Maps don’t show all of Earth’s details. They don’t show the all the details of anything. If they did, they would have scales like “one inch equals one inch.” Steven Wright has a joke about that. Maps with such scales would be the same size as the surfaces they portray; globes would be eight thousand miles in diameter.
No, maps give details germane to their purposes: Road maps, for example, show roads and the names of towns through which or by which they pass. Large scale maps give more details than small scale maps, with the former used for smaller areas than the latter. An architect's floor plan with proposed furniture emplacement in an apartment is a large scale map. In contrast, the smaller scale city map doesn't show apartment sinks, and an even smaller scale state map doesn't show city streets. Ironically, we use “large scale” and “small scale” to mean just the opposite when we speak of human activities and psychological perspectives.
As a center proposition of this website runs, people can use mental maps to understand and control their lives. Those numerous mental maps you hold dear are, like actual maps, also detail deficient. One reason is false memories. Another is imagination or embellishment. And yet another is forgetfulness. Test: Quick, recall all the details of your first bedroom, your first neighborhood, or your first trip. We don’t need all those details over the long term, so our brains selectively drop many of them.* No big deal. We retain what we believe will help us in “going back” mentally or physically.
As we leave the crib and expand our world, we increase the number of maps and thus add more details to either recall or delete. And as we become more imaginative, we can even map fictional places, anticipated places, and analogous places. Expanding the number of cognitive maps is indicative of expanding experiences, including, of course, the maps of more numerous relationships that come with interactions.
In a time of worldwide quarantine, the personal world we map has shrunken in one way and expanded in another. On the one hand, our details are limited in large part to the small areas that we call homes and even mansions can become the cribs of the present. On the other hand, our details are limited by the number of pixels on our TVs, smart devices, and monitors. We can, of course, add books and other print media. Recall Emily Dickinson’s line, “There is no frigate like a book.” The point here is that the focus of mental mapping has changed in the midst of a pandemic. The large and small scales between which we bounce are different today from what they were yesterday. We can find ourselves seeing details in our homes, yards, or neighborhoods that we ignored or forgot under pre-pandemic conditions. We can also find ourselves adding virtual maps to our memories, implanting them in our brain’s place cells.
Itching to go out and re-explore and re-map the world you once freely traveled? Itching to find in retracing previous explorations those details of place and person you forgot? When the pandemic passes, you will have a new world to explore and map. That’s an exciting thought. In the next go-round, in your next emergence from the life of the crib, you will have the advantage of knowing how to explore. This time out you might find yourself with a heightened sense of detail. Sure, eventually they, like the details of your past explorations, will fade as you switch from large scale to small scale in your mental maps, but at the outset, all newly discovered or re-discovered details will elicit in you a revitalized sense of wonder that you experienced when you first left a crib to explore a world.
*Ever play a sport? A third basemen is aware of divots in the grass infield that might deflect a ground ball. An outfielder might be aware of mushy spots where drainage problems prevent sure footing. Both map those details for the duration of a game. The fan in the stands is usually unaware of those details unless a player gets a bad bounce or slips on a muddy surface.
No, maps give details germane to their purposes: Road maps, for example, show roads and the names of towns through which or by which they pass. Large scale maps give more details than small scale maps, with the former used for smaller areas than the latter. An architect's floor plan with proposed furniture emplacement in an apartment is a large scale map. In contrast, the smaller scale city map doesn't show apartment sinks, and an even smaller scale state map doesn't show city streets. Ironically, we use “large scale” and “small scale” to mean just the opposite when we speak of human activities and psychological perspectives.
As a center proposition of this website runs, people can use mental maps to understand and control their lives. Those numerous mental maps you hold dear are, like actual maps, also detail deficient. One reason is false memories. Another is imagination or embellishment. And yet another is forgetfulness. Test: Quick, recall all the details of your first bedroom, your first neighborhood, or your first trip. We don’t need all those details over the long term, so our brains selectively drop many of them.* No big deal. We retain what we believe will help us in “going back” mentally or physically.
As we leave the crib and expand our world, we increase the number of maps and thus add more details to either recall or delete. And as we become more imaginative, we can even map fictional places, anticipated places, and analogous places. Expanding the number of cognitive maps is indicative of expanding experiences, including, of course, the maps of more numerous relationships that come with interactions.
In a time of worldwide quarantine, the personal world we map has shrunken in one way and expanded in another. On the one hand, our details are limited in large part to the small areas that we call homes and even mansions can become the cribs of the present. On the other hand, our details are limited by the number of pixels on our TVs, smart devices, and monitors. We can, of course, add books and other print media. Recall Emily Dickinson’s line, “There is no frigate like a book.” The point here is that the focus of mental mapping has changed in the midst of a pandemic. The large and small scales between which we bounce are different today from what they were yesterday. We can find ourselves seeing details in our homes, yards, or neighborhoods that we ignored or forgot under pre-pandemic conditions. We can also find ourselves adding virtual maps to our memories, implanting them in our brain’s place cells.
Itching to go out and re-explore and re-map the world you once freely traveled? Itching to find in retracing previous explorations those details of place and person you forgot? When the pandemic passes, you will have a new world to explore and map. That’s an exciting thought. In the next go-round, in your next emergence from the life of the crib, you will have the advantage of knowing how to explore. This time out you might find yourself with a heightened sense of detail. Sure, eventually they, like the details of your past explorations, will fade as you switch from large scale to small scale in your mental maps, but at the outset, all newly discovered or re-discovered details will elicit in you a revitalized sense of wonder that you experienced when you first left a crib to explore a world.
*Ever play a sport? A third basemen is aware of divots in the grass infield that might deflect a ground ball. An outfielder might be aware of mushy spots where drainage problems prevent sure footing. Both map those details for the duration of a game. The fan in the stands is usually unaware of those details unless a player gets a bad bounce or slips on a muddy surface.
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