No, only you can, but if that is what you want, help is at every hand!

This important essay, Is Google Making Us Stupid?, does not mention map reading, but I think Nicholas Carr ties together a great number of observations on the same theme I elaborate on this blog.

Google, audible turn by turn navigation, or glancing at a little online map image instead of getting the atlas off the shelf does not make you stupid.  What they do is make it much too easy to let your mental habits drift while you fail to take proper account of the gains and losses to your mental powers.  Before you know it, something has happened that you might not have chosen had you thought it through beforehand.

In the essay, Carr and other highly intelligent, literate people confess that after years of googling, surfing and skimming online content they have lost the patience or even the ability to read a book!  Has that happened to you yet?  Not me, thanks.  Carr and his anecdotal cohort seem bemused at what has happened to them.  They are, after all, busy and successful.

Not every book does this for me, but the reason I consider the novel one of the greatest art forms is this.  Often upon completing an excellent novel, I am pleasantly surprised by the intensity of the moment when I contemplate the whole of what I have just absorbed.  A vast blob of emotional truth crystallizes and shimmers before me.  The  unknowable becomes known. I would say it is inexpressible but it is not:  The author expressed it!  It took thousands of words.  No wonder I sound silly trying to describe the experience in a paragraph.  Carr quotes Maryanne Wolf: “Deep reading is indistinguishable from deep thinking”.

Everywhere are messages and pressures urging us to buy and get with the latest thing.  Skeptics like me are merely trying to provide balance and perspective, not stop progess.

Mind control is here.  It always has been.  How much control do you want to take and how much do you want to hand over?

Something I ought to learn more about is how blind people navigate a city.  Do they develop impressive spatial intelligence?  Is it strictly a matter of obtaining and following step by step directions?  Does it depend?

A customer (this guy is sticking by old fashioned maps to get around) told a story about his daughter.  She landed a new job, entered the address into her GPS device and drove to work.  She drove to work every day for two months.  On the morning her GPS malfunctioned, she could not find her way to work.

Losing my sight is easier to imagine than being in the fix that woman was in.  No one (I think) chooses to become blind, yet people everywhere are choosing to abandon the ability to direct their own physical movement through… well, do we have a word for what isn’t cyberspace?  Oh yeah, space.  aka Reality.

Learning and problem solving is often a matter of parts and steps.  The parts of the parts and the steps within the steps must be isolated, broken down until they are irreducible, and the connections and relationships noted, one by one.  This is especially so when we are setting up a computer to do the problem solving.

Unlike computers, our minds deal effortlessly with wholes.  My point about how laborious it would be to write out every fact that a detailed map could tell us is also a point about how unnecessary that labor is.  Just look at the map and you know.

Mushroom hunting became a favorite pastime of mine this summer.  It is healthy brain exercise to foster the state of relaxed alertness in which you most efficiently spot the mushrooms.  You can tromp along and see none.  You can stop, look around and conclude “No mushrooms here.”  Then keep looking.  Staring is the wrong way to look. You don’t have to execute a search pattern either.  Slow down, wait and trust your eyes.  One of my favorite moments is when you suddenly see a hundred mushrooms in a place that had just seemed bare of them.  I guess most people do not get their thrills in the same ways I do.  Mostly, I believe, because they have not tried.  Silent, low tech encounters with fungi in situ are not big in popular culture these days.  Birdwatchers probably know what I am trying to say.

Printed guides to mushrooms always bear stern warnings about not eating anything until a real live expert has confirmed the identity of your find.  Every living expert must have learned from other experts, who learned from other experts, and so on.  Let us be grateful for the sacrifices that someone, somewhere, some time ago must have made to learn the hard way!

In defiance of the warnings I ate some mushrooms, and survived.  Some had been shown to me by someone who had eaten that mushroom.  Others, like this Bears Head Tooth were so unlike any other possible growth that I judged it foolproof.  Most of the time, however, I would puzzle over my guidebook and my finds.  There are photographs, but every specimen seems misshapen.  Colors are never quite the same.  There are written descriptions of properties:  stems, collars, the little fin-like things or lack thereof underneath,  how it smells, what happens when you bruise it etc.  There are a lot of parts to the identity of a mushroom!  Just when you think you have narrowed the possiblities down to one you flip around the book a bit and think it could be something else.  What is the difference?  Is that stipe (stem) really bulbose? Are those lamellae nearly detached or fully detached?

I have resolved to sign up for the first expert-led mushroom class, walk, foray or whatever I can find next spring.  The difference between learning mushrooms from a book and learning with live specimens under the guidance of an expert is the difference between learning from the parts up and from whole down.  When you really know a mushroom, you know it as a whole.  You know it on sight.  That and where it grows, how it grows, how it smells, how best to cook it, all your history with it are parts of one whole piece of knowledge.

Check the book before you eat it anyway.

All this to praise the uniqueness of the map as a tool for learning:  The parts and the whole are simultaneous and integral.  There is no either – or.  Reading maps trains your mind for more effective thinking even in realms non-geographical.

There are but a few dozen map stores in the country.  You are now paying a virtual visit to the most obscure  corner of the entire commercial landscape.

I have daydreamed of how the biggest stroke of luck my store and its dwindling cohort could enjoy would be to have a popular character in a sitcom or the like work in a map store.  Then I would never again have to meet someone and hear them say “You mean there is such a thing as a map store?”

This is no sitcom (whatever the NY Post thinks).  Improved perspective courtesy of Streetsblog