The concept of the Mind Palace originated in Ancient Greece as a memory mapping practice.
The way it works is this. If you need to remember several seemingly unrelated things, you imagine you're walking through a well-known building, and you place a physical object that reminds you of that thing that you need to remember in a place in that building. Then, when you need to remember it, you walk through the building and see all the objects.
Antonio Damasio is probably the most influential neuroscientist of his time because of his work on consciousness. At the heart of his concept of consciousness is his concept of a proto-self, which is how we relate to our environment, and that environment is three-dimensional.
He explains how the brain operates as a series of maps. You can experience this operating for yourself. Let's say you have a memory of a conversation you had with someone. You will also retain the memory of where you were. You will remember if you were sitting or standing in the room. This geolocation and proprioceptive memory (the memory of where your body is and whether you are standing, sitting, walking, or lying) is the foundation of our memories. This information is always retained; we don't think about it because we're very probably too focused on the content of the conversation.
And then all our other memories are overlaid on top of that.
There are social maps, for example, you will have a map of things you say to new acquaintances, there is a map of people in your head, and successive maps are layered on top of this. Maps are simply representations that have links and nodes.
A node on a map is a specific element that links lead to and from. With the Mind Palace memory practice, you either take a place you know or create one in your mind. Then memory becomes about the movement of your body and your location in space as you move through that space, placing aide-memoires around the building.
If you say to somebody who uses the mind palace memory practice a set of unrelated words such as; water bottle, orchid, monkey, bird, they walk through the mind palace in their mind and place those items in various places in the mind palace, and then later when they need to remember those items., they walk tback hrough the mind palace and they may see acat sitting on a pedestal or monkey sitting on the on the stairs and so.
I'm explaining this to help you realise that we're all very much three-dimensional beings. When you meditate, you understand this far more deeply because when you're practising techniques such as focusing on the breath or noticing sound, you're connecting to this three-dimensional world.
Sound is a three-dimensional experience, too. Humans are very good at identifying our environment through sound. Remember, our ancestors lived in caves. So, for example, you could take somebody into a dark room and say to them, how big is this room? All they need to do is clap their hands, and you know from the echo the size of the room. You're also able to help locate yourself largely based on those sounds. It's a sort of low-quality sonar. We also build up a map of each space we are in. Let's say that, for some reason, it became pitch-black dark. You'd know where the door was, where the window is, and you could orient yourself. When we meditate, we engage in some practices that use these 3D senses.
These 3D senses are called vestibular awareness, proprioception, and balance.
One of the things I teach is forest bathing and nature meditation, which are often new experiences for many urban dwellers. When we are in the forest, we find that we can connect to it, which is a natural, instinctive thing. It's part of our evolutionary heritage, like mindfulness is
When we pick our separate meditation spots and sit down to connect to the forest, the mind naturally selects distances into the forest around us that we can become aware of. Our awareness extends into the forest, encompassing the sounds, the movements of branches and leaves in the wind, and the birdsong.
Meditation teaches us many things, and one of them, A really important one, is how to connect with our environment.
When we practice an open awareness meditation, for instance, I sometimes begin by suggesting that you "cast your mind to the furthest sound," which is often the sound of a car or an aeroplane. And then you realise you have a system that enables you to connect to your environment.
That's one level of 3D awareness in meditation. Another level is the internal level. If I say to you, close your eyes and focus your attention on the space between your eyes and eyebrows. That focus has an effect. It's a location in three-dimensional space that we focus our attention on. Another location could be the belly, where it meets the chest, where you can notice it rising and falling. There are many others, and over the next week or two, we'll dip into this three-dimensional journey of the mind.
If you know anything about the Hindu tradition of meditation and Ayurvedic medicine, there's the concept of chakras. Indian medicine and philosophy view them as energy centres in the body. You can focus internally on these places, and then there's yet another set of different experiences.
Many people find that focusing on the space between the eyes is calming and relaxing. When we focus on these different places in and around the body, we notice that each focus has a different 'quality'.
All of these qualities vary, and they are all on a spectrum of experience. For instance, the space between the eyes, which I call balanced focus, has a very specific quality: you are still aware of your environment, and at the same time, you remain aware of your body. Your awareness is neither fully internal nor fully external.
Now, if you bring your attention to the outside of the building that you're in, your brain plugs into awareness of that area, that space.
All of this is part of our evolutionary heritage because we have evolved to live in nature, and these senses help us navigate environments such as forests, caves, rooms, and streets. All these levels of connection make up what Damasio pretty much calls the proto-self's experience.
This is what we'll explore in our meditations over the next week or so, and I'm looking forward to you joining me on this journey.
Some further reading (You'll need to brace yourself as it's quite dense)
- Damasio, A.R. (1994). Descartes’ error: Emotion, reason, and the human brain. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons.
- Damasio, A.R. (1999). The feeling of what happens: Body and emotion in the making of consciousness. New York: Harcourt Brace.
