Map of Self

Using site to guide us. Think of the strong verticals and trees, and the horizon line moving our eyes up cross it to create the most rudimentary of maps. Perhaps that's why there are so many visual nerve cells dedicated to the detection of horizontal and vertical planes rather than diagonal ones. After all, our environment is based on this x y axis. Human beings are all of us are

trapped in a spatial box. I mean, everything we do takes place in a space, and wayfinding isn't just about physical space around us, that the internal space as well, Like the path that neurons take transmitting information to make memories and serve up thoughts. It's also in our body's ability to perceive itself to test our bodies mapping abilities. Fellow podcaster Holly Fry and I stumbled through a few

vortex tunnels illusions at the Haunted attraction nether World. Here, darkened hallways have no x Y coordinates to fix your gaze on, and the halls reverberate in the swirl of booming, buzzing confusion. Oh my god, swirling stars around me. It's like, I'm going to see this barrel and oh my god, how's it going? Holly good? Those twisty rooms and the

vortex room, they genuinely jack with your equilibrium. Losing the ability to pin yourself down in space and time can be terrifying, and perhaps this is why we can't stand to get lost, even for the briefest of moments. An idea. I took to my house to works coworkers podcaster Jonathan Strickland and senior editor Alison louder Milk. It's time for me to leave. It's time for me to go back to my hotel, grab my stuff and then go to the airport. Couldn't I get a cab to take me

over to Queen's. So I was thinking, well, I've I've budgeted enough time, I will take the subway. The level of panic I experienced when I realized maps were no good to me here. It didn't give me enough information, right, I couldn't I couldn't offload that to technology. I was now dependent upon my own ability, which I had very little confidence in. Jonathan is very seldom without global satellite capabilities, but that day his way finding mission from Manhattan to

Queens wouldn't have benefited from it. Anyhow. For Allison, the wilds of New York were tamed with recognizable landmarks. So I'm glad you brought up New York City. I lived there for my undergrad college experience and then um for a while after, and I noticed that the easiest way for me to get around the subway system was by landmarks.

So say I'm getting out at Columbus Circle. I knew where the fountain was in the in the circle, and so I would orient myself towards that, Like, Okay, if I'm facing the circle, and that means I'm facing north, and I've come out at this entrance, and the McDonald's is on the west corner, and if I'm want to go um cross town, I need to head toward the McDonald's. And so I had completely populated my landscape of New York City with all these arbitrary little landmarks to help

me navigate, you know, my life. Then these sorts of non GPS moments are far and few between these days. In fact, thanks to geographic information systems, we can overlay maps with just about anything, even Happiness doctors Peter Sheridan Dodds and Chris stan Forth use big data to make the case that across ten languages they surveyed, people use

more positive words than negative ones. They use twenty four sources like websites, music, lyrics, fiction, and social media to build up a database of words, billions and billions of words from Twitter alone, they collected roughly one hundred billion of them. And then, in a kind of part B to this study, Dods and dan Forth created a head DNA meter happiness meter, that traces the signals of emotions in Twitter communications, and they found out all sorts of

details about when and where we're happiest. So I thought, the most interesting thing about this steady, and it's one that I hadn't really thought about before, is that they found that the further people were from home, the happier they were. What do you guys think about that. It may not be so much that you're not as happy at home as you are just familiar with everything. Like if I travel to Japan, I'm sure I would be expressing wonder and awe as I traveled the country, walking

around my yard. I'm not likely to do that unless something truly extraordinary has happened. Allison brings up a good point about the source of this study, social media, and whether it's a reliable barometer. I do wonder, though, in that aggregate, how much they are taking into account the fact that we try to present like our best selves book or our worst selves as the case maybe um, depending upon what you're feeling. So I wonder if the

studies take that into account. Well. Also, there's this kind of echo chamber of what you're saying spiraled out among your social groups, So is that really an accurate sense

of what that social group feels. Are they just reacting as we have this discussion right now, my social media feeds are absolutely consumed with the political process of the United States, and I see exactly what you're saying, Julie, I see this kind of echo chamber resonance chamber thing going on to a point where my perception of what is going to happen is largely skewed by that, so that when reality sets in a day later after, say, the primaries have you know, super Tuesday has passed, are

very different from what I would have expected based upon my experience, simply because that echo chamber has has reinforced this idea, and I've created my own kind of, if you will, map of where things are going that's not at all based upon any reliable data, but rather on this this echoing uh sentiment that I'm hearing that has

shaped my perception of what will be. Social media is a map of storytelling, the details of what we choose to disclose and how that shapes the overarching narrative of our autobiography, the story of our lives charted out in our imaginations. So what would Jonathan and Allison's autobiographical map look like? It literally would look like England. I'm probably

a romanticized, perhaps even fantastical version of England. Price of Middle Earth worked into their I do have a Lord of the Rings tattoo on one arm, So I mean, I can't get that far away from it. But that to me, like when I think about my past, there's certain very important events happened to me while I was in England. I've only been in England a few times, but all the times I've been have been pivotal moments.

