Maps & Whitesnake

If we want to know where we’re going, or where we’ve been (Whitesnake knew where they‘d been), or just the lie of the land, we can use maps. Mostly we think of maps as being representations of terrain, to give us relative positions and routes, landmarks, and inclines.

We know that the map is not the terrain, but it represents it in a useful way. It lays out possibilities, not requirements – I am not obliged to visit Tokyo simply because it appears on a world map. However, it also defines limits.

Provided that I remain on Earth the only places that I can go to will be represented on a map of the earth.

This is not entirely true. For some time, Area 51 in Nevada did not appear on maps, so I am told, so technically you could go somewhere not on a map, but practically you can’t as there are people in jeeps all around it and if you get too close, they will drive down and warn you off. They also might shoot you. Other places that do not appear on some maps include Billingsgate Island. In the UK there are reasons why some places might not be represented as they actually are. In 1927, it is alleged that Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin stated that “No work of defence shall appear on any map on sale to the general public…No blank space shall appear, but the natural physical features of the country shall continue to appear", although this rule has since been relaxed. 

How might the idea of maps help us with our thinking in forensic psychology? We’ll have to go on a bit of a journey to get there.

 

John Snow and Cholera

In the 1800s John Snow mapped the occurrences of cholera in London, not just where the households were that had cholera, but where the drew their water from (this was before the time of domestic taps, people would go to a local water source and fill up containers to take home). By doing so he was able to identify the source of the cholera outbreak and so help to reduce the spread of the disease (it helped that he believed in the then unpopular view that cholera was a water-borne disease rather than spread through other means).

 

Charles Booth and wealth

Later that same century Charles Booth used maps of London to then superimpose financial information about its inhabitants, producing a map of the dispersion of wealth in our nation’s capital.

Both of these uses of maps examine the information that is not typically represented allowing new insights to be developed that could impact on society.

 

David Canter and crime

More recently David Canter produced a map of where the Railway Rapist’s victims were located (Duffy wasn’t known as the railway Rapist until Canter identified that the victims were all closely located to railway property) and used this to suggest that the perpetrator must have knowledge of the railway system and was using that to identify and/or dispense with his victims. He also has some views about jack the Ripper. Your typical Ordinance Survey map doesn’t contain the locations of victims of crimes, but when it is done the patterns that exist in the location data take on a new meaning – the structure that the map offers allows for new interpretations.

 

My BloomMap™

The other day I was out with my dog and decided to photograph every different flower we came across, in chronological order, as we ambled along a country path. In principle that information could be used to retrace my steps by someone, as long as they were able to find those same flowers and for a botanist potentially something about the land that supports these flowers as presumably there is a reason why the purple one is here and the yellow one there, not vice versa. My BloomMap™ is less useful than identifying cholera sources, rapists, or determining where society might best provide social support, but it brings an element of structure, information, and potentially prediction to what was a Saturday morning aimless wander.

My BloomMap™ was an a priori decision, but many aspects of our lives can be mapped, and demonstrate interesting principles about us, where there has been no obvious, conscious decision-making process on our part.

 

You going shopping

Think back to times when we were free to wander about our hometowns, meet people, go shopping, have a coffee, unhindered and unfettered by viruses or any other limits. In our hometown we are free to roam.

But we don’t roam freely. If you think of your town and think about the places you go, they are likely fairly limited; perhaps not in number but in location. If you were to place those locations on a map you might start to notice that there are some possible reasons why you don’t explore all aspects of your hometown. Perhaps there is a river, and you tend not to cross it (perhaps there is not a footbridge handy), maybe a dual carriageway or motorway, and these form boundaries, or maybe there is a section of town that is the “bad end” of town, and you don’t go there. Our decisions are, to some extent, determined by our environment in subtle ways. This has been used by architects to, for example, set up housing estates where crime is reduced, to try to develop a sense of community. Going back to a previous post, Don Norman is a great exponent of these ideas for the design of objects, where good design can reduce the likelihood of mistakes (there are fascinating books on air-accidents that demonstrate how bad design can, when people are under stress, increase the chances of fatal errors).

The study of the interplay between our psychology and our surroundings is covered in environmental psychology (David Canter was an environmental psychologist before he became an exponent of geographical profiling), where one of the basic ideas is that we develop Cognitive Maps (Edwin Tolman came up with this idea) as we come to know a place, and it is this we use to navigate our hometown. Our Cognitive Map is not as large as the whole town, it is where we have been and what we know, so there is no surprise that what we know and hence what we do is limited. We can always broaden our map, but if it already contains all we need, why would we? I can buy bread at Tesco, why do I need to know if there is a Sainsbury’s near me? Even if I did, would I go?

