October 16, 2012 • 36 mins
Maps show us familiar places as well as far-flung locales that quietly beckon, intertwining the past, present and future. Join Julie and Robert as they explore how our brains work on maps, from neurons to the role of memory and storytelling in mapmaking.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie,
what is the worst map that you've ever created or had?
Do you use m oh man? I don't know. I
(00:26):
love to draw maps, and so I feel like all
the maps that I've created have been brilliant and places. Yeah, yeah,
I'm not like a cartographer on the side or anything,
but no, I don't I don't feel like I've done
anything too crazy. My daughter recently created a map, and um,
(00:47):
I was pretty impressed. She had China, the United States
is like a blue blob, um, Europe as a yellow blob,
and then butterfly Land. But yeah they had little wings. Um.
So I don't know. I want to say that's the
worst map, but I don't think it was very practical. Still,
it's it's interesting, and we'll have to think about butterfly
Land if we uh as we dive into this podcast,
(01:09):
as we talk about brains, our brains and maps and
how this map ends up informing the world around us. Um,
when I think of bad maps, I've had to use
probably the worst was when is that Yosemite National Park.
There's like just a map that was handed not an
official map, it was like handed out like maybe by
(01:30):
somebody at the hotel that had to show different locations
around this little uh town, different trails, and none of
it was really to scale. So you've got to really
warp sense of distance when you tried to go out
and introverse any of this. I will say, map or
hotel maps are pretty bad because they just want to
show you the landmarks and they just are like that's
(01:52):
all that tourists really care about. They'll they'll figure it out.
Don't worry about the distances, don't worry about whether it's
walkable or you need to set aside a day to
travel this distance. Just just take our word for it
that it's there. Yeah, yeah, you'll see it just like
on the map. Is huge thing just on the horizon. Um,
so of course, yes, we're talking about maps today. We're
talking about how we have our own sort of autobiographical
(02:16):
element to maps that we'll talk about and um, we
should probably kick this off with allegorical maps. Yes, allegorical
maps maps that are not so much of places. I mean,
they can be of places. But they're they're about much
more than that. When when you when you put in
a location into Google Maps or Apple Maps or whatever
(02:36):
you're using, generally you're getting a pretty ironed out idea
of where point A is in relation to point B
between two physical locations with an allegorical map. Point A
and point B may not be things that are precisely real.
They might be states of mind, states of being. Uh.
(02:58):
They might one point A might exist in this world,
point point B might exist in some mythical other world. Yeah.
I was actually thinking about this in terms of Dante,
particularly when I when I thought back to our previous
podcast that dealt with the sins and his sort of
allegorical map of how you are traversing this mountain until
(03:19):
you can you know, scale all these different sins and
wash yourselves of them. Yeah. Yeah. Certainly, with his his
map of Hell, he relied on a lot of older
maps and models that people have been sort of trying
to figure out what the what what a hell might
look like and mapping that up for some time. Uh.
The Purgatory is certainly more of a purely allegorical map
(03:40):
because it's about it. It's it's more precisely about this
journey from a state of of sin, but you know,
acceptable level of sin through cleanliness up the mountain and
into heavens. So it's about the journey of the human soul.
And there's another allegorical map I wanted to mention, and
this one is called a Road to Success, And apparently
(04:02):
this was really popular circa nineteen ten. I love this map.
It is in a book called map Head by Ken Jennings.
Yes that Ken Jennings, Jeopardy, jeopardy um. And it depicts
an actual road winding up a mountain in a similar
way that that Dante considered the landscape. And success is
(04:22):
depicted as a leer at the very top, but at
the bottom all these different things you have to go
through that might prevent you from having success, including boheman
is bohemianism. At the base of this mountain, it looks
like a beer garden. Yes, it looks like a fun
place you might stop in. But his his whole arguments
you stopped in there, he might never leave, right you might.
I mean you can't even get up to the you know,
(04:43):
halfway up the mountain, right, it looks a lot more
attractive than the pit of illiteracy, the pit of a literacy,
which feels like tiny figures plumbing and it is dark abyss.
There's also the mutual admiration society, in which and this
is what I love, because it really is in the
spirit of the times. People are telling each other things
like you'll set the world on fire, You're a wonder
(05:06):
my boy. Um. So you know you can get caught
up in that. But anyway, you go up and up
and up, and you go through true knowledge. Um. But
you of course have to traverse lack of preparation until
you go through the gate of ideals and finally you
have found success. It should be a board game because
it reminds me a lot of the game of Life,
which in in its in its its own sense, it's
(05:26):
kind of an allegorical map transformed into a board game. Well,
and that's what I think is interesting about this is
it is instructional. It is, of course, as you say,
not going to tell you how to get from you know,
point A to point B in terms of uh, you know,
day to day, like how do I just navigate the world,
But it does tell you in some sense this is
the direction that you should take here of the pitfalls.
(05:48):
But of course a lot of people are like thinking, well,
an allegorical map. Again, this is a map of something
that is not real. It's a map of something that
is not a physical location. It doesn't really deal with geography.
It's dealing with abstract ideas and things that exist only
in our heads. But the crazy thing is when you
start looking at maps in our history with maps and
even our future with maps, that same description applies to
(06:11):
to even are more hard boiled um maps that deal
with physical locations, we're still bringing in all of this
mental junk uh and and laying that out as part
of the map making process. It's true, Like, think about
the last time that you just jotted down a quick
map for someone and gave them directions. As you were
doing that, and you're saying, here's the gas station on
(06:32):
the left. Um, you know, there's all these different memories
that you have flooding your brain about that gas station,
or here's the school I went to or so on
and so forth. So you might be putting landmarks on there,
but it's all informed by your past experience. Yeah, and
even as you just find yourself like driving around town
or taking the train to work, Inevitably, you're you're crossing things,
(06:54):
You're you're passing by things that have some sort of
significance to yourself, and they start ticking off in the
in the in the background, you know, you're kind of like, Oh,
that's the place I had that really good sandwich at
that time, That's that place where that that spider leapt
out of my suit. I don't know, whatever the memory
may be, we can't help build an informal map out
of those experiences. Yeah, I was thinking about the writer
(07:16):
Pat Conroy as well. He's a Southern writer in the
United States, and a lot of his fiction draws upon
the landscape in the sort of stories it tells, and
he has a some of my famous quote that says,
my wound is geography. It's also my anchorage and my
port of call. So if you think about this map
is really storytelling, um, it's you know, drawing from our
(07:40):
experience but also our imagination of what could be. And
this is probably what we're all trying to get to
you right now, is you know, the million dollar question,
what is happening in our brains when we are considering
maps in terms of our own personal autobiography but also um,
just trying to navigate the world. I can. So when
you think about ben is m is the brain and
(08:02):
absence of the map. You know what happens when the
map is is almost entirely internalized. And one of the
best examples of that, the one one that we've we've
actually studied scientifically, um, has to do with the London
cab drivers. Yeah. I'm sure a lot of people out
there have heard about this, the fact that their hippocampuses
are larger than non cab drivers in London. But before
(08:23):
we talk about that a little bit more, I wanted
to just sort of lay out the landscape of London
for everyone. Um, the streets that comprised the city. They
sprawl beyond Greater London and they are a tangle of
ancient streets and people have actually referred to them before
as a plate of spaghetti. Yeah. This isn't like a
modern US city where somebody came out, laid out a
(08:45):
bunch of grid work and said, all right, you're gonna
put streets here, going down, streets here, going across the
park here, and that's going to be the city. Boom. Yeah,
this is a place that it's more like sediment city.
A sediment like over the years, different layers have accumulated,
and if you walk through London, you're looking over here,
here's this modern skyscraper that looks like a pickle. Uh,
(09:05):
Here's here's some ancient Roman ruins. Here's some sort of
like mid um mid twentieth century sort of communist looking
building that looks like just an ugly box. And it's
all just a complete it. It's like history through up
this city and you have to sort of navigate the
chunks and have to adjust to debts that is London.
