a place. Also, those pixels capture much of what the camera sees. It’s almost as though we don’t need the brain’s camera. Technology is replacing us, isn’t it? Actually, no. There’s a difference.
All those brain-camera images are as much impressions as they are images. They are as much sound, smell, touch, and taste as they are images. Plus, you don’t see the world you think you see. Just as there are gaps between the pixels of your camera’s images, there are some gaps in your images. Remember that “blind spot” in your eyes you learned about in science class? You don’t take in the entire scene that your eyes scan. In addition, you don’t recall the images you originally captured. Between capture and recall are intervening experiences that alter memories, and, thus, mental images.
So, the places we believe we mapped accurately are not quite the accurate photo-like representations we might think they are. Our mental maps are at once figments of our imagination, collections of experiences and facts, fragments of concepts and introjections, and segments of faithfully sensed reality all gathered together under the aegis of mood. Their time stamp is flawed; their location, afloat on a Heraclitean river of memory. Gee, I thought this room was bigger. Gosh, I thought this park had the smell of flowers. I don’t recall this trip’s being this long.
Yet, for all their literal inaccuracy, our mental maps are more faithful representations of who we are than any megapixel smart phone image could capture.
There they are, all those megapixels of where you have been now readily available and stamped with a date, a time, and a place. Also, those pixels capture much of what the camera sees. It’s almost as though we don’t need the brain’s camera. Technology is replacing us, isn’t it? Actually, no. There’s a difference.
All those brain-camera images are as much impressions as they are images. They are as much sound, smell, touch, and taste as they are images. Plus, you don’t see the world you think you see. Just as there are gaps between the pixels of your camera’s images, there are some gaps in your images. Remember that “blind spot” in your eyes you learned about in science class? You don’t take in the entire scene that your eyes scan. In addition, you don’t recall the images you originally captured. Between capture and recall are intervening experiences that alter memories, and, thus, mental images.
So, the places we believe we mapped accurately are not quite the accurate photo-like representations we might think they are. Our mental maps are at once figments of our imagination, collections of experiences and facts, fragments of concepts and introjections, and segments of faithfully sensed reality all gathered together under the aegis of mood. Their time stamp is flawed; their location, afloat on a Heraclitean river of memory. Gee, I thought this room was bigger. Gosh, I thought this park had the smell of flowers. I don’t recall this trip’s being this long.
Yet, for all their literal inaccuracy, our mental maps are more faithful representations of who we are than any megapixel smart phone image could capture.
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