"being able to walk around a city and not get lost"
I have this module. You can fly me to a new country and drop me in a city I've never seen before, and I'll start navigating it on foot in a day. It worked for me in Copenhagen, Rome, and Barcelona (and miserably failed in Tallinn at night).
I always thought that it was my innate ability to navigate three-dimensional spaces, but now I begin to suspect that this is a trained "module". I walk a lot (mostly in cities), and I played first-person shooters since the first DOOM back in 1993. And I recently found out that I strongly prefer first-person games to top-down / 2D games -- I instantly feel "at home" there.
So I guess my advice to someone who wants to train this "navigation module" would be to 1) walk on foot in complex spaces like cities, and 2) play first-person games without objective and map markers where the knowledge of the game space is critically important. Modern survival games, such as Green Hell, Subnautica, and The Long Dark, are a perfect fit.
This is nice. I'm kinda opposite. I tend to be able to zoom-out in my mind, where I'm and look at my bearing from a bird's eye view like a map (positioning myself on a map such as Google Maps).
I like playing strategy games more than first-person shooters. I did played a lot and started with FPS but stopped after being rushed to the hospital after I collapsed playing a game way back in the early days. :-)
I've been going by foot, metro and bike for over 10 years in the European 2 million city where I live, and I still get lamentably lost when trying to connect two points I should know for the first time.
It probably doesn't work in cities like Prague either, parts of which were specifically designed like a labyrinth (not a grid at all) to confuse invaders.
>I always thought that it was my innate ability to navigate three-dimensional spaces, but now I begin to suspect that this is a trained "module". I walk a lot (mostly in cities), and I played first-person shooters since the first DOOM back in 1993. And I recently found out that I strongly prefer first-person games to top-down / 2D games -- I instantly feel "at home" there.
For me it was MUDs, exploring and running to known locations in MUDs almost certainly developed that feature in me as I was playing then in 1994 when I was all of 9 years old and my sole means of transportation was my bicycle in the real world.
I have the feeling that I have had this all my life. Maybe it is because as I child I was allowed to wander around on myself by foot and by bike. I remember that when I was still in primary school, I often made biking trips going as far as 6 miles from our home. When I am in a strange area, I always have some sense of the direction from which I came.
For me it's the opposite, when walking around I'll have a sense where "north" or "home" is, and at some point it will switch (north becoming east for example) and I won't notice it.
Ahh yes. I really love the idea or mental programs, or self metaprogamming, Human biocomputer, self fulfilling prophecy.
They truly run our lives, and sometimes can be drowned out by constant readjustment process, which in itself can be a program.
The simplist of these programs is the common habit. Showering routines, or waking up slightly before an alarm goes off.
They can be more complex, solving problems spontaneously after focusing on them cognitively for days.
Or simple and short term visualization programs that can be ran over a congruent conscious moment with a little mindfulness training -- each little intent of cognition adjusting what's being imagined.
The mechanism behind the muse, or meaningful dream.
PTSD, shyness, suddenly feeling sad, or happy.
Magical thinking, or the depressive voice constantly trying to find a new adjustment to fix things.
Computers in our head are everything. Not really computers in the classic sense, nor programs, but programs and program factories at the same time. Sometimes little programs with hooks to bail us out of other programs that may do us harm.
It’s so much fun to read this, author has described it well. I think it’s related to the part of the brain responsible for tool mastery.
When you start using a new tool, there is a separation: it’s you and the tool; you use it, learn how it responds to various stimuli.
Over time, your brain has FPGA-like abilities and wires up some specialized circuitry. To you, it feels like you and the tool are now one thing. Your brain controls the tool like it’s an extension of your body.
Riding a bike, playing chess, even reading and writing can be viewed through this lens.
I imagine something similar has happened to many/most people. For me, I got rather obsessed with cycling ~5 years ago, and as time has passed on I've found that I can traverse entire 80 mile routes in my head with a lot of detail and accuracy. Further still, I listen to podcasts when I bike most of the time, and it's interesting to do a route twice and remember snippets of conversation from the podcast of the last time I road the route.