It's true you have names that change just you know, suddenly,
(09:30):
and there's not a lot of consistency with with the
way that the names go and are um going through
the actual city. And then you have a lack of
house numbers on some streets that doesn't seem to be
important to everyone um in every location. And it can
take a London Cabby two to four years of training
to master the twenty five thousand streets that dart out
(09:51):
in the six mile radius from trying cross area all
the knowledge that's right um. This training is a culmination
and of what they will finally sit down and be
tested on called as you say, the Knowledge, which I
love because it just sounds like so mysterious and wonderful,
like you're about to go through a portal um. But yeah,
(10:13):
the Knowledge is basically a series of sit down test
with an examiner who tells the cabby where she or
he wants to go, and then the cabby has to
tell the examiner the exact turn by turn route that
here she will take, including the side of the street
that the journey begins on. He reminds me a lot
of Mark Clain's Life on the Mississippi, which I remember
(10:33):
reading as a child and being dreadfully bored by it
because it's a lot of Mark Clain talking about being
on on the Mississippi and and about how one navigates
the Mississippi. But it's but it was really similar in
that you had these, uh, these guys that had to
just memorize, just had to commit to memory all of
these details of the river and about its depth in
(10:54):
which and how navigable different portions of the river we're
going to be at a given time, right, And that's
actually what all of us are doing all the time.
But Lendon cab drivers in particular are really paying attention
to Yes, they're dealing with a very complex street system.
Like you said, numbers not not aren't necessarily where they
need to be. You're you're dealing with the with the
various flow and flux of traffic. And as a result,
(11:17):
their hippocampus, which is located in the brains temporal lobe
and is responsible for uh navigating, starts to get bigger
and bigger. And the more years that they're on the job,
the bigger the hippocampus. Alright, so most people who have
a job that involves sitting and might think, well, your
your rear end might grow over time. The rear end
of the hippocampus grows over time, swells with this knowledge
(11:39):
if you will. Yes, it does. But when you retire,
it shrinks back down to normal. That's the thing. Um So.
And also this is interesting too when they found when
they actually did a couple of more follow up tests
because the hippocampus. It was a two thousand study and
in two thousand and eight they did a follow up
and they found that the hippocampus was really only activated
(11:59):
at the beginning of a trip, and then other parts
of the brain started to take over. And there have
been there have been some studies to that have suggested
that there's a trade off in cognitive talents that as
a taxi driver becomes more and more equipped to navigate
this complex road system, there their their other modes of
memory kind of kind of dim just a little bit, really,
(12:20):
so the backswells, the front portion shrinks a little Okay, well,
there you go. UM. I wanted to also talk about
neurons and how they are influencing the way that we
actually are able to follow directions. According to Barbara Trusky
in her article Distortions in Memory for maps, UM, we
(12:42):
have neurons in our brains that are biased towards horizontal
and vertical arrangements, which I think is trippy in and
of itself. In fact, the neurons greatly outnumber the neurons
that are dedicated to diagonal arrangement. But when you start
to think about our planet, which is biased on this
X Y access, it begins to make sense because we
(13:02):
have really strong verticals in the trees that we see right,
and then the ground provides a flat horizon, and even
when you look out, you see the horizon. So it
makes sense that we evolve to have more neurons that
would appreciate this X y axis. So yeah, so we're
more in line with the rook on a on a chessboard,
just up and down, yes, and think right and think
(13:27):
about those trees. This sort of proto landmarks for for
all animals really, And then I was reminded of that
sleight of hand trick that we discussed when we talked
about the science of magicians, and um, the fact that
not just magicians use this trick, but pickpocketers also will
take advantage of the fact that we have this x
(13:49):
y axis, and they do this by moving their hands
uh in an arc rather than horizontally. And the reason
for that is that we have cicades and these are
the fast just movements in the human body, and it
occurs in our eyes right, and they automatically move their
gaze to the endpoint um of what they think is
(14:10):
going to happen. So if you were to move your
hand horizontally, then you could track it really well. But pipocketers, uh, magicians, illusionists,
they all do this sort of arc because it's very
hard to track it accurately and you're distracted. It also
reminds me of zigzagging, like the whole deal and alligators
chasing you, Right, what do you do? Run bag? That's right?
(14:31):
Mess with their ability to determine when something is actually
moving sideways. And if you think that that's not enough
of a case to say that we prefer this sort
of x Y access, think about the London Tube map. Yes,
back to London, the the fabulous London Tube Map. Where
it's really and I'm fairly new to all of this, um.
(14:53):
I mean I've been to London, you know, I've certainly
used that tube map to get around before, but but
I really never stopped to realize how how important it
was and how groundbreaking that map design was. And certainly
you see its influence everywhere. You see various versions of it.
You see other public transportation systems that mimic that style.
It's it's become sort of something of a modern art motif. Yes,
(15:15):
it's definitely iconic. Um And the reason why it works
so well is that it plays again to the x
Y access. Harry Beck is the person who designed this
map in nineteen thirty three, or rather he did it
a couple of years before that, but they didn't adopt
until ninety three. And what he did is he took
all the squirrely lines that played a spaghetti and tried
to make sense of it by only delineating all the
(15:38):
stations and that connecting stations in forty five degree angles.
So the effect, while being really modern to the eye,
I think um is that it really cleaned up that
space and it made it much more logical for people
to understand the system, and it really becomes one's understanding
of the city. That's what what really fascinates me. I mean,
(15:58):
you tend to sort of the fine your space based
on the roads and paths you have to travel. Like, uh,
here in Atlanta, we live in a pretty pretty uh
non complex city as far as public transportation goes. We
got north and southeast and west, We've got we've got
eight and seventy five going up the center, We've got
twenty going through in the middle. So it's it's it's
(16:19):
pretty it's pretty simple. And then you have the Highway
to eighty five looping, yeah, looping around and trapping everybody
inside because that's our plan is that you just roar
enough traffic through there and the zombies can't get in
or out, depending on what the scenario is. But but
but it's difficult to not think about one surroundings in
those terms, like thinking about where are you in terms
of the perimeter. I mean, I'm here in Atlanta. People
(16:41):
tend to talk about things being O t P outside
the perimeter, like you do not want to go O
t P even if you have a friend that lives
out there. God bless them, but they're O t P
and they just invited you to dinner. You might have
to make up an excuse that kind of thing. Uh.
And then inside the perimeter is is the preferred distance
of travel? Um? And then you think of it in
those those different sections. That's right. The mental map does
(17:03):
actually map to the system that is in place. And
apparently this London tube map was so important to so
many people that when they made changes to it, there
was a big oh, like whoa, what are you doing?
You've changed our reality. Basically, you've changed the thing that
forms the world that we live in. Even though this
map is inaccurate, right because it's not nothing that the
(17:24):
forty five degree angle that has picked it in, it
was still like, that's how I see London, at least
for some people. Other people sort of said this is fine,
it's more inaccurate, but you know, that's that's what happens
when something becomes iconic. I suppose, Well, I think that's
what's ultimately at heart when when people have this reaction
to Pluto losing its planet status, you know, like ultimately
(17:45):
nobody really cares about Pluto. Really, it's it's it's out there,
it's not really really has a stake in Pluto's a
long ways off and and pretty insignificant compared to the
other planets. But it was part of that map that
we grew up seeing. It was in that app was
how we defined our place in the Solar System and
in the the universe at large. And suddenly that changed
(18:05):
and people are like, whoa, that changes everything in a
small and perhaps in significant way to to normal life
and the way you live your daily life. But he's
still shifted your universe. Yeah. And it's funny because even
though we know life is uh something that is constantly
changing that we're just transience here, really, all of us,
we still can't help but try to nail things down
(18:28):
and say this is not going to change. So we're
gonna map it. Yeah, We're gonna look up at the
night sky and say that is belongs to us. And
you know, anytime sort of those things are tinkered with,
it reminds us of this transient quality of life. Yeah,
anyone who has a GPS device that's not attached to
their phone knows this steel because like like with me,
I know that there is a way to take it
and hook it up to a computer and probably pay
(18:50):
some stupid sum of money to get the maps updated.
