Cognitive Cartography

Mental map-making and technology

Before the advent of GPS, everyone flipped through road atlases and A-Z maps, plotting their route from A to B. Now digital maps work out the journey, and it is a route from you to B. The map radiates outward from that central pin that is you, and your destination simply approaches. Even knowing exactly where you are or the whereabouts of what you seek is unnecessary. All you have to do is follow instructions, and trust the tech.

Down to earth

When in Venice last year, I saw thousands of stakes driven into the mud, marking out the safe channels along which boats can pass (there are 20,000 of these ‘bricole’ in the Venetian lagoon). Together with the lighthouse at Murano, the street names and one-way signs on canals, they are designed to raise awareness of the environment. Here there is a mudbank, here some rocks, here a safe pathway. Sat Navs do the opposite, making us look at a screen rather than our surroundings, removing us from the concrete reality of the tarmac beneath our feet, and onto a virtual plane.

This dissociation between navigation and solid ground began long before Sat Navs were normalised, with the development of rapid transport systems. Whether jumping on a plane or taking the metro, you pop up somewhere without a sense of the route taken. When travelling on the London Underground, you follow a map of coloured lines that is not to scale and, unless the river is in sight, it’s not easy to know where you are in relation to the geography of the area. City dwellers move between a few microlocations — home, work, pubs, gym, park — without having a clear mental map of how they connect.

This tendency has not escaped the interest of artists and thinkers over the years. In his book and columns on Psychogeography, author Will Self determinedly walks around London, and even as far as Heathrow, to reflect on the relationship between psyche and place. Travelling on foot requires you to find your own path, and gives the fullest possible experience of the land — from watercourses to tiny roadside flowers.

A time and a place

So what I’ve been wondering is this: if you don’t have time to be a psychogeographer, is there a problem with being steered by Sat Nav?

It turns out that being able to visualise locations and distances is surprisingly fundamental to our psychology. We have neurons known as ‘grid cells’ whose firing patterns create a sort of mental map telling us how one location relates to another — a sense of place. What is interesting about these cells is that they are also associated with the formation of memories.

When we recall things, we seem to travel around inside our brain, positioning events in time rather than space.

A fifth of people visualise time. The year might have a certain shape — like an oval — that they travel around, or time itself might seem like a pathway stretching ahead. Consider the expressions we use to describe it — looking forward to something, looking ahead or looking back, as though standing on a path. We use space, which we understand, to make sense of the abstract concept of time.

Like stones from old castle walls being carried off and used to build new houses, we employ memories to construct visions of the future, so if our memory-making is weakened, so too is our ability to plan. Who would have thought cognitive mapping was so important?

Sat Navs for life

The way in which Sat Navs are taking route-planning out of our hands reflects the wider narrative of the smartworld, one of convenience at the price of control. It’s also a metaphor for what an increasingly personalised internet does for us, building itself up around our needs, so we are always at the centre of the map.

We are already learning to depend on Google, and on the upcoming generation of virtual assistants which will build on the limited intuition of Siri and Alexa to offer even more useful and intimate suggestions for our lives. They will help us make better choices, but I hope we’ll still defy them now and then and stubbornly go our own way, even if it means getting a little lost.

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