Mental Maps and My Instinctive, Subconscious Navigational Computer

A journey to the center of my brain

Hear me read this post on the Deep Sy podcast!

Come, reader, on a journey deep into my psyche. Let us board this mental elevator and descend past the surface thoughts and feelings, below the planning and executive functioning, beneath the anxieties and fears, right on by the deepest contemplations and core memories. Ah, here we are: the Subconscious. Where things happen far beyond my knowledge that nonetheless influence my every thought and action. Where the slightest similarity in the tone of something innocent a friend says and something mean a random teenager said in 2004 causes me to, for some reason, eat ice cream and buy a new podcasting microphone.

It’s weird down here. A stream of songs stuck in my head, the smell of my middle school math classroom, my fear that all rats want to climb up the inside of my pants, and other ephemera loose in my brain.

Oh, and also a perfect map of every New York City Subway line I’ve ever ridden.

This is why we’ve come down here today. To take a look at the mental maps that exist in my mind whether I make any effort to put them there or not. They just appear. It’s always been this way. Though the scale of them has definitely changed.

As a kid, mental mapping was instinctive. For instance, I knew, without anyone saying anything, that the main hallway of my elementary school was shaped like an angular, backwards, lowercase j. The auditorium was inside the hook of the J, with the gym, offices, and cafeteria filling out the rest of the building. The kindergarten classrooms were at the top of the J, and you progressed through the years to the third grade classrooms at the end of the hook. Then there was a hallway sticking out from the bottom left of the j that was clearly tacked on at some historical moment when the school added fourth and fifth graders and needed more rooms.

As you can tell, this map is forever engraved on my mind. To this day, I could take you to Ridgewood, New Jersey, and walk you through the building room-by-room. I could easily tell you the grade of each classroom, or point you to the principal’s office, the nurses room, the library, or the dim basement bathroom I was always terrified to use. Of course, taking you there would be risky because we would probably scare the children, and we might be arrested for trespassing. But the point is I could do it.

At some point around fourth grade, a woman came to school to show me how to get places in my neighborhood independently. She was an orientation and mobility (O&M) instructor. A professional blind navigation coach. She walked around the school with me and drew a simple diagram of the roads in Sharpie so I could see it with the limited vision I had at the time. She noted that the streets were kind of in the shape of an arrow as I watched her trace the drawing with her finger. I can still picture it. It’s an important memory. Something clicked at that moment. I could map whole areas of land the same way I did buildings. So after we evade the police at my elementary school, I could take you around 15 or 20 surrounding streets, pointing out the houses of my old friends, and giving you tours of all the rooms inside them as well. Hopefully my friends’ parents still live there. They’ll be less startled.

My mapping ability kept expanding as I grew. And after living in New York City for almost 20 years, I have information about whole swaths of neighborhoods where I’ve lived, worked, or been educated imprinted on this subconscious level of my brain. Schematics of subway stations and blueprints of bodegas. In my mind, the city is like a video game’s world map. Anywhere I haven’t been is blacked out. Anywhere I have is clearly detailed in case I ever need to return. I could show you around any of these places almost as efficiently as a sighted person. And they’re all public spaces, so there wouldn’t be anything illegal about us being there this time. Plus, if we made it to New York City, the New Jersey law enforcement who were after us don’t have jurisdiction anymore.

Because I can’t follow signs or other visual clues while navigating, I’ve paid close attention to details about how the city is organized that aid my course-plotting. Sighted people don’t always notice these things. And if they do, they usually don’t integrate them into how they get around on a day-to-day basis. I’ll come out of a subway station, turn right, and confidently start walking toward an address I’ve never been to before while my wife asks how I know I’m going the right way.

“What do you mean? The building number we’re looking for is in the 100’s on West 53^rd. We’re south of Central Park, so that means it’s between Sixth and Seventh avenue. The building number is odd, so obviously it’s on the north side of the street. We just got off a downtown train, which as we all know runs on the same side of the street as the downtown traffic, which is to say the west side of the street. Since I can hear the noise of multiple lanes of traffic to my left, that’s Sixth. Thus, the street I can hear ahead must be 53^rd. so we’re on the northwest corner of the intersection and that means we’re turning right. Clearly. Why do you ask?”

I have all these maps, ideas, and rules operating together at all times to create turn-by-turn directions to my destination. Contrastingly, sighted people, as far as I can tell, never have any idea where they are an would wander the streets aimlessly until they collapsed from exhaustion if not for the signs and maps telling them precisely where they are and where to go at all moments. This difference in awareness is one of the main reasons it is often extremely hard for me to get helpful directions from sighted people. They simply cannot fathom the navigational calculations that have to process in my head, let alone how to give useful instructions to someone thinking about all that.

The one shining exception to this experience came during a journey on Washington D.C.’s metro over a decade ago. I had to transfer lines at the L’Enfant Plaza station, but had no idea how to get to my next train. I asked a random person where to go, bracing, as always, for instructions of limited value.

“Oh, sure. I’m happy to help. I’m an O&M instructor.”

“Sorry you’re a… Wait, what?!”

“Yeah I work with blind people around the city. This station is shaped like a capital T. You’re currently at the far left end of the line across the top of the T. Just use your cane along this wall until you feel the gap at the intersection with the stem of the T. Turn right, and walk to the bottom of the stem. You’ll hear escalators going down to the other track. Just pull a U-turn and Go to the down escalator on the far right. Once you’re at the bottom, you’ll be right on the platform, and the train going your direction will arrive on the left hand track.”

“Um… that… was literally perfect. I have zero questions.”

“That’s my job,” he said cheerily.

I moved effortlessly through the station to the next train in a stunned daze. I realize society wouldn’t function very well if all sighted people were O&M instructors, but man, a guy can dream…

Well, reader, thank you for joining me on this metaphorical trip deep into my mind. Disappointingly, I’m going to have to end it here. There’s someone knocking on my door saying something about a New Jersey court summons. Fortunately, I also have a mental map of the fire escape outside this window. Gotta go!