But that's a lot of trouble and money I don't
want to spend, so I end up with old maps.
So you know, it'll occasionally send us in a direction
that towards the street that is no longer there, or
will ignore a street that it doesn't know exists yet
and there, but there's there is something troubling about it.
You're like, why are the roads changing? Why is the
(19:11):
world changing around me? The map should have kept it
as it is. Yeah, that happened to me recently. And
the road just dead ended and it was supposed to
go for like another twenty miles. And nothing makes you
feel more helpless than relying on, you know, a clunky GPS.
Uh to feel like a rube in the middle of
nowhere and appreciate maps, at least the written ones. So um,
(19:34):
I did want to bring this up about Americans and
their apparent ability to excel at directions. Okay, geographer hom
Debuge has made the claim that we Americans and he's Dutch, correct,
he's German, we have a better sense of direction than
our European counterparts that live in these sort of spaghetti
(19:57):
streeted cities, be because we have exercise that part of
our brain, because we are so used to this grid
like system in the United States, where most major cities
are very logical and planned out on this x y acxis.
I think you can make a case for that, certainly
in something like when you go to a city like Savannah, Georgia.
(20:18):
You know where they have to like it's pretty laid
out on a grid, or the main part of the
city is anyway, and you have here's a street, and
here's a street coming from the other direction, here's a park.
Here is I mean, it's just it's like a grid
where it's like a it's like a board for a
card game. Yeah, And even though they have the parks,
they have successive parks, and so there's a pattern of that,
(20:39):
and so you know that you're going to have to
go around these parks and x y Z configuration. So yeah,
there you go. But I think it's surprising to people
because when you think about Americans and you think about maps, um,
and our ability to actually find other countries on the map,
it's pretty dismal. Well, you know what we've talked before
about how much our brain likes to find patterns and
(21:00):
recognized patterns with these pattern recognition engines. So there's something
comfortably comforting about knowing that, all right, well in another street, UM,
I know, what about what's gonna happen. There's gonna be
a park up there, or another couple of streets, there's
gonna be this or that. You know, it's a you
want this regularity in your world around you. Yeah, and um,
for all the people out there when you go on
(21:21):
vacation and you're the map person, this is for you. UM.
I don't know if you guys like to do this,
but I love to study the map beforehand so that
I do start to create some sort of reality of
this new city for myself and my brain and orient
myself as quickly as possible. I tend to wait more
towards the last minute to do that, but I do
find something. There's something satisfying about it, Like when you're
(21:41):
actually on the like flying into this city and the
so the city in a sense is about to become
real to you. Then I engage with the map and
I started looking at it, and I see where I'm
going to be, what's around it, what where I can eat,
in the general vicinity and in the place becomes a
little more real before I get there. Uh, And I'm
already imagining that, which we'll talk about in a moment.
(22:03):
We're gonna take a break. When we get back, we
are going to talk about this idea of maps from
our imagination that become completely real to us. All right,
we're back, and we're going to talk about maps as
they relate to storytelling in the creation of unreal places
(22:25):
in memory and memory. We've talked before about the memory palace,
of course, and this is the method where you use
our fabulous gift for spatial processing and use that to
create an imagined place full of the things that you
need to memorize. Yeah, and think about it this way too.
When you go into a room and you perceive a room,
(22:47):
you're not just getting an image of your room. What
that you know, what you're perceiving is actually your mind
creating those dimensions of a room for you. So that's
very important in terms of how we remember things and
how we map at our worlds. Yeah, like the anytime
you check out a new restaurant, restaurant, right, your your
brain has to develop that map to the bathroom. And
(23:08):
then once you have that data, it's it's it's important,
it's it's valuable, and you share it with other people.
The other person the table goes to get up there,
like where's that You know where the bathroom is? And like, yeah,
let me share that mental map with you. Yeah, you're like, okay,
see that fabulous mustachioed man over there, take a right,
and so on to forth. See how it becomes a
very much a part of what sticks out to your
(23:29):
in your memory. And this is one of the uh
bedrocks of this memory palace idea of how you can
create a whole world in your mind and remember a
bunch of random things by tagging them to these surreal
objects of this story that you tell yourself. I also
can't help but be reminded of of the mandala, which
(23:51):
comes from the Sanskrit for circle. And this is a
motif you see again and again especially in the Tobetan Buddhism,
where it is the essentially one uses this image to
help build this virtual place in one's mind. You have
a map on on paper or on canvas or in sand,
and you use that to form this spiritually significant map
(24:13):
in your mind and it's and then that's used for uh,
you know, for meditation. So what I think is interesting
about this is that you're basically talking about the intersection
between reality and imagination. And we've seen this used not
necessarily the mandala per se, but the idea of this
transposing um, your imagination onto reality and fiction. Yes, um,
(24:38):
And I was thinking about token and how important that
is as a narrative device to create this world for
the readers that you can begin to reference because you're
taking a bird's eye view of this world that Token
has created. Yes, definitely, the maps of Middle Earth in
The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, those were
those are really big for me early on before where
(25:00):
I was able to read those books because my my
dad had him in these like tattered paperbacks. I remember,
like in third grade probably even younger, getting those out
and I would look at the maps and the maps
amazed me, you know, because you're you're pouring over this
data and you're looking at things like Mirkwood and uh,
you're looking at um at you know, the the place
where the Hobbits live. You're looking at where the the
(25:21):
the evil creatures live and more door and you're you're
forming this, uh, this world view. And then as you
you get older and you deal with these maps too,
you're trying to figure out, well, what what what is
this model? After it's what is this representing the real world,
either geographically or politically? Because you're building a players of
this world, right, Yeah, so you're you're looking like, all right,
how do I how do I interpret this map in
(25:41):
terms of of the actual earth? How do I interpret
it in terms of the world as as the author
was seeing it? Uh in those days. Uh, it's it's
really fascinating and it's become a hallmark, certainly of any
kind of world creating fantasy. Be it. Um. The works
of St. George are Martin is really big right now.
(26:02):
Game of Thrones, Uh, the TV series based on his work,
actually starts off with a map. It's like a sweeping
computer animated map of the world in which the show
takes place. UM. Other big examples of that are Scott
Baker's Um Second Apocalypse books. He has a really awesome
map with the three c's in there, so you're you're
(26:24):
pouring over that and you're trying to figure out, all right,
what is this this portion of the map. This is
kind of his Middle East, I guess, and this is
this is kind of his Baltic region. And then and
then this is where he's put the the the iconic
evil portion of the of the of the planet. UM.
It's it's it's fascinating to think of all that that stuff.
And also it's also interesting to think of the authors
(26:45):
who create a map but don't actually share that with
the readers. UM. Because certainly, if you're if you're creating,
you're engaging in world creation. You're you're creating a new planet,
new cultures, new geography. All of the stuff needs to
come together in a form that the author understands in
order to write about it. So, like a lot of
(27:05):
the stuff that that later came out from Tolkien, it's
stuff that he never intended for a wider audience to view.
He wrote that for himself so that he could create
these books. So a map for yourself so that you
the writer, could then write the story. I think it's fascinating. Yeah.
