mental maps

This week on From Our Neurons to Yours, we sit down with Stanford neurobiologist Lisa Giocomo to explore the intersection of memory and navigation.

This episode was inspired by the idea of memory palaces. The idea is simple: Take a place you're very familiar with, say the house you grew up in, and place information you want to remember in different locations within that space. When it's time to remember those things, you can mentally walk through that space and retrieve those items.

This ancient technique reveals something very fundamental about how our brains work. It turns out that the same parts of the brain are responsible both for memory and for navigating through the world.

Scientists are learning more and more about these systems and the connections between them, and it's revealing surprising insights about how we build the narrative of our lives, how we turn our environments into an internal model of who we are, and where we fit into the world.

Join us to learn more about the neuroscience of space and memory.

Learn more:

• About Lisa Giocomo’s research
• About the story of Henry Molaison (patient H. M.), who lost the ability to form new memories after epilepsy treatment removed his hippocampus.
• About the 2014 Nobel Prize in medicine, awarded to John O’Keefe and to May-Britt and Edvard Moser (Giocomo’s mentors) for their discovery of the GPS system of the brain.
• About Memory Palaces, a technique used since ancient times to enhance memory using mental maps.

Episode Credits

This episode was produced by Michael Osborne at 14th Street Studios, with production assistance by Morgan Honaker. Our logo is by Aimee Garza. The show is hosted by Nicholas Weiler at Stanford's Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute. 

Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.

Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

On this episode of the “Emotional Vitality” series, Jared shares a unique way of harnessing the power of gratitude as an evening practice. Be sure to listen to part 1 of this two part episode first to better understand the Reticular Activating System (RAS) and how to create a complementary morning routine to this evening practice. Here, you’ll learn some of the science behind gratitude and how to use it to improve your mental and physical health, your self esteem, life satisfaction, happiness, and your overall well being.

Additional Information:

The Science of Gratitude - Mindful.org article

***Be sure to listen to all episodes of the “Emotional Vitality” series to learn more tools for achieving emotional vitality.

Evening Gratitude Practice:

1. Write down 3 things you are grateful for today - try not to repeat yourself.

2. Write down something you are grateful for about a significant other, child, friend, or anyone you’d like to improve your relationship with.

3. Write down something you are grateful for about your body - your appearance, your health, your abilities, etc.

4. Write down something you are grateful to yourself for that happened today - something you accomplished, the way you handled something - anything! 

Visit the podcast website here: VitalityRadio.com

You can follow @vitalityradio and @vitalitynutritionbountiful on Instagram, or Vitality Radio and Vitality Nutrition on Facebook. Join us also in the Vitality Radio Podcast Listener Community on Facebook. Shop the products that Jared mentions at vitalitynutrition.com. Let us know your thoughts about this episode using the hashtag #vitalityradio and please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. Thank you!

Please also join us on the Dearly Discarded Podcast with Jared St. Clair.

Just a reminder that this podcast is for educational purposes only. The FDA has not evaluated the podcast. The information is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. The advice given is not intended to replace the advice of your medical professional.

On this episode of the “Emotional Vitality” series, Jared shares another tool to add to your mental health toolbox. This tool involves taking a few moments each morning to completely change your day, and your life. Jared explains what the Reticular Activating System (RAS) is, and how you can take control of it. You’ll learn exactly how you can rewire your subconscious mind to bring what you truly want for your life into your conscious mind. This practice will take you from repeating patterns of defeat, anxiety, depression, and relationship struggles, to patterns of emotional freedom, happiness, and balanced and healthy relationships. In Part 2 of this episode, Jared will share another tool you can use to create a complementary evening routine.

Additional Information:

#345: Emotional Vitality: Limiting Beliefs and The Stories We Tell Ourselves

#378: Emotional Vitality: Using Curiosity to Take Back Control of Your Subconscious Mind

***Be sure to listen to all episodes of the “Emotional Vitality” series to learn more tools for achieving emotional vitality.

