Cartocacoethes: Map Mania!

week or two ago. Everyone updated their iOS and suddenly Google Maps were no more on the phone. It was Apple Maps instead, and there were some There was some some ensuing confusion. Bridges melting melting bridges. Uh. The system that we were used to was no longer in play, and suddenly we were unable to simply drive a mile from our house to to a location that we've been to before. Nobody showed up at work. They didn't know how to get here anymore because the maps weren't working.

I think that all this points to the fact that maps are totally underrated and people don't realize how important they are and actually how difficult it is to get a good system in place. And I mean, speaking of systems, remember what it was like before all this. I mean by the time I was actively driving two places I've never been to before, I think I had what was the map Quest at my disposal, which even map Quest

was really confusing. Yeah, you had your print out of map Quest and then the Sun's direction and you're on your own. Yeah, and and and I and I'd still get lost. And then we eventually had you know, Google Maps with an improvement as far as I'm consappie, as far as most people were concerned. And then then came the more affordable GPS devices and we were able to navigate more without thinking about it. Well and uh, we have seen actually instances where people absolutely did not even

think about it. And um, this was made fun of in the TV episode The Office, But Michael Scott, Yeah, he drives into the lake because it's not on the map. On the map, the GPS says that you know, the road keeps going, and it's a joke, but I think this has actually happened to some people. It was amazing when I when I was looking at into our history with maps and and sort of comparing our modern understanding of maps and use of these highly technological maps, and

comparing that two models of the past. I found these photo auto guides from around nineteen o five really interesting. Basically, if if I was to go back in time to nineteen o five and then I had access to a car and we're touring the country, and I was touring the country and I was like, WHOA, my GPS doesn't work. I brought it back. I bothered to bring it back with me, but it has no satellites to playoff off, so it's just setting there without a signal. What should

I do? What? What would it be like then? If I were to try and replicate the GPS driving experience using early twentieth century technology, or not even technology, but just printing abilities and photography abilities, you would end up with the photo auto guide, which was basically a detailed set of directions for it to drive from one place to another that would include photographs of intersections, detailed instructions

about how to navigate in order by turn. Yeah, so kind of a combo an early version of both the map quest print out of directions and a detailed GPS p o V of where you are and where you're going, but also travel guide of sorts do right because they're talking about landmarks and about the different things that you

will encounter on the way. So as humans, we need maps, and that's basically what we're talking about in this this episode of stuff to blow your mind about our relationship with maps from its early goings and on into the future and just how tired we are to them. We may not think about them all the time, you know, you may not think about the map until you're having to navigate somewhere you haven't been to before, or you don't really remember the instructions are you're having to share

these instructions, these directions with someone else. But the map is always there in the mind like it's it's really part of our neural architecture at at a very deep and important level. But at one point you could argue that it wasn't there right because we didn't have even though you know, humans have been nomadic for some time, uh, we didn't necessarily have a sense of place beyond the say of like I don't know two mile radius that

you might forage in. So there's some arguments about whether or not there have been true maps made at those times and or whether or not those were just sort of moral like you know, turn right at the boulder, um, and when we started to make maps in earnest as humans. Yeah,

now's this interesting. You said place. It's really important to think about place, and certainly the difference between place and space is reading in this book To Take Place Toward Theory and Ritual by Jonathan Z. Smith, which is one of my old college religious studies books, but like really deep stuff about like the origins of ritual. But there's a part where they talk about the use of maps and he he quotes UM geographer Yi Futuin who says,

this space is more abstract than place. What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value. If we think of space as that which allows movement, then place is pause. Each pause in movement makes it possible for location to be transformed into place. So this is sense of in a sense, it's like bringing order out of chaos. You're

bringing place out of space. Well, I like this idea of movement too, because I think of that in those terms of like spaces being a frontier something you're going to explore and Emmanuel can't. Also, he argued that geography was the study of knowledge in a location, while history is the study of knowledge and time. Okay, So it comes down to, you know, it's it's core to our

perception of reality in the world around us. This this map of where we are in space, of this place that we inhabit that is full of things that have value and meaning. Well, and that's what I think is so intriguing about maps is that it tries to do double duty. It tries to take space, place, and time and combine it all on on one surface, right right, one sort of understanding. Um, it is thought that the

oldest known maps are preserved. Um, well, not that they're preserved, but that they actually go back to and then they are preserved on Babylonian clay tablets from that time and an ancient Greece, where photography was considerably advanced. The concept of a spherical earth was well known among Greek philosophers by the time of Aristotle. So we're talking about three

and fifty BC. So this idea that you're going to map that space has been around and we know that humans have tried to Harn said, Um, it's certainly one of those things that if someone says that what was the first map, there's no way of knowing, because that's something that really vanishes into the murk of history. It's probably some you know, some dude with a stick and the dust or something. You know, it's it's not something that's going to survive. And then even if it is

on paper, that it's not going to survive. And then a lot of the things we end up keeping are that we may think, we may interpret them as maps, it's not necessarily the case. In our previous podcast, we talked about allegorical maps, maps of things that are not real, and you really get into a weird area with old maps where you have to judge, all right, to what extent is this a map of anything in physical reality?

