The alternative to perceiving the world as webs is to see it as maps. Instead of finding ways to connect all sorts of different things, like webbing does, maps focus on only one thing and chart it out to create a mental blueprint of it.

Example: Map of a Room

Imagine being inside a room in a house, and wanting to remember what it looks like. The first thing you might do is look towards one of the walls. For this example, this is what you would see:

The above diagram contains all of the objects we will consider in the picture, but it does not contain any connections yet. When mapping something, the connections of the map are all the internal relationships among that thing’s defining sub-aspects. So when mapping a wall of a room, the connections must show how each object is related to every other one:

In the above thought net, the instances are connected to their closest neighbors. Names for the connections are omitted in the diagram, but they could have names such as ‘about 5 inches to the left of’ or ‘just above’ or ‘on top of.’

Many times, maps will have a topology to them, especially ones that map spatial environments, like the room shown above. Instead of remembering names for each of the relationships, the mind usually gets a general feel for how far apart things are from each other.

From this thought net, you can understand various things: the chair is on the floor and below the picture; the picture is a bit to the left of the upper part of the door; and the door is above and in front of the mat, and the mat is on the floor.

Now let’s pretend you leave the room, and all you remember of the room is the map thought net above. Then let’s pretend someone asked you to tell them from memory where the mat is in relation to the chair. Since this is a map, there should be a way to connect every object of the room to every other object. However, when creating the map, you didn’t explicitly remember how the chair was related to the mat.

Fortunately, you can still figure it out, because maps are transitive, meaning everything in the map is somehow connected to every other part, although you may have to traverse through several objects to get from one to another. In this example, the chair is below the picture, which is a little left of the door, which is above the mat. Therefore, the chair is a little left of the mat, and its height is somewhere in the same neighborhood as the mat, but we can’t tell exactly from this information.

However, from the map, you also remembered that both the chair and the mat are both resting on the surface of the floor, so you can quickly figure out that the bottoms of each object are parallel to one another, and you now have a pretty good idea of how the mat and the chair are situated with respect to one another.

Maps Summary

This was a simple example of how mapping works. The map is created by remembering the relationships between key landmarks of some topic, such as the view of a wall. Afterwards, this map can be recalled from memory to reconstruct a mental view of the wall, with all of the features (including the chair, picture, door, and mat,) in their correct places. If the map is thorough enough, it should be possible to connect every part of the map to every other part.

Maps are Only About One Thing

Maps can only be about one thing, or one instance idea. In this example, the map is for a specific instance of a ‘wall’ or view of the wall.

Of course, we could pick out instances from within this map, such as the chair, and start a web, using chair as a starting point to brainstorm related ideas: people sit on them, some are hard, some are soft, some are made of wood, some are wide enough for two people, etc.

Or we could create a map of the chair, which would allow us to draw it from memory if we had to, but again, this map would only be about the chair.

We could also take this map of one wall, and combine it with maps of the views of other walls to get a map of the entire room, and then combine maps of all the rooms to get a map of the building. Still, the map would only be about one thing: the building.

Different Kinds of Maps

The example map of the room is a mapping of its features in physical space. Maps are very useful for charting physical space, but they can also be used to create maps in abstract spaces. As an example, let’s make a map of the idea ‘colors’ or, phrased differently, of ‘color space.’

How can we make a map of colors? Well, in the room example, we made a map by saying how far one object was from another object, so let’s do that with colors, by considering two colors at a time:

Red & Green:

“I don’t know how red and green are related.”

Red & Blue:

“I don’t know how to relate red and blue either, but it does come to mind that mixing red and blue makes purple, so I will try that.”

Red & Purple:

“Purple has red in it, and the more reddish the purple, the closer to red it gets.”

Purple & Blue:

“Purple has blue in it too, and the bluer purple becomes, the closer it becomes to blue.”

From this we can say red and blue are both close to purple, and that to get from red to blue, or vice versa, one can go through purple. Therefore, it can be said that purple is somewhere in between red and blue in “color space.” Color space is an abstract space, and not a spatial one like the room, but we can still make a map out of it.

Here is a picture of a color wheel, where you can see how close colors are to one another based on their hue, and what colors you have to “go through” to get from one to another:

And here is a mapping of the color wheel:

As you can see, there are connections connecting all along the color wheel, with a few extra connections that aid in remembering the relationship colors that are not directly next to each other. As before, since maps are transitive, any colors that are not directly connected can be related to one another by going through multiple connections.

The Internet and Maps

While websites can consist of many web pages, they usually focus on one thing or theme. Nearly every website has a menu for navigation, representing a high-level map of the site, and often submenus to navigate a segment of the site. This makes it easy to get an idea of all the information that is on the site, or on some segment of the site, and saves the websurfer the trouble of reading every page and clicking every link on every page in order to find all the webpages.

While some maps are not topographical, and it would not matter if the order of items was changed on a website’s menu, the mind still often likes to think of where each menu item is in relation to another. People often like to have things arranged in a certain way, such as icons on a computer desktop, or items on a real desktop, so that they can take advantage of mental maps to locate items faster.

One very important map is used in alphabetical sorting, which allows people to use their sequential mapping of letters in the alphabet to quickly find something. Imagine how long it would take to look up a word in a dictionary if the words were not in alphabetical order! Without maps, a dictionary would not be practical to use.

The idea that maps are about one thing holds true for navigation menus, desktops, and the alphabet. Since there are only a few things in a map, it is possible for the mind to picture where everything is, and drill down into sub-maps when necessary, such as submenus on websites, or going to the 2^nd and 3^rd letter in a list of alphabetically sorted words.

Tags: abstract maps, Mapping, processes, transitive