Visit the podcast website here: VitalityRadio.com

You can follow @vitalityradio and @vitalitynutritionbountiful on Instagram, or Vitality Radio and Vitality Nutrition on Facebook. Join us also in the Vitality Radio Podcast Listener Community on Facebook. Shop the products that Jared mentions at vitalitynutrition.com. Let us know your thoughts about this episode using the hashtag #vitalityradio and please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. Thank you!

Please also join us on the Dearly Discarded Podcast with Jared St. Clair.

Just a reminder that this podcast is for educational purposes only. The FDA has not evaluated the podcast. The information is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. The advice given is not intended to replace the advice of your medical professional.

When we enter a new ecosystem, like Pandora, with new rules, players, functions, etc. It can be a rude awakening that our maps of reality are utterly insufficient to navigate this new terrain.  Un-writing maps of reality can be a painful and energy-intensive process, just ask Jake or Trudy.  Both come to Pandora with a hunan-centric view of the universe and struggle to accept what they see and what the Na'vi are trying to tell them about the world around them, because their maps are already too fixed, their cups are already full. 

Over the course of our leadership journeys we must get from a mindset of "look what I can teach you" to "I see you".  How might we learn from Jake, Trudy, and the Na'vi how to re-align our mental maps to reality so that we can love other well?

When Jake Sully reaches Pandora in Avatar, he comes pre-loafed with a series of mental maps that he uses to navigate reality: his maps of reality.  Jake's maps include all kinds of useful tools that he's learned on earth from how to navigate the world without the use of his legs to how to respond to combat situations.  We all have our own maps of reality that we use to navigate and become reliant on, but we're all flawed, so what happens when those models prove ineffective in a new situation?  

When Jake is failing to adapt his earthly maps of reality to Pandora, Neytiri tells Jake, "It's hard to fill a cup that's already full".  Doesn't it fill like each of our cups gets too full to take on new information sometimes?  Too full to have empathy for someone who sees the world from a different perspective?  As leaders, we want to ensure our mental maps correspond to reality as much as possible, so how might we learn from Jake how to un-write and re-write those maps for the good of others?

Just how powerful are the ideas that we have in our mind?

Find out how the enemy will do everything in his power to think away from God and towards yourself.

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Does language influence how you think, what you do, and how you see the world? Hedvig speaks with Panos Athanasopoulos about linguistic relativity.

For the full show notes including more guest information and links, visit podcast.abundate.org/12.

Join the School of Certainty

Don’t let your language worries hold you back any longer. Join the School of Certainty and start your journey towards confident and effective communication: abundate.org/soc

This podcast tackles a wide-range of factors about the educational systems of the Nordic countries, focusing primarily on Sweden and comparisons with Finland. On the way, it answers the following questions: 

• Why does the Finnish education system have such a good reputation around the world? 
• After decades of reform, is the Swedish education system in crisis? 
• How does decision-making and the politics around education in Finland and Sweden differ and how is it similar? 
•  What role do schools and teachers play in the creation of our 'mental maps'? A term usually used by cultural geographers, mental maps encompass many different dimensions of our world view: from an awareness of our country and region’s place in the world, to our view of history and where we sit on an imaginary timeline.
• How is all of this influenced by national politicians and institutional systems, and even the international dimension? 

Join the editor of nordics.info, Nicola Witcombe, on her virtual visit around the Nordic countries, this time to Janne Holmén, Associate Professor in the Department of Education at Uppsala University to discover the answer to these questions. Janne is from the Åland Islands and this has influenced his research interests.

This podcast was recorded in February 2021 and is the second in the series: The Nordics Uncovered: Critical Voices from the Region. The third in the series is an interview with Elisabeth Staksrud, Professor in the Department of Education and Media at Oslo University in Norway. She will be talking about childhood in the Nordics and the online lives of children and young people.

Sound credits from freesound.org including school break noise outdoor.wav by Libra222.

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