The principle of Cognitive Maps being limited shouldn’t come as a surprise – we don’t know what we don’t know and when we learn more, we add that to our understanding. This applies to anything. I have no idea beyond the name as to what the Hirajoshi Scale is so it is not a part of my cognitive map of music so I won’t use it (it turns out it is 1, 2, b3, 5, b6, so the C Hirajoshi scale would be C, D, Eb, G, Ab). If you don’t know where Flying Horse Walk is you won’t find Nottingham’s best cheese shop (other cheese shops are available, but inferior).

All of that was a bit of an introduction to different ways that we can think of maps and how they might be used and how they might limit us. Now the magic happens – is there a way that we can use some of these ideas in our work as forensic psychologists? I think so.

 

Our lives as psychological maps

If we accept the idea that maps define limits, yet our personal maps can change over time, we can start to see how the notion of a more psychological map might make sense and be useful.

What are psychological maps? For me they represent the geography of possibilities for my thinking and behaviour. My psychological map has nothing first-hand regarding Russia; I have never been, I don’t speak the language, and I have no friends who are Russian. My map of Russia does include film representations, media, and the little I know from my interest in space travel. My psychological map includes eating food I don’t recognise in countries where I do not speak the language, trying to be nice when there are no reasons to be and a whole lot of reasons not to be – and these experiences and visits and confrontations, wine and song, are landmarks and inclines from which I understand the world and where my options and choices are made.

The limits of my map are partly genetic. Just the way I am made means my cognition is biased in some ways, and some ways that I might never be able to change. Just as some people are scared to fly, and they will never get over that, so their global maps are defined by that fear, so my biases and quirks define my limits.

The current limits of my map are also defined by experience. The experiences I have had impact on how I believe the world is and as such how I behave in the world. I could take chances and behave in new ways (you could try that new Vietnamese restaurant in your town) but behaviour is “sticky”, to use a phrase that Sandra connects to DVDs of Underworld (you had to be there). Change is hard, and self-motivated change is harder in part because we don’t always know why we are making decisions, we just are aware of the outcome of those decisions. So how do we locate where the bias is?

When I skidded on some slate in Wales and cracked myself on the head you can guarantee that some part of my brain was damaged, and if that part was involved in mapping my world then my map is damaged. Perhaps it is no longer accurate or isn’t accessible. Those times you had two or three drinks too many and woke with thunder in your skull you might have altered your map. Maybe only temporarily, maybe only in small ways.

Right now, writing this, I am knackered. I’ve been up since 5am, it’s 9pm and I can’t make a good decision to save your life. Or mine. Now is not a good time for decisions, but for me it will pass. A bit of a sleep and it’s back to access all areas, but I’m lucky, I was seldom beaten as a child, wasn’t bullied, didn’t have close family die at an early age, wasn’t exposed to pornography until I was 12 (yes, I went to a good school), wasn’t vulnerable to drink and drugs, didn’t have mates who stole or sexually assaulted people or demanded that to be their friend I had to attack someone in the street. My functioning map of the world, right now, is a disaster, but mostly it covers enough terrain and offers enough options that I can travel safely to safe places.

My map is a representation of me, but it isn’t me. It provides structure that can give you an understanding of me, the same way that a map of the Lake District can give you an understanding of that area if you were deciding to go on a walking trip.

Hopefully, you have a sense that just as maps of places can be limited, so can our internal maps, and these limits define where we can go and how we can get there. If we could see our patients’ maps, we could understand better why they can only move around the places that they move around, or why they always use the same routes. But we can’t.

So, what can we do and what is the point of all this?

Going back to Whitesnake, David Coverdale sang, “I don’t know where I’m going, but I sure know where I’ve been”. Our clients know where they’ve been, and the order of the places they’ve been. Some might even know how they got there.

This we can map. From victim of bullying to school smoking behind the bike sheds and then to truant, bravado with the boys, feeling humiliated and rebuilding self-esteem with a fist, developing a reputation, not respected or loved but feared… We do routinely trace these journeys, these histories, but seldom do we see them as partially mapping the terrain, identifying the returned to locations, those that are avoided, the routes taken, and asking, “why is that preferred when the same destination could have been reached another way?”

Formulation isn’t a map, it’s a series of hypotheses to be tested, destinations to be connected. It’s nice, we can help our clients take the train rather than the bus, walk don’t run, but one day that train might be delayed and then it’s back to the bus. My suggestion is to go beyond that and start to look at the map. So, not just the routes taken, but the routes available, not just the places visited but the places that could be visited. There is little point in a focus on self-respect if my experience means that self-respect is not on my map – as Whitesnake tell us, “Tho' I keep searching for an answer I never seem to find what I'm looking for”.

First you have to get it on the map, then you can find a route to get there. It seems to me these are fundamentally different ways of thinking about change; one assumes that we are all working from the same map, the other suggests that we need to examine that assumption and where the map is different find ways to broaden its scope.

The crucial question is how do we broaden another’s map? I expect David Coverdale has some good ideas.