One of my favorite authors is a guy named Brian McNaughton,
and he wrote a book called Throne of Bones, which
all takes place in the same dark fantasy setting. And
(27:30):
I am told that he and I understand from from
what I've read about him, he did have a map
of this world that he'd created, but it's it's no
one's there. It's never been published. As far as I know,
no one outside of a small number of people have
ever seen it. Because his characters were not the kind
of people who engaged in a sweeping understanding of their
own world, whereas ay Gandalf, Lord of the Rings, like,
(27:51):
he's the kind of guy who would watch whatever Middle
Earth's version of BBC News was, you know, he he'd
be the one who tune anim I wonder the weather's
gonna be tomorrow, I wonder what's going on in uh
up there in Hobbit Country. You know, he would even
have that wider understanding, whereas the characters in um in
Brian McNaughton's book, they were more concerned with their day
to day and maybe figuring out what they were going
to eat in the next hour, or whatever their own
(28:13):
petty sufferings happened to be. The reader didn't need the
bird's eye in that sense. Um. I was thinking about
how places so incredibly important in fiction in our own
lives obviously, um. And then I was thinking about as
a guy named often Tappen right, and he is someone
who took his childhood creation of a country called Islandia
(28:35):
into adulthood with him. So I don't when you were younger,
did you ever create a sort of fantasy world or yes, um,
all the time, Because I m pretty early on I
got into Dungeons and Dragons, which the various supplements you
would get into dungeons for Dungeons and Dragons would come
with maps, which we're all pretty fascinating. I remember one
supplement in particular had had treasure maps. Yeah, that you
(28:58):
could do, and so I would. I wouldn't inevitably end
up plotting out my own little scenarios in a little world.
So I would draw out all these maps, and then
later when I got into actually writing and attempting to
write fiction, I would also envision these fantastic worlds and
try and map them out. On paper and also in
my own head and I guess i've I'm still doing that. Well.
(29:19):
My brother and I also did this, and we came
up with Marijuana Island. We did not know what marijuana meant.
But Cranga was this this ape who uh ruled this island. Well,
that sounds like that would be a great bit of
slang for it, you know, yeah, like going to Marijuana
(29:40):
Island to get some cronja. Yeah yeah. Um. But you know,
we never sort of took this world with us into adulthood.
But this guy that I talked about, Austin Tapp and
right his Islandia he took from his boyhood and he
spent twenty years off and on developing this world, um
and talking about it. It's really exhau postively, like the geography,
(30:01):
the people, the language he made up a language for them, um,
the politics, the laws and um. This he said was
a small kingdom at the southern tip of the Korean subcontinent.
And he really put a ton of thought into this.
He created maps for it. And at the time of
his death at forty eight, he was in a car
(30:23):
accident and unfortunately, um he had twenty three hundred long
hand pages dedicated to this world that he made up,
this country actually, and his wife and then later his
daughter paired it down to one thousand pages and published
it in ninety two. It was a sensation because it
really captured people's imaginations. I mean, here's someone who made
(30:46):
such an authentic world for others to enjoy. He did
not intend that, of course, it was his own personal obsession.
But I do think it's fascinating that he was able
to weave together uh this this uh country to the
point where people just wanted to go there. And and
he even said on his own travels across the world,
he would he would look at something and his family
(31:08):
said that he would look out at the mountains and say, oh,
that reminds me of Islandia. That's how real it was
in his brain. Well, and then it makes you wonder too.
We were talking about how the world around us forms
a map, but in the maps that we have formed
that world for us. So to what extent is this
created world of his more real than the real world
(31:29):
that he inhabits. You know, the more he knew, he
knew it better than the actual real world. I think
he did. I mean, think about this. It started in
his childhood, let's say, around ten years old up until
he was forty eight years old, dominated the most of
his life. He reminds me a little bit of this
author by the name of M. A. R. Barker, and
(31:51):
he was a professor of Urdu and South Asian studies.
Really really brilliant man, you know, just steeped in the
lore and history and geography of of Asia. And he
created in his spare time. His full time professor most
of his career, but in his spare time he created
a fantasy setting called uh Teco Mel and that's t
(32:12):
e Ku in the l is a really cool website
that has all the stuff on it, and he ended
up writing a few different sort of pulpy but very
creative fantasy novels set there, and also one of the
earliest like a contemporary of Dungeons and Dragons role playing game.
Uh And it's just like really really rich setting, kind
of like imagine Lord of the Rings, except instead of
(32:33):
based upon Western and Norse models of mythology, based entirely
upon Uh Eastern motifs and models. And that's basically the
world that M. A. R. Barker created. He sadly died
I think last year, but but certainly created one of
those worlds where you feel like this world was more
real for him, Um, maybe by by only a certain margin,
(32:55):
but still it almost as real as the real world
that he can earned himself with. And I think it's
interesting how we can't help but create this sort of map,
whether or not we're doing it. No, no, that we're
doing it, you know what I'm saying, Whether or not
we know that we're sitting down like Austin Tapp and
right and creating this whole mythology, or just in our
heads when we're randomly thinking about our lives, you know
(33:18):
how much of that is this sort of map construct
um And we will talk more about maps um, the
history of maps, and a bit more about the science
of it in a couple of their podcasts, but we
wanted to touch on this um idea of maps as storytelling,
So I'm gonna leave you with a little quote from
map head from Ken Jennings. He says, and he, of
(33:40):
course is someone who loves maps, is a map head
Um pieces maps are just too convenient and too tempting
a way to understand place. There's a tension in them.
Almost every map will show us two kinds of places,
places where we've been in places where we've never been. Been.
Nearby in the far away exists together in the same frame,
(34:01):
our world, undeniably connected to the new and unexpected. We
can understand at a glance our place in new universe,
our potential to go and see new things, and the
way to get back home afterward. Very nice. All right, Well,
let's call the robot over here and we'll read a
quick listener mail. All right, this one comes to us
from Scott, who's writing about our bats episodes. He s,
(34:23):
it's high guys. I love the podcast. I listen while
I'm at work all alone on the second shift, and
it informs me as well as entertains. I love the
show about bats. The first thing I thought of about
when I go mountain biking at night in the woods,
bats will swoop down and fly along in front of us,
staying in the beam of our head helmet lights. Sometimes
they are twenty feet away, and sometimes they are close
(34:44):
enough to see the hairs on their body and hear
their leathery wings flapping. It doesn't happen all the time,
but a half dozen times a year is thrilling. Second,
when we were kids, we would throw pebbles up in
the air at dusk and watch the bats come zipping
in to intercept the pebbles, probably thinking it was a
juice bug meal. I know it sounds cruel now, but
we were kids and we and we didn't hurt the bats.
(35:04):
We didn't throw anything at them. Last I live in
an old house and once every few years we'll have
a bat visitor, usually in early summer, flapping around the house.
My surefire way to safely remove them is to hold
up a sheet or blanket and slowly walk them into
a corner, and then gently lower the blanket before pick
it up and ever so gently bring it outside and unfurled.
I haven't lost a bat yet this way. Thanks again,
(35:27):
Scott all right catcher. Yeah, so, if if you guys
have anything you would like to share, certainly about bats
and catching bats safely in your household that kind of thing,
or about maps. What's your relationship with maps? Do you
have memories of like, like I feel a lot of
us do, of looking at these maps as a kid,
before you really had any understanding of the world, trying
(35:48):
to piece it together from that that map on the wall,
looking at far away places, wondering what it's like, or
certainly the old maps. I remember we had one of
these old world maps in the wall when I was
a kid, where all the all the all the continents
are kind of malformed and kind of weird, and there
may have been a dragon or two. Uh will therapy
dragons right? Um? Let us know what you think about
all that, And if you're into fantasy, what do you
(36:09):
think about about the fantasy worlds that your favorite authors create?
In that form, what are some of your favorite maps
of unreal places? We'd love to hear about it. You
can find us on Tumblr and Facebook. On both of
those we are stuff to Blow your Mind, and you
can also find us on Twitter, where our handle is
blow the Mind and you can always drop us a
(36:29):
line at blow the Mind at discovery dot com for
more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it
how Stuff Works dot com
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie,
what is the worst map that you've ever created or had?