My honeymoon was in England, for example. I spent a week with very close friends in England where we all learned interesting things about one another and got hopelessly lost. All of these moments just kind of pulled back. And even though I've spent more, way more time out of England than in it, I feel like I could cram pretty much everywhere else I've been into this fictional map. I think that mine would like a little bit like Phillery. And I don't know if you guys have read the

Musician's trilogy, which is wonderful. Just finished up the last one and I'm sad love grossmend right more. Please. My map is hand painted, and it's hand lettered, and it's probably a little bit off scale. And the house where I grew up in is kind of Castle Lake, and they're various figures who are important in my life back then and still are today, and they're kind of gathered around the castle, and then we go out into the wilds. You know, here's New York City, a tiny dot that

was pretty pivotal in my growing up years, my twenties. Uh, and here's Atlanta. I mean, actually, I think it would be a map of the east, the East coast, but it would be lovely. It would be a lovely map of the East Coast of the United States, and one that really has no relevance for anyone else. I think Alison's map features Philary and this place is similar to mine in that Narnia is a fictional place and it

figures as a backdrop in my life. Map The Lion, the Which and the Wardrobe was one of the first places my mind could reliably retreat to a fantasy land that explored what it was like to be a child shaped by the forces around her. And in that respect, each of us has a bit of the fictional world

woven into our autobiography. Yeah. Well, if I had to make an autobiographical map of my life, in terms of what it would look like, I would think back to earlier medieval maps, where fast expanses of the known world hadn't been explored or discovered yet, so you'd have these old maps with vast expanses of empty land and empty ocean where it was blank, nothing was really there um And usually those parts of the maps are where you

would find all of these monsters. Um. They kind of represented the unknown, so they were placed in the unknown portions of maps. That's Toronto based artists Bailey Henderson. She brings mythological secreatures from medieval and Renaissance maps to life in her ongoing sculpture series Monstrom Marines. In her research, Bailey was struck by one particular map, the Carter Marina,

drawn by Alls Magnus. In it features a bestiary of marine animals, the kinds that sailors would trade stories about, beasts said to tear a ship asunder and plunge it into the briny depths. One such beast is Zivious. This bronze sculpture depicts a bird faced worka with a dorsal thing that can slice boats in half. And it turns out that this kind of land and sea animal mashup is common and the Renaissance it was a common belief that all of the animals presented on land had their

counterpart in the sea. So on a lot of early maps and text you would see creatures like a sea pig, or a sea dog, sea lion, a seahorse. They are just completely ridiculous creatures that obviously didn't ever exist. But it's quite an amazing, uh, the imagination that early artists

ad when they were depicting these creatures. Here with these maps we see Bailey's imagination working spatially, willing these two D beasts into a three D sculptural existence, which is in stark opposition of what we do in real life. In real life, we survey our three D surroundings an attempt to freeze them into a tableau, compressing the details to what we wanted to look like. And in this way there's an interplay between one is real and what

is fiction. To me, all maps are fictional. It's important to when you look at a map to kind of ask yourself the question, what has he or she decided to leave out? What rhetorical messages being given, even the ones that people think are you know, this is the

most scientifically accurate piece of cartography. I'm John Hessler. I'm a specialist in modern cartography and geographic information sciences Here at the Library of Congress, Geographic Information System g i S is changing the way we take in details from the world. It's like mapping on steroids, allowing us to question, analyze, and interpret data to understand all sorts of relationships, patterns,

and even trends. So g i S and and modern mapping are really an attempt to kind of abstract from this huge, complex, multidimensional um mess that is the world um and to visualize what's actually happening. An example here is crisis mapping in after a devastating earthquake hit Nepal, it took only forty eight hours for volunteers to map incredibly useful data, like areas that had passable roads to get supplies to and from, and areas that had given

way to landslides. This is a kind of humanitarian ground swell of technology. My interest in cartography has always been, at least in modern cartography, is how do we use this data to help people. My involvement with crisis mappers UM and and and the humanitarian mapping world is all about that, to kind of plan for things that are unexpected, things that are happening and changing rapidly. Almost everything that we humans do is never an equilibrium. It's always changing.

