Mind Maps

Mind Maps

Animals have bodies but they also have maps of bodies in their brains. They know the layout of their own body—topographic somatic representations. This is the basis of what is called proprioception. These representations are not discursive but model-like. They provide the animal with an innate awareness of its body type, a primitive knowledge of its corporeal nature. In our case such knowledge interlocks with scientific knowledge of anatomy and physiology; we don’t come to these subjects with a blank slate—we already know a lot about our body’s architecture and functioning. This makes the subjects of anatomy and physiology easier to grasp, at least in broad outline (we don’t know everything about our body spontaneously). But nothing like this holds in the case of the mind: we don’t have a primitive knowledge of its basic architecture. We do have knowledge of scattered psychological facts, but we don’t have a mental model of the overall structure of the mind—how it all fits together. Some theorists have tried to develop maps of the mind, analogous to maps of the brain, but we don’t possess such maps as part of our innate human endowment. This makes psychology a lot harder than anatomy for us: for we don’t have a natural jumping-off point. We have to discover it from the outside—hence all those flow diagrams that psychologists manufacture. Just imagine if we had a natural awareness of the links between perception and memory with all the senses and types of memory perspicuously laid out in diagrammatic form. Imagine if we felt our mental architecture the way we feel the architecture of our body. Wouldn’t it all be so much easier? We wouldn’t be staring into a void but already well on the way to psychological omniscience. Or imagine if the links between language and the rest of the mind were as perspicuous as the links between your limbs: not a black box but an open cabinet. It’s a tantalizing thought—psychology on the cheap. We do have first-person knowledge of the outputs of mental faculties, but we are denied knowledge of the overall structure—we have no map to guide us. So we have both knowledge and ignorance of the mind—isolated spots of knowledge but no general picture. It’s a pity nature didn’t provide us with a leg up in this department. It would be nice to survey the mind as a functional whole from the comfort of one’s own inner awareness.  [1]

  [1] We experience the body as unified whole, but we don’t experience the mind as a unified whole; its various elements are felt as fragmentary, if somehow connected. Wouldn’t it be interesting to sense all the parts of your mind linked together as you sense the parts of your body linked together?