Do you use m oh man? I don't know. I
(00:26):
love to draw maps, and so I feel like all
the maps that I've created have been brilliant and places. Yeah, yeah,
I'm not like a cartographer on the side or anything,
but no, I don't I don't feel like I've done
anything too crazy. My daughter recently created a map, and um,
(00:47):
I was pretty impressed. She had China, the United States
is like a blue blob, um, Europe as a yellow blob,
and then butterfly Land. But yeah they had little wings. Um.
So I don't know. I want to say that's the
worst map, but I don't think it was very practical. Still,
it's it's interesting, and we'll have to think about butterfly
Land if we uh as we dive into this podcast,
(01:09):
as we talk about brains, our brains and maps and
how this map ends up informing the world around us. Um,
when I think of bad maps, I've had to use
probably the worst was when is that Yosemite National Park.
There's like just a map that was handed not an
official map, it was like handed out like maybe by
(01:30):
somebody at the hotel that had to show different locations
around this little uh town, different trails, and none of
it was really to scale. So you've got to really
warp sense of distance when you tried to go out
and introverse any of this. I will say, map or
hotel maps are pretty bad because they just want to
show you the landmarks and they just are like that's
(01:52):
all that tourists really care about. They'll they'll figure it out.
Don't worry about the distances, don't worry about whether it's
walkable or you need to set aside a day to
travel this distance. Just just take our word for it
that it's there. Yeah, yeah, you'll see it just like
on the map. Is huge thing just on the horizon. Um,
so of course, yes, we're talking about maps today. We're
talking about how we have our own sort of autobiographical
(02:16):
element to maps that we'll talk about and um, we
should probably kick this off with allegorical maps. Yes, allegorical
maps maps that are not so much of places. I mean,
they can be of places. But they're they're about much
more than that. When when you when you put in
a location into Google Maps or Apple Maps or whatever
(02:36):
you're using, generally you're getting a pretty ironed out idea
of where point A is in relation to point B
between two physical locations with an allegorical map. Point A
and point B may not be things that are precisely real.
They might be states of mind, states of being. Uh.
(02:58):
They might one point A might exist in this world,
point point B might exist in some mythical other world. Yeah.
I was actually thinking about this in terms of Dante,
particularly when I when I thought back to our previous
podcast that dealt with the sins and his sort of
allegorical map of how you are traversing this mountain until
(03:19):
you can you know, scale all these different sins and
wash yourselves of them. Yeah. Yeah. Certainly, with his his
map of Hell, he relied on a lot of older
maps and models that people have been sort of trying
to figure out what the what what a hell might
look like and mapping that up for some time. Uh.
The Purgatory is certainly more of a purely allegorical map
(03:40):
because it's about it. It's it's more precisely about this
journey from a state of of sin, but you know,
acceptable level of sin through cleanliness up the mountain and
into heavens. So it's about the journey of the human soul.
And there's another allegorical map I wanted to mention, and
this one is called a Road to Success, And apparently
(04:02):
this was really popular circa nineteen ten. I love this map.
It is in a book called map Head by Ken Jennings.
Yes that Ken Jennings, Jeopardy, jeopardy um. And it depicts
an actual road winding up a mountain in a similar
way that that Dante considered the landscape. And success is
(04:22):
depicted as a leer at the very top, but at
the bottom all these different things you have to go
through that might prevent you from having success, including boheman
is bohemianism. At the base of this mountain, it looks
like a beer garden. Yes, it looks like a fun
place you might stop in. But his his whole arguments
you stopped in there, he might never leave, right you might.
I mean you can't even get up to the you know,
(04:43):
halfway up the mountain, right, it looks a lot more
attractive than the pit of illiteracy, the pit of a literacy,
which feels like tiny figures plumbing and it is dark abyss.
There's also the mutual admiration society, in which and this
is what I love, because it really is in the
spirit of the times. People are telling each other things
like you'll set the world on fire, You're a wonder
(05:06):
my boy. Um. So you know you can get caught
up in that. But anyway, you go up and up
and up, and you go through true knowledge. Um. But
you of course have to traverse lack of preparation until
you go through the gate of ideals and finally you
have found success. It should be a board game because
it reminds me a lot of the game of Life,
which in in its in its its own sense, it's
(05:26):
kind of an allegorical map transformed into a board game. Well,
and that's what I think is interesting about this is
it is instructional. It is, of course, as you say,
not going to tell you how to get from you know,
point A to point B in terms of uh, you know,
day to day, like how do I just navigate the world,
But it does tell you in some sense this is
the direction that you should take here of the pitfalls.
(05:48):
But of course a lot of people are like thinking, well,
an allegorical map. Again, this is a map of something
that is not real. It's a map of something that
is not a physical location. It doesn't really deal with geography.
It's dealing with abstract ideas and things that exist only
in our heads. But the crazy thing is when you
start looking at maps in our history with maps and
even our future with maps, that same description applies to
(06:11):
to even are more hard boiled um maps that deal
with physical locations, we're still bringing in all of this
mental junk uh and and laying that out as part
of the map making process. It's true, Like, think about
the last time that you just jotted down a quick
map for someone and gave them directions. As you were
doing that, and you're saying, here's the gas station on
(06:32):
the left. Um, you know, there's all these different memories
that you have flooding your brain about that gas station,
or here's the school I went to or so on
and so forth. So you might be putting landmarks on there,
but it's all informed by your past experience. Yeah, and
even as you just find yourself like driving around town
or taking the train to work, Inevitably, you're you're crossing things,
(06:54):
You're you're passing by things that have some sort of
significance to yourself, and they start ticking off in the
in the in the background, you know, you're kind of like, Oh,
that's the place I had that really good sandwich at
that time, That's that place where that that spider leapt
out of my suit. I don't know, whatever the memory
may be, we can't help build an informal map out
of those experiences. Yeah, I was thinking about the writer
(07:16):
Pat Conroy as well. He's a Southern writer in the
United States, and a lot of his fiction draws upon
the landscape in the sort of stories it tells, and
he has a some of my famous quote that says,
my wound is geography. It's also my anchorage and my
port of call. So if you think about this map
is really storytelling, um, it's you know, drawing from our
(07:40):
experience but also our imagination of what could be. And
this is probably what we're all trying to get to
you right now, is you know, the million dollar question,
what is happening in our brains when we are considering
maps in terms of our own personal autobiography but also um,
just trying to navigate the world. I can. So when
you think about ben is m is the brain and
(08:02):
absence of the map. You know what happens when the
map is is almost entirely internalized. And one of the
best examples of that, the one one that we've we've
actually studied scientifically, um, has to do with the London
cab drivers. Yeah. I'm sure a lot of people out
there have heard about this, the fact that their hippocampuses
are larger than non cab drivers in London. But before
(08:23):
we talk about that a little bit more, I wanted
to just sort of lay out the landscape of London
for everyone. Um, the streets that comprised the city. They
sprawl beyond Greater London and they are a tangle of
ancient streets and people have actually referred to them before
as a plate of spaghetti. Yeah. This isn't like a
modern US city where somebody came out, laid out a
(08:45):
bunch of grid work and said, all right, you're gonna
put streets here, going down, streets here, going across the
park here, and that's going to be the city. Boom. Yeah,
this is a place that it's more like sediment city.
A sediment like over the years, different layers have accumulated,
and if you walk through London, you're looking over here,
here's this modern skyscraper that looks like a pickle. Uh,
(09:05):
Here's here's some ancient Roman ruins. Here's some sort of
like mid um mid twentieth century sort of communist looking
building that looks like just an ugly box. And it's
all just a complete it. It's like history through up
this city and you have to sort of navigate the
chunks and have to adjust to debts that is London.
