The Geographic Mind
“I suspect that a driving force in the evolution of …complex cognition was strong long-term selection acting to enhance our ancestors’ ability to mentally map the location and seasonal variation of many species of plants in arid environments and to convey this accumulated knowledge to offspring and other group members. This capacity laid the foundation for many other advances….”
--Curtis W. Marean, “When the Sea Saved Humanity,” Scientific American, August 2010, Volume 303, Number 2, p. 61
“…human beings are innately equipped with powerful pattern-recognition algorithms, which sort similar objects in groups.”
--Guy Deutscher, Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages, New York, Metropolitan Books, 2010, p. 12
Is it through pattern-recognition and a geographical sense that you orient yourself in a personal world to make decisions and by which you map your successes and failures against a background of chaos and harsh reality?
You’re always making maps. Maybe that’s why your last strange dream was “strange”: It altered not only human relationships, but also changed the nature of place, mixing together the maps of that restless brain. Map-making is part of the complex cognition that Curtis W. Marean mentions.
Remember that expanding set of maps from womb to crib to room to home to neighborhood to village to town to city to country: Like the ripples in a pond expanding from a tossed pebble, those complex waves encompass ever more space. But in a world of vicissitudes, your cartographic waves return to wash over areas previously mapped, and each time the waves record a different pattern: A grown tree where once a sapling stood, a new house on a previously vacant lot, a pothole in an old road, and new occupants along a street. Meanwhile the initial waves continue to expand unless you decide you’ve reach a limiting shore, and a reflecting bounce of energy goes through somewhat familiar—but never the same—waters of the past. And like all waves, interference and enhancement are inevitable as crests or troughs merge, steepening, flattening, erasing, and replacing.
Mapping and re-mapping frame your past, present, and future.
“I suspect that a driving force in the evolution of …complex cognition was strong long-term selection acting to enhance our ancestors’ ability to mentally map the location and seasonal variation of many species of plants in arid environments and to convey this accumulated knowledge to offspring and other group members. This capacity laid the foundation for many other advances….”
--Curtis W. Marean, “When the Sea Saved Humanity,” Scientific American, August 2010, Volume 303, Number 2, p. 61
“…human beings are innately equipped with powerful pattern-recognition algorithms, which sort similar objects in groups.”
--Guy Deutscher, Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages, New York, Metropolitan Books, 2010, p. 12
Is it through pattern-recognition and a geographical sense that you orient yourself in a personal world to make decisions and by which you map your successes and failures against a background of chaos and harsh reality?
You’re always making maps. Maybe that’s why your last strange dream was “strange”: It altered not only human relationships, but also changed the nature of place, mixing together the maps of that restless brain. Map-making is part of the complex cognition that Curtis W. Marean mentions.
Remember that expanding set of maps from womb to crib to room to home to neighborhood to village to town to city to country: Like the ripples in a pond expanding from a tossed pebble, those complex waves encompass ever more space. But in a world of vicissitudes, your cartographic waves return to wash over areas previously mapped, and each time the waves record a different pattern: A grown tree where once a sapling stood, a new house on a previously vacant lot, a pothole in an old road, and new occupants along a street. Meanwhile the initial waves continue to expand unless you decide you’ve reach a limiting shore, and a reflecting bounce of energy goes through somewhat familiar—but never the same—waters of the past. And like all waves, interference and enhancement are inevitable as crests or troughs merge, steepening, flattening, erasing, and replacing.
Mapping and re-mapping frame your past, present, and future.
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