To what extent is this, say, a map of this more cosmological in its sense, doesn't have to do with religious matters, is it is it have to do it with ritual or is it just merely some sort of illustrative art. Well, into what extent is it our brains interpreting something that isn't a map, but looking at patterns, And we'll talk about is it depictogram, is a religious artifact. Is it just a landscape? Yeah, and describing our own

meaning to it. I did want to point out that Greek and Roman cartography reached a culmination um with Claudius Ptolemius, and this was an a d around and his world map depicted the old world from about sixty degrees north to thirty degrees latitude uh south, and his writing was called Guide to Geography, and it was really the authoritative reference uh to maps in world geography until the Renaissance.

So that's quite a bit of chunk of time there. Um. And then of course you can also fast forward to about eleven fifty four when an Arab geographer named Muhammad all the Reci produced his atlas and that actually was used quite a bit as well. Um. He incorporated the knowledge of Africa, Indian Ocean in the Far East gathered by Arab merchants. And this is something that we're going to see repeating over and over in history and matt making. Is this idea that maps really came about as a

sort of crowdsourcing. Everybody else's knowledge dumped into this one document to say, okay, this is what my experience was in this landscape, and you had to trust that you had people who actually were capable of of contributing to the dialogue and weren't just gonna be like what he said. I don't I'm just gonna go along with what this previous person said, because then you end up keeping not only uh, this previous cartographer's successes, but also his inaccuracies.

And we do see huge inaccuracies with maps even today. Um. But when you think about these trade routes um, you know, either by by foot or by horse or camel um, then you get to you know, well established points of reference and you can begin to make a mental mapping of the landscape. But this is one of those outrageous overstatements of the obvious, which is sometimes necessary in dealing with mind building content, because you have to actually step

back and think about something that you already knew. And that is that until very recently, we were not able to look down at the earth from above and see that is the shape of that island, that is the shape of that peninsula, that is the manner in which that river cuts across the continent. This is all that is all really new technology, really new information to have, and prior to that, you had to to to deal with it all based on observation, mathematics and slowly pieced

together this top side vision of the world. It was not possible. Yeah, it's true. Seventeen and eighteenth centuries really ushered in mathematics and technology. Clockmaking made it possible for travelers to determine their or longitude accurately, made it much more easier to make more accurate maps. Uh for instance, using degrees, minutes, and seconds. Meridians measure how far east or west a location is from the prime meridian, and parallels measure how far north or south of location is

from the equator. So if you didn't have all this information mapped out in the first place, it would be very difficult to even try to figure out that journey, let along how long it would take. But thankfully we had that sort of technology coming online in the form of magnetic compasses, telescopes in six tons, which are these instruments that really measure the angle between two visible objects. So but as you say, it wasn't really until we

could get above and confirmed. Yeah, and actually Joan Jehan Glenn said that when he first went up and he saw he was, you know, going he was traveling away from Earth and he looked down and he saw the state of Florida. He was really impressed because he thought, wow, our our map making is pretty accurate, because that is a really great representation of Florida. We're not so far off.

So yeah, we're talking about the ability to obtain aerial photography, which of course one has to have the technology to at least send up a balloon um or or climb something very high, I guess, in a very simple, limited, not really aerial form of photography, and of course you need took graph It helps, it helps a lot. And we actually had the technology of aerial photography back in eighty eight, but it's kind of hard to believe that it wasn't until after World War One that we began

to really use it. In earnest Um, it was used in reconnaissance missions. Yeah, so prior to that, we there was a huge chunks of the world that were really uncharted because we didn't have the aerial photography. And then of course you had satellites come online, and in the beginning of the US military, satellites were equipped with hi rese cameras for the purpose of aerial photography. But they had no way to develop the film or transmit the images. And we take that so for granted right now, right

you think about you know, Mars curiosity beaming back these images. Um. But what they would do is that these early satellites would drop film packets into the atmosphere and these were outfitted with parachutes. Just kind of cute to think about, um, and then they were retrieved mid air by military mill

