Navigating a city with Anna
When you navigate a city, what is your inner experience? Do you see detailed overhead maps, or street-level views of landmarks, or neither? Vynn Suren and Francis Irving interview Anna about how she uses her imagination to find routes, program a computer and remember names. Anna describes how she sees both an overhead map view and street-level views of landmarks. She switches between them dynamically. What's a visual map vs a spatial map? What features are salient? What is a waypoint? How do the imagined maps vary in quality between different cities? What does the marker look like that shows where you are? There's then a discussion about how people work out the route to take on the map, and what happens when they get lost. What's the inner experience of being lost? How do you find yourself again? The conversation switches to use of imagination while computer programming. Anna describes the abstract concepts she sees in a spatial structure. What then happens when you're interrupted? Does this apply to other tasks, e.g. getting quotes for insurance? To wrap up, the team talk about names and faces and how well people remember them. If you visualise writing is it serif or sans-serif, is it white or grey? Timestamps: 00:55 Imagine an apple 02:17 Inner background music 05:00 Navigating a city 08:26 Spatial vs visual 11:07 Finding the best route 20:17 Typical waypoints 22:49 Sense of direction 26:33 Getting lost 30:18 Variety of experience while navigating 34:08 Imagination while computer programming 38:56 Interruptions 41:02 Smoky grey shapes of thinking 44:35 Inner experience during collaborative tasks 46:29 Remembering names and faces Show Links: * This isn't f***ing Dalston! [https://sites.google.com/view/tifd/home] - mapping the cognitive boundaries of part of London * The Image of the City [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Image_of_the_City] - book about how people make mental maps * Mind's Eye Mentorship [https://www.gorcdc.com/visualization-training] - 1:1 coaching, used to be called AphantasiaMeow * Guugu Yimithirr language [https://www.naturalnavigator.com/news/2010/09/guugu-yimithirr/] - uses north/south where English uses left/right * Country Driving by Peter Hessler [https://www.peterhessler.net/country-driving/] - getting lost in rural China * Statistics of mental imagery by Francis Galton [https://galton.org/essays/1880-1889/galton-1880-mind-statistics-mental-imagery.pdf] - either this, or William James referencing it, mentions the smokey grey shapes * 1946 birth cohort study [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Survey_of_Health_%26_Development] - NHS research project Contact Details: Please follow us, get in touch, tell us about your inner experiences! Twitter: @imagine_apple [https://twitter.com/imagine_apple] @SurenVynn [https://twitter.com/SurenVynn] @frabcus [https://twitter.com/frabcus] Email: imagine@flourish.org Theme written, performed and recorded by @MJPiercello [https://twitter.com/MJPiercello]