It's true you have names that change just you know, suddenly,
(09:30):
and there's not a lot of consistency with with the
way that the names go and are um going through
the actual city. And then you have a lack of
house numbers on some streets that doesn't seem to be
important to everyone um in every location. And it can
take a London Cabby two to four years of training
to master the twenty five thousand streets that dart out
(09:51):
in the six mile radius from trying cross area all
the knowledge that's right um. This training is a culmination
and of what they will finally sit down and be
tested on called as you say, the Knowledge, which I
love because it just sounds like so mysterious and wonderful,
like you're about to go through a portal um. But yeah,
(10:13):
the Knowledge is basically a series of sit down test
with an examiner who tells the cabby where she or
he wants to go, and then the cabby has to
tell the examiner the exact turn by turn route that
here she will take, including the side of the street
that the journey begins on. He reminds me a lot
of Mark Clain's Life on the Mississippi, which I remember
(10:33):
reading as a child and being dreadfully bored by it
because it's a lot of Mark Clain talking about being
on on the Mississippi and and about how one navigates
the Mississippi. But it's but it was really similar in
that you had these, uh, these guys that had to
just memorize, just had to commit to memory all of
these details of the river and about its depth in
(10:54):
which and how navigable different portions of the river we're
going to be at a given time, right, And that's
actually what all of us are doing all the time.
But Lendon cab drivers in particular are really paying attention
to Yes, they're dealing with a very complex street system.
Like you said, numbers not not aren't necessarily where they
need to be. You're you're dealing with the with the
various flow and flux of traffic. And as a result,
(11:17):
their hippocampus, which is located in the brains temporal lobe
and is responsible for uh navigating, starts to get bigger
and bigger. And the more years that they're on the job,
the bigger the hippocampus. Alright, so most people who have
a job that involves sitting and might think, well, your
your rear end might grow over time. The rear end
of the hippocampus grows over time, swells with this knowledge
(11:39):
if you will. Yes, it does. But when you retire,
it shrinks back down to normal. That's the thing. Um So.
And also this is interesting too when they found when
they actually did a couple of more follow up tests
because the hippocampus. It was a two thousand study and
in two thousand and eight they did a follow up
and they found that the hippocampus was really only activated
(11:59):
at the beginning of a trip, and then other parts
of the brain started to take over. And there have
been there have been some studies to that have suggested
that there's a trade off in cognitive talents that as
a taxi driver becomes more and more equipped to navigate
this complex road system, there their their other modes of
memory kind of kind of dim just a little bit, really,
(12:20):
so the backswells, the front portion shrinks a little Okay, well,
there you go. UM. I wanted to also talk about
neurons and how they are influencing the way that we
actually are able to follow directions. According to Barbara Trusky
in her article Distortions in Memory for maps, UM, we
(12:42):
have neurons in our brains that are biased towards horizontal
and vertical arrangements, which I think is trippy in and
of itself. In fact, the neurons greatly outnumber the neurons
that are dedicated to diagonal arrangement. But when you start
to think about our planet, which is biased on this
X Y access, it begins to make sense because we
(13:02):
have really strong verticals in the trees that we see right,
and then the ground provides a flat horizon, and even
when you look out, you see the horizon. So it
makes sense that we evolve to have more neurons that
would appreciate this X y axis. So yeah, so we're
more in line with the rook on a on a chessboard,
just up and down, yes, and think right and think
(13:27):
about those trees. This sort of proto landmarks for for
all animals really, And then I was reminded of that
sleight of hand trick that we discussed when we talked
about the science of magicians, and um, the fact that
not just magicians use this trick, but pickpocketers also will
take advantage of the fact that we have this x
(13:49):
y axis, and they do this by moving their hands
uh in an arc rather than horizontally. And the reason
for that is that we have cicades and these are
the fast just movements in the human body, and it
occurs in our eyes right, and they automatically move their
gaze to the endpoint um of what they think is
(14:10):
going to happen. So if you were to move your
hand horizontally, then you could track it really well. But pipocketers, uh, magicians, illusionists,
they all do this sort of arc because it's very
hard to track it accurately and you're distracted. It also
reminds me of zigzagging, like the whole deal and alligators
chasing you, Right, what do you do? Run bag? That's right?
(14:31):
Mess with their ability to determine when something is actually
moving sideways. And if you think that that's not enough
of a case to say that we prefer this sort
of x Y access, think about the London Tube map. Yes,
back to London, the the fabulous London Tube Map. Where
it's really and I'm fairly new to all of this, um.
(14:53):
I mean I've been to London, you know, I've certainly
used that tube map to get around before, but but
I really never stopped to realize how how important it
was and how groundbreaking that map design was. And certainly
you see its influence everywhere. You see various versions of it.
You see other public transportation systems that mimic that style.
It's it's become sort of something of a modern art motif. Yes,
(15:15):
it's definitely iconic. Um And the reason why it works
so well is that it plays again to the x
Y access. Harry Beck is the person who designed this
map in nineteen thirty three, or rather he did it
a couple of years before that, but they didn't adopt
until ninety three. And what he did is he took
all the squirrely lines that played a spaghetti and tried
to make sense of it by only delineating all the
(15:38):
stations and that connecting stations in forty five degree angles.
So the effect, while being really modern to the eye,
I think um is that it really cleaned up that
space and it made it much more logical for people
to understand the system, and it really becomes one's understanding
of the city. That's what what really fascinates me. I mean,
(15:58):
you tend to sort of the fine your space based
on the roads and paths you have to travel. Like, uh,
here in Atlanta, we live in a pretty pretty uh
non complex city as far as public transportation goes. We
got north and southeast and west, We've got we've got
eight and seventy five going up the center, We've got
twenty going through in the middle. So it's it's it's
(16:19):
pretty it's pretty simple. And then you have the Highway
to eighty five looping, yeah, looping around and trapping everybody
inside because that's our plan is that you just roar
enough traffic through there and the zombies can't get in
or out, depending on what the scenario is. But but
but it's difficult to not think about one surroundings in
those terms, like thinking about where are you in terms
of the perimeter. I mean, I'm here in Atlanta. People
(16:41):
tend to talk about things being O t P outside
the perimeter, like you do not want to go O
t P even if you have a friend that lives
out there. God bless them, but they're O t P
and they just invited you to dinner. You might have
to make up an excuse that kind of thing. Uh.
And then inside the perimeter is is the preferred distance
of travel? Um? And then you think of it in
those those different sections. That's right. The mental map does
(17:03):
actually map to the system that is in place. And
apparently this London tube map was so important to so
many people that when they made changes to it, there
was a big oh, like whoa, what are you doing?
You've changed our reality. Basically, you've changed the thing that
forms the world that we live in. Even though this
map is inaccurate, right because it's not nothing that the
(17:24):
forty five degree angle that has picked it in, it
was still like, that's how I see London, at least
for some people. Other people sort of said this is fine,
it's more inaccurate, but you know, that's that's what happens
when something becomes iconic. I suppose, Well, I think that's
what's ultimately at heart when when people have this reaction
to Pluto losing its planet status, you know, like ultimately
(17:45):
nobody really cares about Pluto. Really, it's it's it's out there,
it's not really really has a stake in Pluto's a
long ways off and and pretty insignificant compared to the
other planets. But it was part of that map that
we grew up seeing. It was in that app was
how we defined our place in the Solar System and
in the the universe at large. And suddenly that changed
(18:05):
and people are like, whoa, that changes everything in a
small and perhaps in significant way to to normal life
and the way you live your daily life. But he's
still shifted your universe. Yeah. And it's funny because even
though we know life is uh something that is constantly
changing that we're just transience here, really, all of us,
we still can't help but try to nail things down
(18:28):
and say this is not going to change. So we're
gonna map it. Yeah, We're gonna look up at the
night sky and say that is belongs to us. And
you know, anytime sort of those things are tinkered with,
it reminds us of this transient quality of life. Yeah,
anyone who has a GPS device that's not attached to
their phone knows this steel because like like with me,
I know that there is a way to take it
and hook it up to a computer and probably pay
(18:50):
some stupid sum of money to get the maps updated.