terry transport planes. Yeah. So there, yeah, I mean, yeah, alright, we're gonna take a quick little break here, and when we come back, we're going to deal with a really ancient possibly a map, maybe not a map, you'll find out when we discuss it. And also are unstoppable need to see maps in the world around us? And there's actual term for this cartok kofies. All right, we're back, and before we get really hardcore back into maps, let's talk a little bit about apophenia. Okay, we've talked about

this before. It is the spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness of unrelated phenomena. Yeah. Yeah, the coin was too the coin. The term was coined by k. Conrad in nine and neurologist Peter Bruger studied apophenia and patients who had psychotic episodes, and he noticed that they were they were finding meaning and random aspects of their lives. And his research actually indicates that high levels of dopamine effect

propensity to find meaning. In other words, when you find a pattern, you get a little ding ding from dopamine, your reward system of your brain lights up a bit. So it would make sense that first that the human brain is hardwired to try to find pattern just really important in trying to survive, and too, that it would get rewarded for that. Yeah, So if you have enough dopamine in your system, if you listen to that Led Zeppelin song and you finally figure out what he was

talking about, man, that kind of thing. I mean, it's it's essentially a type one error in which we are you're seeing patterns that aren't necessarily there. It's part of everything from our ability to see a smiley face where there isn't one to see, you know, because we can look at anything but even the vaguest human face pattern

in it and we we sort of personify it. And so there's a little bit of it going on there, but been in it's more extreme cases, it's it plays into conspiracy theories, it plays into religious experience, paranormal experience. It's just drawing all these connections that aren't there where Suddenly you realize that whoa, this uh, this thing that happened with my car is something wrong with the engine and it's totally because of the government, and they're probably

watching me through my TV. Meanwhile, you fellow dopamine release for making that connection. Right, So it's not surprising that there would be a little something called cartok cothies, which is this uncontrollable urge to see maps where there aren't none. Yeah, which is which is pretty pretty pretty phenomenal. I mean, at one level we mentioned that, and I imagined a lot of you are thinking, wow, well, when when would one have the opportunity to make that mistake? Because you know,

I'm thinking about just my daily life. How many times do I encounter something that's not a map that I could interpret as a map, Like maybe if I found like a scrap of paper and I was wondering if it was a treasure map. You know, I just I don't see this being a big deal for the average person. No,

And I don't think it is. I think it's for people who are map minded and intend to gravitate towards Matt and particularly archaeologist and anthropologists were looking back in human history finding these relics, and in many cases it may just be some scratches on a on a wall on ancient cave site, and then trying to figure out what what was this ancient person whose mind I can barely comprehend, if at all comprehend what were they thinking

when they did this? Well, and it seems benign until you start to consider that if you, if you tend to see maps where there are not, then if someone is an archaeologist and they're looking at something, they could perhaps uh perceive something that is not there and in doing so, really warp our understanding of that culture, of that period of time and history. Um and I am

thinking about something called the Caltahyak Map. It was first brought to our attention in a nineteen article entitled Excavations at Katahayak. And this is by James Mollart, who at the time recognized it as a city plan. Yes, now, the original scratch, the original scratches, the original markings do kind of look like scratches on a wall, not not to discredit the work of an ancient people, but it hadn't really survived all that well, it's it's it's kind

of abstract. But the popularized version of this though, is a sketch that he did of it. It's the sketch that's the problems because the sketch really plays into his interpretation of it. So you see in his sketch what really looks like a laid out city like grid work of the of the city and then above it interrupting volcano right and um now he is saying that this, uh, this sort of neolithic map dates back to six BC and that it would have been one of the first maps.

Now that's really important because all of a sudden you have pinned in time when man started to really make maps. Um or you know, the surrounding areas are certainly just you know, you have one of the earliest examples of it. And that's that's amazing because we can actually put a date. You're right, that's more accurate that you can actually just put a date to it rather than trying to figure

out when we started to make maps. And then you know, you start to think, okay, well that's older than any writing system, you know, four thousand years ago and older than the oldest known alphabetical writing system. And this really begins to shape this story about humans. Um, the problem is, as you say, is that this was a picture that he made of a cave painting, and so it's it's just full of I guess you could say, his impression

of what he thought it was. Yeah, And like like I said earlier too, even if you're dealing with an actual map, uh from an ancient culture, you have to really navigate that gray area of to what extent is this just a person trying to figure out what their places in the surrounding space and what to what point is this a cosmological or religious work, To what extent is it are they just seeing things in the world

around them and making pictures of them. You get into that gray area of what a map is to an ancient people, well certainly to a non language people, even even more difficult to the fathom. Well, archaeologist Stephanie Mice is the person who actually illuminated this problem because she said, first of all, it's been taking out of context. Let's go and look at this cave painting in the context with other cave paintings and see what we find and

lo and behold. When she examined it, she said, m okay, Now in the context, I can see that this volcano it's spotted like a leopard skin, and if you look at it, it's not really a volcano. It's kind of two peaks. One peak is larger than the other. Now I'm going to compare it against this other cave painting in which they have stretched out tiger skins or excuse me, leopard skins, and you begin to see that this volcano.