Brains are truly spectacular machines. Makes me wonder what cell phones / social media / all those free dopamine hits are doing to my brain and consciousness over all these years.
If you can traverse one of those 80 mile journeys in your head, you already have the hard part of a memory palace. Check out a method book, they're cheap and fairly common, and you can probably set up loci for a couple hundred items within your first two weeks.
Our brains evolved to store memories with locations as the index. Through some mechanism involved in cortical wiring, we evolved to abstract locations, so we can imagine places and things incredibly well, and our basic biology automatically sorts and traverses memories using 3d maps, real or imaginary.
With a minimal amount of practice and effort, you can gain what amounts to a superpower.
Things like this are so trivially easy I don't know why method of loci isn't taught in kindergarten and improved throughout formal education into adulthood. A society that embraced this would produce an astonishing culture.
I watched this video[1] about a driving game track designed to be as long and boring and reptetitive and self-similar as possible, as a challenge of patience. The streamer is trying to be the first person to complete it, moving carefully over a flat grey pipe just as wide as the car, with only 90 degree turns, in gray fog, without making a single mistake for three hours.
After 42 minutes, he fell off, and had to go back to the start. After that much time and getting a bit complacent, he was not happy.
Then restarted, kept driving, faster this time. After about 30 minutes he suddenly says "wait, was it this corner? Wait, does this look familiar? This looks familiar to me; I think it was here. I'm just having flashbacks. I think it was exactly here where I fell. I just had deja vu. I'll never forget the moment I fell here. I think it was here".
Check out the video and see there is no way a casual glance would tell any corner from any other. He beleivably seems to have encoded a "whoa" memory from a negative experience, which triggered then. (I'm not really interested in "is it fake", even if it's fake it's perfectly relatable. That after 45 minutes of concentration, he can tell where he is on the self-similar map much more accurately than the viewer with a video open on a second monitor, and that there could/would be an emotional "beware" kick at that place next time).
I’ve observed a similar thing with Scrabble. After some years (18 by now) of tournament-level Scrabble playing, I’ve developed the anagramming ability: throw a rack at me and I’ll dump the Polish anagrams with 70-80% accuracy. I no longer reorganize letters on my rack or even in my head: the anagrams just come back. It’s become an unconscious primitive.
Needless to say, it kicks in at random moments when I’m not playing. Passing by a store, reading train station signs, you name it.
I’ve noticed the same thing (although I’m sure to a lesser degree) after years of compulsively making puns about everything. It’s almost a self-imposed dyslexia where you start seeing words out of order in places you don’t intend. Sometimes this ‘module’ runs on completely serious statements I’m about to make and it’s very distracting. Look what they make you give… :-)
Lovely article! I have a fun one to share that I noticed recently. I am 37 years old and have been doing 3D mechanical design for 15 years, including 7 years of full time CAD at the beginning. I continue to use CAD in my robot designs which I am working on almost every night. By now I am able to do a fair amount of design work in my head. I can conceptualize a new assembly with multiple parts, and focus in on specific areas to sort out how to form the shapes so that they do their job, can be assembled, and are 3D printable. It is not super high resolution but in a close-up level I can imagine any of the basic primitives you would encounter and how they mate together, and I can zoom out and imagine the part as a collection of these assemblies. It's great because I have a lot of ideas but don't want to sit at a computer all the time. I can do design work while I am on a walk or when going to sleep. And it really works!
After a few years of working with neural networks I thought: imagine writing a program that parses LaTeX equations and displays them, using exclusively a neural network. It sounds absurd, and yet my brain's neural networks can do that.
I always thought that it was my innate ability to navigate three-dimensional spaces, but now I begin to suspect that this is a trained "module". I walk a lot (mostly in cities), and I played first-person shooters since the first DOOM back in 1993. And I recently found out that I strongly prefer first-person games to top-down / 2D games -- I instantly feel "at home" there.
So I guess my advice to someone who wants to train this "navigation module" would be to 1) walk on foot in complex spaces like cities, and 2) play first-person games without objective and map markers where the knowledge of the game space is critically important. Modern survival games, such as Green Hell, Subnautica, and The Long Dark, are a perfect fit.