It's the Mental Geography |
Ancient human's survival relied heavily on spatial thinking.
Modern brains still use these skills for learning and developing memory.
People can use spatial strategies to organize and teach ideas, enhancing recall and comprehension.
Imagine being one of our Paleolithic ancestors and having to navigate the relative safety of the cave and all the presumably more dangerous places around it for food, forest bathing, and whatever else was on your cave-person mind. Your life would depend on having a detailed mental map of as much of the area around your dwelling as possible. If you were nomadic, that kind of mental mapping would be even more essential. As a fairly weak animal surrounded by apex predators ready to take a chomp out of you, the ability to use your environment for sustenance and safety would be paramount. Indeed, your lifespan would depend on your skills in those areas.
Lacking any form of physical mapping, it would all be internal. No road maps, no GPS, just an ability to recognize where you’ve been and where you were headed, your life literally depending on being able to recognize the signs of other animals, whether prey or preying on you, plants with both benign and dangerous qualities, and the quicksand that loomed just before those distant hills where you could take shelter for the night.
That human experience, stretching over millennia, would place paramount importance on your ability to think spatially, to place events, activities, and memories in three-dimensional maps with dangers and opportunities clearly labeled at every turn. Moreover, you would need to be constantly updating those maps of the world around you. And you would further need, since the only way you and your fellow ancient humans could survive was to work in groups, to be constantly updating your sense of how your whole group worked together, especially in moments of crisis.
Now put that mind to work in a modern setting, and where does that ancient wiring show up? The research generally shows that our minds think in terms of spatial relations—we place memories and people on mental maps that use our sense of location most powerfully to organize how we think.
In particular, there are several ways in which that ancient mind is well-suited for learning more modern material and for teaching it.
First of all, when needing to master large amounts of knowledge as a student, an expert, or a specialist in a field, training your brain to use its innate geographical-spatial talents will be particularly helpful. And in teaching that knowledge to students, colleagues, teammates, or your own children, taking advantage of the geography of the mind will be particularly effective.
Don’t even attempt to make an audience remember a half-dozen key points in an argument without putting them somewhere physically. At the very least, use your body to place your ideas in relation to one another in various spots at the front of the room or on the stage. Most speakers wander around as the mood (and their energies) take them, without any inherent meaning. It’s much more powerful to place the first idea at extreme stage left, the second idea a few feet toward center, and so on, giving the ideas physical locations. Both your memory and the audience’s will benefit enormously.
The ancient brain evolved to survive in space; the modern descendant can use these ancient skills to enhance memory, learning, and impact.