A city is a thing that used to be thought of this kind of the stable UM place, but it's not. It's the transportation is moving, there's energy going in and out, there's all kinds of things happening. UM. How do we plan that to make people's lives better. That's not to

say this kind of technology is perfect. While on the one hand, there's this this really beautiful side of you know, what can we do to UM use this technology in order to improve people's lives, to plan better, to figure out how to deliver fresh water to people better, to um plan all of those kind of resources and agricultural

land use and all of that stuff. There's also that that negative side that the more of this data that gets out there, of course, the more information that that other people have about us UM government agencies and and that kind of thing marketers UM. So there's the there's the double edged sword there in this sense. G I S mapping is Pandora's box. Will never be able to stuff it back in and close the latch, and we probably wouldn't want to do that even if we could.

After all, it's changed the way that we move through the world. People use it to pick hotel rooms. They go and they look at what the orientation of the hotel is, and they, you know, decide what room in a hotel they might want to stay in based on the view that they can see on Google Earth. UM. And so I think it's taken the difficulty of wayfinding out um. In other words, the space of wayfinding, the anxiety of finding your way has has kind of disappeared.

Where we're all on our phones, um, looking for the Starbucks that's a block away with our little GPS and our smartphone owns or or anything like that. We we no longer have to wander about looking for anything. And the spatial aspect of mapping has exploded, spiraling out and influencing every sector of technology, even game design. Take Minecraft, for example, a game that looks deceptively simple with its basic survival premise and block architecture to build shelters with.

But it turns out that Minecraft is really sophisticated and it requires a lot of spatial and problem solving skills. It's taking advantage of a certain cognitive way we perceive spaces. Um. One thing, when you build a Minecraft space you're kind of moving through it. And I think that's an interesting,

uh cognitive way to look at at at mapping. Mapping usually is a space that someone is moving through, that people are moving through, but in Minecraft, um it's especially important that that people can move through the space that you're building. Disability to throw off the shackles of space may help to explain the fanaticism of Minecraft players. And I think it really does compartmentalize a certain um, a certain fantasy we have about breaking out of what is

our normal spatial box. Um. Humans have always wanted to kind of like throw off space, throw off this this this geometric thing that kind of keeps us down and keeps us in place. That one thing that humans can't do is flyes. And I think these things kind of play on that. John's life is in maps, and this

has changed the way that he sees the world. Now we can do real time mapping, Now we can do stuff that's updating itself, you know immediately, and and and looking at that, and the way that changed my worldview is is that I now look at the world as never in equilibrium, that there's never anything that's not changing. Everything is in motion, everything is happening um. Everything is interactive,

everything is connected. Maps are contours of the human experience, laid out on an emotional grid, And in those contours we consider location, distance, history, people, and whether we want to go there or have been there, whether we once stood on a mountaintop picking out the Big Dipper from a wreath of brilliant stars hanging overhead, or whether we dreamed it or flew over it on Google Earth, moving

through space and time in our minds. Think of all the ephemeral maps you leave behind each day, the physical and digital footprints marking your paths, and the stories these routes tell about where you are in your life and who you are in your life, the outward evidence of your inner wayfinding. We've mapped the bloody universe and pinned it in a net, but as for dots of humans, we've made no progress. Yes, The Stuff of Life is written and co produced by me Julie Douglas. Original music

and sound design is by co producer Noel Brown. This episode also featured tracks from the album Mechanical Advantage by The Cubists. Editorial oversight is provided by Head of production Jerry Rowland. Excerpts of hireby Dragons is by Felix Dennis. We'd like to thank John Hessler for revealing the illuminating ways in which we map the world. You can find out more about John's work at Warping History dot blogspot dot com. Thank you to Bailey Henderson for discussing your

research into medieval and Renaissance maps. Check at her sculpture series Monstro Marines at Bailey Henderson dot com. And thank you to Alison Ladermilk and Jonathan Strickland for sharing your travels, real and imagined. If you like what we do here at the Stuff of Life, visit us on Facebook and Twitter. In the meantime, email us a drawing or a description of your autobiographical map at the Stuff of Life at Housta works dot com.