It's really funny. When you first look at it, you do see a volcano, but when you see her explanation, you see that it is a stretched out it's totally yeah, it's not a volcano. And these other little scratches aren't, you know, necessarily the houses in that town or the huts. It reminds me of the episode of Rest of Development, where there's a cell phone picture that they think is showing w M D S. But Tobias just took a

picture of himself by accident in the bathtub. You know. Well, it's like Ken Jennings and map Head looks at Krishev's forehead and sees a country I think it's Thailand or something. Because he can't help it, and he's drawn the connections to in that book between the shapes of various states and the shapes of other countries. I mean, yeah, you can't help but think those connections in your mind. All right,

So sent for doing some time traveling. Let's go forward into the way way future, which is now um and think about what maps mean to us today, particularly with sort of technology that we have. Are you know, recapable of making a similar mistake and misinterpreting information and layering

information that we have now? Well, if a future society or alien culture comes back and looks at our maps now, they're probably either going to be a little confused by all the maps that we have of things that are not actually real, which we discussed in our previous podcasts, are gonna be like whoa, they have all these maps of Hell, like tons of them. And and then there are all these these other planets. I guess there's some place called Middle Earth. It doesn't match up with anything

on the planet. There's the Hobbits. We don't see anything in the record. So again, on one level, there's the just the complexity of of our map obsession that we have maps of things that aren't real. We have maps that that deserve a purpose other than navigating the physical world. But then our modern day maps are rather unique in that they certainly something on your anything you're gonna have in your smartphone, you're dealing with a real time map.

You're dealing in the map that not only charts the streets in your world, but also the traffic on those streets, how they're affected by weather, how they're affected by public transportation system. So you have a lot of real time data informing the shape of that map. Think about Google Earth.

It uses satellites, planes, hot air balloons. I did not know that, uh, camera equipped kites and cars to capture their images and then create this this virtual Earth for us, and then you it has the keyhole technology UM which actually before Google acquired it, I gave that program to my dad because he's an early adopter of technology and that was like the one thing I knew he didn't have. So that gave them the ability to swoop in and out UM, you know, with two D graphics and try

to make it even more accurate representation. UM. The goal of Google is to have a sentiment centimeter per pixel imagery for the entirety of the globe, So every square centimeter is its own pixel on the map. So now that's overlaid with real time data like traffic and weather

and also crowdsourcing photos. Right, you can overlay virtually anything on top of that, and you begin to wonder, is this a more greate picture of of humanity in the places that we live or is it still could there be a bias in this, because some people will say that that maps are biased in ways depending on the sort of information that you share. Yes, And Uh. The interesting thing too about going forward and thinking about the information that shared in the map. We're talking about engaging

the map with even more and more information. We talked in the past about the Living Earth simulator, this idea that will essentially create a simulated model of the Earth. Now it's it's not necessarily and it's it's least in its short term vision. It's we're not talking about a virtual Earth than which you could jack into and see, you know, what the Queen is doing tomorrow and how

it's affecting Wall Street, that kind of thing. But you'd be able to take a virtual world, Uh, Q in the data that is essential to your problem, such as say I don't know how Hollywood blockbusters affect the global seafood market. You would put in the Hollywood data that you put in the seafood data, you put in maybe a few other data sets that play between those, and then you would let it roll like a weather model and see what the forecast is for tomorrow or the

day after in terms of fish and Hollywood movies. So I think what we're talking about is the capability to have a mapping system that can tell you what's going on in the here and now, that can also extrapolate what's going on a year from now, thirty days, ten years predicated on these models for the Living Earth simulator that at least in the program in its present form, right.

