Mental Real Estate
There’s a decent amount of evidence that geolocation—where we are any any given moment, physically—influences our state of mind.
Our location in space can also stimulate our capacity to remember things. This effect is so potent that many champion memorizers utilize some variation of the “memory palace” technique, which typically involves walking through an imaginary version of a familiar space, placing the things they need to remember within that explorable context as if they were physical objects.
I find that the metaphor of brain-based physical space can be extended even further to help me prime my thinking for various tasks, patterns, and rhythms.
My approach to this is less literal than the approach utilized by memory champions: I basically tell myself that I’m moving to a different room in my mental mansion, so it’s time to shift gears and tweak cognitive cadence.
Sometimes merely telling myself that it’s time to approach things from another angle is enough to nudge me into a new mindset, but I also find I can trigger such shifts using some kind of a physical representation of where I’d like to go next.
Donning workout clothes helps me move into a more physically conscious state; performing a few quick stretches and sitting crossed-legged on the floor nudges me into a calmer, meditative posture; setting a timer for 20-minutes primes me to tackle intellectually expensive work that will require intense and draining focus.
Each of these actions triggers a shift from one imaginary room to the next.
Using the metaphor of mental real estate also helps me string together behaviors and rituals so that they become habits.
I may eventually learn, for instance, that a period of hard work will be followed by a period of calm, cognitive unclenching. A meandering, meditative walk will generally be followed by a period of note-taking and planning, which then typically segues into a span of focused work.
Each of these habit-chains are made up of modular pieces that can be broken apart and sprinkled throughout any type of day—filling in gaps and taking new shapes, as necessary. And they can and arguably should be reworked, iterated, and replaced over time: there’s little point in sticking to just a handful of rooms in your mental mansion, when there are an infinite number of other rooms to discover and explore.
Thinking in these terms can make such shifts and adjustments more fluid, though, and can help a sometimes frazzled mind find firmer footing in whichever room or rooms warrant regular, and perhaps more thorough, exploration.
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Projects
This week on Brain Lenses I published an essay about the Peak—End Rule and a podcast episode about Shoshin.
This week’s episode of Let’s Know Things is about a highly potential-ridden technology called WebRTC.
Also: if the news seems a little overwhelming at the moment, but you still want to be informed about what’s happening in the world, consider subscribing to my new project, Yesterday’s Newsletter.
Interesting & Useful
Some neat things:
Explore the International Space Station w/ Google Street View(this is wonderful)
Wildlife Photographer of the Year People’s Choice selections(also wonderful)
Most-view GIFs of 2020(seems about right to me)
Washington Post’s Photo Issue(a collection of photo collections)
How cargo ships are sliced up for scrap(random, interesting thing)
Did QuantumScape just solve a 40-year-old battery problem?(big if true)
Results pointing at possible universal flu vaccine(also very big if true)
For more interesting things of this kind, subscribe to Curiosity Weekly.
Outro
Two things got me thinking about mental real estate, this week.
The first was discovering that there’s an entire neighborhood within walking distance of where I’m staying that I didn’t know existed, and it has fancy things like sidewalks that are unfortunately lacking in my own neighborhood.
This is important because I love walking and do it every single day, when feasible. And for months it hasn’t been feasible due to the lack of places to safely perambulate.
That issue ameliorated, I’ve found myself once more drifting into my mid-walk mindset on a daily basis, and that mindset is difficult for me to achieve through any other habit or mechanism.
I also decided to finally learn the geography of Africa more thoroughly—which is something I’ve been meaning to do for ages, as I’ve become increasingly aware of just how much of a cognitive blind spot I have for that continent in particular.
It took about a week, but I can now take a blank map of Africa and put a name to each country. And because I’m not a memorization champion, my method of storing this type of information is heavily dependent on context: which in this case means learning a little something about each and every nation to lock it into my memory landscape.
So this endeavor has taught me a great deal more than just geography, and has set me off in a slew of new curiosity-driven directions, which has been wonderful.
What’ve you been up to this past week?
Working on anything you’re particularly excited about?
Have any holiday-related plans you wouldn’t mind sharing with a stranger from the internet?
One of my favorite aspects of publishing this newsletter is hearing from folks on the other end of it. So if you have a spare moment (or multiple spare moments), consider sending me a quick introduction and/or update as to what you’re up to, what you’re thinking about, and how you’re thinking about things during this tail-end segment of a truly bizarre year.
You can do so by responding directly to this email, or at colin@exilelifestyle.com.
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You can also communicate via the usual channels: Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, or pixelated photo of an unidentified aerial phenomenon.
If you’re finding some value in what I’m doing here, consider supporting my work by becoming a patron of my writing or Let’s Know Things, buying one of my books, or subscribing to Brain Lenses. You can also buy me a coffee.