Mental Mapping (Part 1)
Posted by halcyon on Mar 26, 2008 at 9:29 pm in Daily SpaceConsider the human face. Most faces contain the same basic features. Two eyes, a nose, a mouth, etc. When describing your face, you use the shortcut of assuming all those features and only call attention to the ones that differentiate you. In the same way, your mind can be described by the things that you think about regularly.
I call this “Mental Mapping.”*
Picture your mind as a planetoid. Your consciousness is like the view through a telescope from that planetoid. You observe your thoughts, passing by your consciousness, as stellar objects. Some pass by frequently, on a regular orbit, like moons. Others are irregular, their orbits eccentric, like comets. Some you only “see” if you direct your consciousness there; some are only visible at certain times of day or during certain seasons. And so on.
Most moon-thoughts are as common as noses. They are not really worth commenting on, or considering as a defining characteristic. For example, I regularly think “I don’t want to go to work tomorrow.” That’s a classic moon-thought.
What you are searching for, when Mental Mapping, is ideas or thoughts that are relatively unique or at least very unusual, and that occur to you with some regularity. Captain Subspace regularly finds herself thinking about “eating grapes the size of a watermelons.” That’s notable.
Collect these orbital eccentric thoughts on a list; try to estimate their frequency. Now you have a mental map, a little rough perhaps, but a fair likeness of your mind.
More later.
Always here to help,
Halcyon
Psych Officer
GalacticMu
*For several years, I credited Nicholson Baker with this concept; I swore that I had read it in “The Size of Thoughts.” Having re-read the source (the essay in particular was called “Changes of Mind”), it turns out that my theory was spored from the dingy and ill-kempt laboratory of my own mind, and had merely taken root in the fertile agar Mr. Baker had so kindly supplied. I highly recommend you read his essay; you can find it at any decent library.
I find this fascinating, but I’m fairly certain I’ve heard it before. Was it perhaps mentioned on a prior blogging venture?
Anyway. I think it’s really interesting to consider the mappability of thoughts like physical objects but it poses some really big questions. As with physical objects there are probably many classes of mental patterns. Identifying them could get way more complicated than this. But it seems like that’s the hardest part. Connecting physics behaviors with mental processes, that is. When that’s understood, boiling it down to a sensical visual representation sounds relatively simple. Neat idea.
It was mentioned on my last blog, but I gave it a very superficial treatment, and it wasn’t even my idea, it was Halcyon’s. I’ve been ragging him to write a better explanation for some time.
A:
Possibly on the (sadly defunct) bean mines? We can’t be sure. I never wrote about it before, though, so there.
B:
Good point. Classification is a whole wing of this “science.” The space metaphor doesn’t hold up to close scrutiny, and there are far more things in the galaxy than moons and comets. But it helps you visualize; that was my goal anyway.This is one of those things that’s as complicated as you let it be.
Go nuts.
I like to think of my mind as my mouth and my consciousness as a nice crunchy tortilla chip on the end of my arm in my hand. My thoughts/views of the world are a really big fucking bowl of 7-layer bean dip made with 3 kinds o’ beans, tomatoes, onion, sliced black olives and then topped … oh man, with guacamole, sour cream and salsa drowning the top o’ that sum’bitch.
Now, that hungry mutha of a mouth is always searchin, jabbin’ that white corn tortilla (the genuine rectangular, strip kind, no wussy round shit here) all up in that dip, searchin’, diggin’, trying to scoop up something tasty and interesting. After all these years it’s started to be too familiar and taste the same. But I keep diggin’ deeper, hoping to snag a wonderous morsel of somethin’ new.
I’ll find it … just-can’t-sleep … must-keep-scooping … must-dig-deeper … need-more-chips …
(note: my subconscience is a frosty Heineken in my left hand. The stuff dreams are made of. Ego? Hell, lost that when I started balding at 21.)
It doesn’t seem to me to be possible to accurately suss out your own mental map. collecting passing thoughts on a list will give them an existence outside of the orbital pathways that they used to inhabit. once you begin to actively and consciously catalog the notable passing thoughts, you will begin to regularly think of your catalog and thereby think of your notable thoughts already listed. this will skew the data on how often your notables occur. it will be impossible to tell whether a thought has appeared as a result of it’s normal orbit, or whether it was pulled in early through the wormhole that is the list that you now carry in you back pocket.
the only way to create a mental map, is to do it without knowing that it happens. perhaps a psychic could be employed to monitor you for a period of time.
I think our psych officer might be a closet Buddhist.
This model of mind mapping is one of the meditation methods for exploring what Buddhists believe are the fallacies of differentiating between self and not-self. This is the first step- becoming aware of individual attributes that we recognize as setting our selves apart from others. They take it a lot further though by going on to point out that the self noticing these things can’t logically exist without throwing yourself into an infinite regress of trying to figure out who’s noticing the noticer… er or something.
I could never manage to stay focused long enough to accomplish anything remotely meaningful. I always wound up thinking “My self is real and it wants a Coke”.
Aargh: I disagree completely. Things you express to other people aren’t the things that make up a unique mind. It takes time, and there are flaws (awareness of self-observation obviously skews it). But the longer you do it and the more honest you are (”How often do I really wish I had a unicorn horn?”) the better it works. Hopefully Halcyon will get around to expanding on this soon, because these next stages are really interesting to me.
Halcyon is a very zen person. When he’s not throwing tantrums over there not being coffee or cheese for his immediate consumption, he’s very zen.
I think Aargh’s saying that once you notice some errant interesting thought and label it as being unique to you, the more likely it is that you will think it again- then you wind up integrating that thought into the way you think of yourself.
I don’t think he’s saying it has anything to do with what you express to others, just that the act of being aware of those thoughts makes them occur more often.
Once you think about that unicorn horn the next time you consciously “mind map” you’re probably going to think about the unicorn again… and again, until you think of yourself as being this neat person who really does want a horn.
If you had a psychic observer, or machine to record your thoughts then the likely hood that you’d get some real results over time would be greater. That was my take anyway.
i never said anything about expressing to others. i spoke only of awareness of one’s self.
To aargh’s point, this theory has Heisenberg problems up the wazoo. Obviously, the answer is to employ a psychic robot. Part 2 will be coming soon, so stay tuned.
psychic robots are always the answer!