And then you think about Google's Liquid Galaxy, which is this cluster of computers running Google Earth to create a really immersive effect, and you begin to get this picture of the future where you would never have to leave your home to have pretty immersive experiences, right, because you can even go out into the galaxy. We talked about about the Internet, interstellar in net and how we're trying to connect our solar system and trying to get trying

to figure out ways that will be connected. Think about what that means in terms of the images that we're getting from Mars curiosity, in that sort of data pace that we're building up. Yeah, the map becomes more and more complex. Ideally it is still providing a simplified model or view of the world to the user, but the map itself, that the technology and the information in it

just swells and swells. I can't help but be reminded of your Hey, Leuis Borges story on exactitude in science, in which an empire that's obsessed with cartography creates a map of the empire that is that is one to one scale, so it's the map is the size of the thing that it's mapping, and it just lays over the earth um which which is an idea that the Boorhees took from or he adapted from Loose Carroll and something yeah, and and so borgyes Is was always up

for some sort of mind twisting, magical realistic idea, and so he played with that in his short story and it was pretty pretty thought provoking. Silly but thought provoking. You know, well, it certainly appliable to a virtual map world, Like, what point does it become the equal of the thing it's mapping in terms of its complexity? Well, and what

other frontiers are we mapping? Again, going back to Mars curiosity and just in September, they discovered an area where they think there was water and uh, the rocks are in this large canyon and NASA's team named this rock outcrop um Hotel. I believe that's the way to pronounce it, after Canada's Hota Lake. So I mean already we're beginning to take our history and propel it forward into these uncharted areas. And then of course we get into the

area of augmented reality. Now um I believe it was umberto Echo and one of his essays and numberto Eco writes about everything from comic books to obscure things and medieval literature. Great writer, but he wrote a piece where he was talking about Borges story on exactitude and science, and he was talking about making the map um see through It would be okay so that you could you could lay it out over the thing that it's mapping. You wouldn't you wouldn't be able to you wouldn't say

something like, oh, where's the park. I can't see the park for the map of the park that's on top of it. To a certain extent, augmented reality is exactly that, the idea of putting on a pair of enhanced augmented reality glasses that then overlay the world around us with information about that world. It becomes a c through one

to one map of the world that we live in. Yeah, we've already seen the technology and play with surfaces too, so um, yeah, it's kind of interesting to to imagine walking down the street with you know, contacts that are super imposing information and map coordinates at the same time. You know, is this uh, I mean, I guess this

is just another version of the map, right. You can kind of awful lies about it and be a Cassandra about it, but this is the reality of living at a different time in the world when map technology is now this instead of your Rand McNally tattered in your back pocket. Yeah, maps amazes. There you go. All right, let's call over the robot. Then we'll do a quick listener or email. All right, we heard from Adam, and Adam is of course the chief Happiness Officer that we've

heard about before. He has a website Happiness plunge dot com, as well as crazy Hair fundraiser dot com and uh. He wrote into us in a response to our bat episodes. He says, Hey guys, great timing on the podcast. I was just on the island of Samal in the Philippines, working with the community fighting to keep its land from

being deserved by business interests to make resorts. Anyway, I stayed just a short walk away from the Guinness Record biggest colony um of Jeffrey Rose's fruit bats in the world. There are approximately one point eight million there. I had never seen a bat before, so it was quite an experience. We went about an hour before twilight, so that the bats were active, flying around inside the cave and moving around upside down. The noise the bats make is quite distinct.

It's hard to describe, but maybe like a high pitched mouse mixed with nails on a chalkboard. It didn't smell at all until one of the cave openings. Then the smell just kind of slapped me across the face and was horrible. I don't think their exit is quite as dramatic, since there are several openings in the cave, but it might be a site to see when they all leave from the same area. Thanks for the great podcast and information about these amazing, pollinating creatures, attached to some pictures

and videos for your enjoyment. Uh And indeed he includes some really cool photos and video. I'm right after this podcast, I guess I will go and put it on the Facebook, so by the time you listen to this you will have maybe seen them already. But he took some really cool photographs, Like the beautiful creature. It's very uh, like the the color of their their wing webbing versus the wings limbs themselves. It's very distinct, really beautiful. I think

in general bouts are elegant. That's probably not something people for around when they talk about bats, but they are. To me. Well, if you don't find that's beautiful, I challenge that you have not really stopped to look at the bat. Yeah, yeah, yes, all right. Well, if you have something to share with us about the beauty of bats, or about our obsession with maps, about our ability to see maps in the world around us, let us know. I'd love to hear if any of you out there

compulsively see maps where there are no maps. Um, I'm interested in anyone's personal experience with these new map technologies that we're dealing with, whether it's just getting lost due to some mishap with your a GPS, or some thoughts on how your GPS and your augmented technology actually informs your understanding and view of the world around you. Let us know about it. You can find us on Facebook

and you can find us on tumbler. We are stuff to blow your mind on both of those, and you can find us on Twitter where our handle is blow the Mind, and you can send us a lot at blow the Mind at discovery dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how Stuff Works dot com