But that's a lot of trouble and money I don't
want to spend, so I end up with old maps.
So you know, it'll occasionally send us in a direction
that towards the street that is no longer there, or
will ignore a street that it doesn't know exists yet
and there, but there's there is something troubling about it.
You're like, why are the roads changing? Why is the
(19:11):
world changing around me? The map should have kept it
as it is. Yeah, that happened to me recently. And
the road just dead ended and it was supposed to
go for like another twenty miles. And nothing makes you
feel more helpless than relying on, you know, a clunky GPS.
Uh to feel like a rube in the middle of
nowhere and appreciate maps, at least the written ones. So um,
(19:34):
I did want to bring this up about Americans and
their apparent ability to excel at directions. Okay, geographer hom
Debuge has made the claim that we Americans and he's Dutch, correct,
he's German, we have a better sense of direction than
our European counterparts that live in these sort of spaghetti
(19:57):
streeted cities, be because we have exercise that part of
our brain, because we are so used to this grid
like system in the United States, where most major cities
are very logical and planned out on this x y acxis.
I think you can make a case for that, certainly
in something like when you go to a city like Savannah, Georgia.
(20:18):
You know where they have to like it's pretty laid
out on a grid, or the main part of the
city is anyway, and you have here's a street, and
here's a street coming from the other direction, here's a park.
Here is I mean, it's just it's like a grid
where it's like a it's like a board for a
card game. Yeah, And even though they have the parks,
they have successive parks, and so there's a pattern of that,
(20:39):
and so you know that you're going to have to
go around these parks and x y Z configuration. So yeah,
there you go. But I think it's surprising to people
because when you think about Americans and you think about maps, um,
and our ability to actually find other countries on the map,
it's pretty dismal. Well, you know what we've talked before
about how much our brain likes to find patterns and
(21:00):
recognized patterns with these pattern recognition engines. So there's something
comfortably comforting about knowing that, all right, well in another street, UM,
I know, what about what's gonna happen. There's gonna be
a park up there, or another couple of streets, there's
gonna be this or that. You know, it's a you
want this regularity in your world around you. Yeah, and um,
for all the people out there when you go on
(21:21):
vacation and you're the map person, this is for you. UM.
I don't know if you guys like to do this,
but I love to study the map beforehand so that
I do start to create some sort of reality of
this new city for myself and my brain and orient
myself as quickly as possible. I tend to wait more
towards the last minute to do that, but I do
find something. There's something satisfying about it, Like when you're
(21:41):
actually on the like flying into this city and the
so the city in a sense is about to become
real to you. Then I engage with the map and
I started looking at it, and I see where I'm
going to be, what's around it, what where I can eat,
in the general vicinity and in the place becomes a
little more real before I get there. Uh, And I'm
already imagining that, which we'll talk about in a moment.
(22:03):
We're gonna take a break. When we get back, we
are going to talk about this idea of maps from
our imagination that become completely real to us. All right,
we're back, and we're going to talk about maps as
they relate to storytelling in the creation of unreal places
(22:25):
in memory and memory. We've talked before about the memory palace,
of course, and this is the method where you use
our fabulous gift for spatial processing and use that to
create an imagined place full of the things that you
need to memorize. Yeah, and think about it this way too.
When you go into a room and you perceive a room,
(22:47):
you're not just getting an image of your room. What
that you know, what you're perceiving is actually your mind
creating those dimensions of a room for you. So that's
very important in terms of how we remember things and
how we map at our worlds. Yeah, like the anytime
you check out a new restaurant, restaurant, right, your your
brain has to develop that map to the bathroom. And
(23:08):
then once you have that data, it's it's it's important,
it's it's valuable, and you share it with other people.
The other person the table goes to get up there,
like where's that You know where the bathroom is? And like, yeah,
let me share that mental map with you. Yeah, you're like, okay,
see that fabulous mustachioed man over there, take a right,
and so on to forth. See how it becomes a
very much a part of what sticks out to your
(23:29):
in your memory. And this is one of the uh
bedrocks of this memory palace idea of how you can
create a whole world in your mind and remember a
bunch of random things by tagging them to these surreal
objects of this story that you tell yourself. I also
can't help but be reminded of of the mandala, which
(23:51):
comes from the Sanskrit for circle. And this is a
motif you see again and again especially in the Tobetan Buddhism,
where it is the essentially one uses this image to
help build this virtual place in one's mind. You have
a map on on paper or on canvas or in sand,
and you use that to form this spiritually significant map
(24:13):
in your mind and it's and then that's used for uh,
you know, for meditation. So what I think is interesting
about this is that you're basically talking about the intersection
between reality and imagination. And we've seen this used not
necessarily the mandala per se, but the idea of this
transposing um, your imagination onto reality and fiction. Yes, um,
(24:38):
And I was thinking about token and how important that
is as a narrative device to create this world for
the readers that you can begin to reference because you're
taking a bird's eye view of this world that Token
has created. Yes, definitely, the maps of Middle Earth in
The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, those were
those are really big for me early on before where
(25:00):
I was able to read those books because my my
dad had him in these like tattered paperbacks. I remember,
like in third grade probably even younger, getting those out
and I would look at the maps and the maps
amazed me, you know, because you're you're pouring over this
data and you're looking at things like Mirkwood and uh,
you're looking at um at you know, the the place
where the Hobbits live. You're looking at where the the
(25:21):
the evil creatures live and more door and you're you're
forming this, uh, this world view. And then as you
you get older and you deal with these maps too,
you're trying to figure out, well, what what what is
this model? After it's what is this representing the real world,
either geographically or politically? Because you're building a players of
this world, right, Yeah, so you're you're looking like, all right,
how do I how do I interpret this map in
(25:41):
terms of of the actual earth? How do I interpret
it in terms of the world as as the author
was seeing it? Uh in those days. Uh, it's it's
really fascinating and it's become a hallmark, certainly of any
kind of world creating fantasy. Be it. Um. The works
of St. George are Martin is really big right now.
(26:02):
Game of Thrones, Uh, the TV series based on his work,
actually starts off with a map. It's like a sweeping
computer animated map of the world in which the show
takes place. UM. Other big examples of that are Scott
Baker's Um Second Apocalypse books. He has a really awesome
map with the three c's in there, so you're you're
(26:24):
pouring over that and you're trying to figure out, all right,
what is this this portion of the map. This is
kind of his Middle East, I guess, and this is
this is kind of his Baltic region. And then and
then this is where he's put the the the iconic
evil portion of the of the of the planet. UM.
It's it's it's fascinating to think of all that that stuff.
And also it's also interesting to think of the authors
(26:45):
who create a map but don't actually share that with
the readers. UM. Because certainly, if you're if you're creating,
you're engaging in world creation. You're you're creating a new planet,
new cultures, new geography. All of the stuff needs to
come together in a form that the author understands in
order to write about it. So, like a lot of
(27:05):
the stuff that that later came out from Tolkien, it's
stuff that he never intended for a wider audience to view.
He wrote that for himself so that he could create
these books. So a map for yourself so that you
the writer, could then write the story. I think it's fascinating. Yeah.
