Living Through the Maps of Your Mind

How unconscious processes and imagination provide the structure that we call experience.

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Traveling usually requires directions. With the advent of GPS, the history of more broadly keeping an eye on where we're going seems to have gone away. Stories litter the Internet of people who got into accidents because they followed the GPS directions without paying attention to their surroundings. As it is with GPS, so it is with the maps of your mind, the mental maps shaping what we call experience.

Let's start with a couple declarations, in agreement with Fauconnier and Turner's (2002) book The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities:

"…Nearly all important thinking takes place outside of consciousness and is not available on introspection…" and "…the imagination is always at work…"

These starting points have a great deal of explanatory power when it comes to a broader understanding of those times when the mind makes connections we find profoundly unhelpful and/or unhealthy (obsessive thoughts and feelings) and sends us down paths that fundamentally change our notions of who we are (psychosis and other pathologies). Let’s explore a bit further and then getting into mind maps themselves.

“Nearly all important thinking takes place outside of consciousness and is not available on introspection…” Where exactly do the thoughts you have come from? Let’s consider the point that, while it may be jarring is not nearly as problematic as that initial emotional impact may lead you to think, you don’t choose your thoughts. You read that right, you don’t choose your thoughts. They simply appear. They’re just there, suddenly and inexplicably and without conscious choice. At no point are you consciously deliberating over the next thought you’re going to have, as even that deliberation is itself a series of thoughts you didn’t pick out from various possibilities. Rather, conscious thinking is a result, an emergent result out of the billions of interactions occurring every moment of the day by the interactive system that is your embodied mind embedded in a broader interactive reality. Such unconscious thinking (admittedly the use of the same word here can lead to confusion, but I continue to use it precisely because it causes a pause in reflection) is where the vast majority of the work happens providing us the usually seemless thing we call experience. And none of it, at least at the present level of technologically-supported inquiry, is available to inquiry. When we reflect, when we consider the reasons for our thoughts, they themselves are the same emergent results as the original.

This doesn’t make any of the experiences bound within consciousness as pointless, it’s simply a recognition of how the experiences that make up our lives are derived from processes we have no direct control over. For the vast majority of us, we use machines of which we have zero or next to zero understanding of how they work, from cars to smart phones, and yet that lack of direct control over the mechanisms that give us the experience of driving and digital interactions does not remove the importance of the actions. How we use those things still matters.

“..the imagination is always at work.” This is why what we do still matters. Consider imagination as being the cognitive fuel for flexible response creation. It is the process of taking the disparate data points constantly being taken in via internal and external environmental stimuli and building through associations, new and varied ways of putting them together. Similar to image-generation using the various A.I. tools, instructions can be repeated over and over to create different results. This requires interaction though, the power of imagination is build upon the bedrock of a continued supply of raw data. We broaden or limit its potential by the degree to which our lives are siloed and made static.

Just What Is A Mind-Map?

A typical map is a representation of the physical world and can serve multiple purposes: directions, land contours including elevation and slope, and the locations of various items, depending on need. A mind-map is much the same, a way of representing the world of our experiences to provide the structure of behavioral expression, the means of justifying that behavior through fundamental schemas and Values, and organizing the relationships of our lives.

As Lakoff and Johnson (1999) note:

"Living systems must categorize. Since we are neural beings, our categories are formed through our embodiment. What that means is that the categories we form are part of our experience! They are the structures that differentiate aspects of our experience into discernible kinds. Categorization is thus not a purely intellectual matter, occurring after the fact of experience. Rather, the formation and use of categories is the stuff of experience."

Categories are more than the signs seen at a grocery aisle, they are the means by which our minds differentiate the whole of our experiences into disparate parts. Fundamentally we begin with the category of Identity, as in "me and not-me." Were we incapable of separating our bodies from everything else, we'd have a hard time determining how and whether to react to objects, indeed the very notion of "reaction" assumes the mental framing of a relationship between two objects and infers a type of cause-effect relationship as well.

These categories are not simply mental constructs, they have immediate and direct effects in how we live our lives. In fact, they are the means through which we act!

"Because relations that verbal humans learn in one direction, they derive in two, they have the capacity to treat anything as a symbol for something else. The etymology of “symbol” means “to throw back as the same,” and because you are reacting to the ink on this paper symbolically, the words you just read evoked a reaction from you..." (Hayes, 2005)

Just as the words, symbols representing linguistic concepts, on a page spark reactions in us, so too do the actions we take based on our mental categories. Unfortunately these categories do not exist ‘out there’ like Platonic ideals, they are instead ways of organizing the disparate data of reality that our bodies interact within and within, to create experience.

Why Relationships Matter

"When we think, we arbitrarily relate events. Symbols “carry back” objects and events because they are related to these events as being “the same.” These symbols enter into a vast relational network that our mind generates and expands on over the course of our lives." (Hayes, 2005)

Consider the fact that lines and symbols on a map do not actually exist upon the land being traversed. This may bury the needle in obviousness, but such notions are often so "obvious" that the power of their effect is ignored. Lines and symbols on a map are a form of collective agreement, as a species across varying geographic locations and forms we've landed on a relatively universal means of organizing our planet. However, none of these things exist or have meaning outside the contours of our minds. Earthquakes, sea-level changes, erosion, etc. all routinely shift our maps at a base physical level and the political/military changes and conflicts change them at the level of ideology. Our maps are arbitrary, and sometimes capricious, not in the sense of not having any meaning, but that the meaning is quite clearly capable of being changed at a moment's notice.

Our mind-maps are not much different. We connect disparate data points into lines and symbols, stretching categories into schemas, living through Principles and Values as if these things have a life outside the relational bonds we live and breath through. They don't.

As human beings, we can and do quite often engage in behavior that is contrary to stated goals, contrary to our well-being and incompatible with the goals and well-being of others. Our mind-maps are similar enough precisely because we're all human and therefore allow us to organize ourselves to create societies and come to a consensus on things like the creation of physical maps. However, the associational process that supports all this is not a simple one-to-one or uni-directional.

"Humans think relationally…" and "are able to arbitrarily relate objects in our environment, thoughts, feelings, behavioral predispositions, actions (basically anything) to other objects in our environment, thoughts, feelings (basically anything else) in virtually any possible way (e.g., same as, similar to, better than, opposite of, part of, cause of, and so on)." (Hayes, 2005)

Consider that a singular social event like a protest can be looked at in almost as many ways as there were people participating within it. We each, every one of us, utilize mind-maps to organize our understanding, come to conclusions and therefore set us on a trajectory of response. Nobody does this differently, there is only variation in the information that is selected to support conclusions, the schemas being applied and the resultant behavioral response.

What allows us the freedom to grow and change is our ability to associate multiple things with one experience and build new maps guiding us into new realms of potential behavior. A childhood considered oppressive and dominating can later be looked at as supportive if perhaps ignorant; a beggar on the street-corner can be looked at as lazy and later seen as having fallen to forces outside their control; a woman's body considered the property of a man's can come to be seen as the source and embodiment of their independence; and those once considered "other" and open to ridicule and mockery can eventually be seen as belonging to the same great sea of humanity we all reside within.

The journeys of our mind-maps are the lines and symbols of our interactional lives.

References:

Fauconnier, G., & Turner, M. (2002). The Way we think: Conceptual blending and the mind’s hidden complexities. United States: Basic Books.

Hayes, Steven C.; Smith, Spencer (2005-11-01). Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life: The New Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (Kindle Locations 468-470). New Harbinger Publications. Kindle Edition.

Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1999). Philosophy in the flesh: The embodied mind and its challenge to western thought. New York: Basic Books.