One of my favorite authors is a guy named Brian McNaughton,
and he wrote a book called Throne of Bones, which
all takes place in the same dark fantasy setting. And
(27:30):
I am told that he and I understand from from
what I've read about him, he did have a map
of this world that he'd created, but it's it's no
one's there. It's never been published. As far as I know,
no one outside of a small number of people have
ever seen it. Because his characters were not the kind
of people who engaged in a sweeping understanding of their
own world, whereas ay Gandalf, Lord of the Rings, like,
(27:51):
he's the kind of guy who would watch whatever Middle
Earth's version of BBC News was, you know, he he'd
be the one who tune anim I wonder the weather's
gonna be tomorrow, I wonder what's going on in uh
up there in Hobbit Country. You know, he would even
have that wider understanding, whereas the characters in um in
Brian McNaughton's book, they were more concerned with their day
to day and maybe figuring out what they were going
to eat in the next hour, or whatever their own
(28:13):
petty sufferings happened to be. The reader didn't need the
bird's eye in that sense. Um. I was thinking about
how places so incredibly important in fiction in our own
lives obviously, um. And then I was thinking about as
a guy named often Tappen right, and he is someone
who took his childhood creation of a country called Islandia
(28:35):
into adulthood with him. So I don't when you were younger,
did you ever create a sort of fantasy world or yes, um,
all the time, Because I m pretty early on I
got into Dungeons and Dragons, which the various supplements you
would get into dungeons for Dungeons and Dragons would come
with maps, which we're all pretty fascinating. I remember one
supplement in particular had had treasure maps. Yeah, that you
(28:58):
could do, and so I would. I wouldn't inevitably end
up plotting out my own little scenarios in a little world.
So I would draw out all these maps, and then
later when I got into actually writing and attempting to
write fiction, I would also envision these fantastic worlds and
try and map them out. On paper and also in
my own head and I guess i've I'm still doing that. Well.
(29:19):
My brother and I also did this, and we came
up with Marijuana Island. We did not know what marijuana meant.
But Cranga was this this ape who uh ruled this island. Well,
that sounds like that would be a great bit of
slang for it, you know, yeah, like going to Marijuana
(29:40):
Island to get some cronja. Yeah yeah. Um. But you know,
we never sort of took this world with us into adulthood.
But this guy that I talked about, Austin Tapp and
right his Islandia he took from his boyhood and he
spent twenty years off and on developing this world, um
and talking about it. It's really exhau postively, like the geography,
(30:01):
the people, the language he made up a language for them, um,
the politics, the laws and um. This he said was
a small kingdom at the southern tip of the Korean subcontinent.
And he really put a ton of thought into this.
He created maps for it. And at the time of
his death at forty eight, he was in a car
(30:23):
accident and unfortunately, um he had twenty three hundred long
hand pages dedicated to this world that he made up,
this country actually, and his wife and then later his
daughter paired it down to one thousand pages and published
it in ninety two. It was a sensation because it
really captured people's imaginations. I mean, here's someone who made
(30:46):
such an authentic world for others to enjoy. He did
not intend that, of course, it was his own personal obsession.
But I do think it's fascinating that he was able
to weave together uh this this uh country to the
point where people just wanted to go there. And and
he even said on his own travels across the world,
he would he would look at something and his family
(31:08):
said that he would look out at the mountains and say, oh,
that reminds me of Islandia. That's how real it was
in his brain. Well, and then it makes you wonder too.
We were talking about how the world around us forms
a map, but in the maps that we have formed
that world for us. So to what extent is this
created world of his more real than the real world
(31:29):
that he inhabits. You know, the more he knew, he
knew it better than the actual real world. I think
he did. I mean, think about this. It started in
his childhood, let's say, around ten years old up until
he was forty eight years old, dominated the most of
his life. He reminds me a little bit of this
author by the name of M. A. R. Barker, and
(31:51):
he was a professor of Urdu and South Asian studies.
Really really brilliant man, you know, just steeped in the
lore and history and geography of of Asia. And he
created in his spare time. His full time professor most
of his career, but in his spare time he created
a fantasy setting called uh Teco Mel and that's t
(32:12):
e Ku in the l is a really cool website
that has all the stuff on it, and he ended
up writing a few different sort of pulpy but very
creative fantasy novels set there, and also one of the
earliest like a contemporary of Dungeons and Dragons role playing game.
Uh And it's just like really really rich setting, kind
of like imagine Lord of the Rings, except instead of
(32:33):
based upon Western and Norse models of mythology, based entirely
upon Uh Eastern motifs and models. And that's basically the
world that M. A. R. Barker created. He sadly died
I think last year, but but certainly created one of
those worlds where you feel like this world was more
real for him, Um, maybe by by only a certain margin,
(32:55):
but still it almost as real as the real world
that he can earned himself with. And I think it's
interesting how we can't help but create this sort of map,
whether or not we're doing it. No, no, that we're
doing it, you know what I'm saying, Whether or not
we know that we're sitting down like Austin Tapp and
right and creating this whole mythology, or just in our
heads when we're randomly thinking about our lives, you know
(33:18):
how much of that is this sort of map construct
um And we will talk more about maps um, the
history of maps, and a bit more about the science
of it in a couple of their podcasts, but we
wanted to touch on this um idea of maps as storytelling,
So I'm gonna leave you with a little quote from
map head from Ken Jennings. He says, and he, of
(33:40):
course is someone who loves maps, is a map head
Um pieces maps are just too convenient and too tempting
a way to understand place. There's a tension in them.
Almost every map will show us two kinds of places,
places where we've been in places where we've never been. Been.
Nearby in the far away exists together in the same frame,
(34:01):
our world, undeniably connected to the new and unexpected. We
can understand at a glance our place in new universe,
our potential to go and see new things, and the
way to get back home afterward. Very nice. All right, Well,
let's call the robot over here and we'll read a
quick listener mail. All right, this one comes to us
from Scott, who's writing about our bats episodes. He s,
(34:23):
it's high guys. I love the podcast. I listen while
I'm at work all alone on the second shift, and
it informs me as well as entertains. I love the
show about bats. The first thing I thought of about
when I go mountain biking at night in the woods,
bats will swoop down and fly along in front of us,
staying in the beam of our head helmet lights. Sometimes
they are twenty feet away, and sometimes they are close
(34:44):
enough to see the hairs on their body and hear
their leathery wings flapping. It doesn't happen all the time,
but a half dozen times a year is thrilling. Second,
when we were kids, we would throw pebbles up in
the air at dusk and watch the bats come zipping
in to intercept the pebbles, probably thinking it was a
juice bug meal. I know it sounds cruel now, but
we were kids and we and we didn't hurt the bats.
(35:04):
We didn't throw anything at them. Last I live in
an old house and once every few years we'll have
a bat visitor, usually in early summer, flapping around the house.
My surefire way to safely remove them is to hold
up a sheet or blanket and slowly walk them into
a corner, and then gently lower the blanket before pick
it up and ever so gently bring it outside and unfurled.
I haven't lost a bat yet this way. Thanks again,
(35:27):
Scott all right catcher. Yeah, so, if if you guys
have anything you would like to share, certainly about bats
and catching bats safely in your household that kind of thing,
or about maps. What's your relationship with maps? Do you
have memories of like, like I feel a lot of
us do, of looking at these maps as a kid,
before you really had any understanding of the world, trying
(35:48):
to piece it together from that that map on the wall,
looking at far away places, wondering what it's like, or
certainly the old maps. I remember we had one of
these old world maps in the wall when I was
a kid, where all the all the all the continents
are kind of malformed and kind of weird, and there
may have been a dragon or two. Uh will therapy
dragons right? Um? Let us know what you think about
all that, And if you're into fantasy, what do you
(36:09):
think about about the fantasy worlds that your favorite authors create?
In that form, what are some of your favorite maps
of unreal places? We'd love to hear about it. You
can find us on Tumblr and Facebook. On both of
those we are stuff to Blow your Mind, and you
can also find us on Twitter, where our handle is
blow the Mind and you can always drop us a
(36:29):
line at blow the Mind at discovery dot com for
more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it
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