Mind Palaces

A mind palace is any system you build, and rely upon, as a cognitive crutch or lever. It is the union of two things: a cognitive process, and an external system that augments the natural facilities you would use to carry out that process.

A spider’s web is a mind palace. A stack of books and notebooks can be a mind palace. The constellation of apps on your smartphone is a mind palace.

Computers are unreasonably effective as tools for building mind palaces.

Because mind palaces bear some amount of a person’s mental load and processes, a disruption to their mind palace constitutes actual violence to their mind. This is a useful way of understanding, for example, the angry (and uneven) responses people have to software updates, or the mental impairment caused by moving to a new home, even voluntarily.

Exoskeletal thinking

My notion of “mind palaces” starts with the work of Andy Clark and David Chalmers, who argued that cognitive processes can literally extend outside the skull, when external systems are tightly coupled with internal mental processes.

In The Extended Mind, they argue that the environments we build around ourselves deserve epistemic credit for the ways in which we use them to facilitate our thinking. Looking up a fact we have written in a notebook, they argue, is not different from recalling it by introspection. Going further: if you write down something you believe to be true in your notebook, then as long as you rely on that notebook you can still be said to hold that belief, even if it disappears from your immediate mental recall!

Clark and Chalmers are concerned with whether a mind or self can extend into one’s environment, and what counts as external cognition. To study “mind palaces” (as we do here) is to take their conclusions for granted, and look at the resulting systems themselves. Mind palace serves well as a term for these systems (despite possible confusion with “memory palace” or method of loci). It captures how we delegate cognition to external systems in ways that animate both the system and ourselves: designed, crafted, and out in the world, yet genuinely part of your mind.

Types of mind palaces

Many things count as mind palaces, and it’s useful to distinguish them.

Fundamentally, there are embodied mind palaces, which operate at the level of pure sensation and response; and symbolic mind palaces, which operate through language, notation and representational systems.

Within symbolic mind palaces, we can identify three main types:

1. Instrumental systems that extend or backfill basic mental functions (like notebooks and filing systems)
2. Cognitive levers that enable entirely new forms of thinking
3. Architectural mind palaces built for the intellectual pleasure of creating beautiful, interconnected cognitive structures.

Embodied mind palaces

The spider’s web is the best example of the embodied mind palace. In The Thoughts of a Spiderweb, Joshua Sokol describes research by Hilton Japyassú and Kevin Laland, who argue “a spider’s web is at least an adjustable part of its sensory apparatus, and at most an extension of the spider’s cognitive system.”

We conclude that the web threads and configurations are integral parts of the cognitive systems. The extension of cognition to the web helps to explain some puzzling features of spider behaviour and seems to promote evolvability within the group, enhancing innovation through cognitive connectivity to variable habitat features. Graded changes in relative brain size could also be explained by outsourcing information processing to environmental features.

Musicians experience a similar cognitive coupling with their instruments, as do artisans with their tools.

suggesting that a spider’s web functions as an extension of the spider’s cognitive system. When researchers altered spider webs by cutting threads, the spiders didn’t just repair the damage: they innovated, finding new hunting strategies their species had abandoned millions of years ago. The question becomes: where is this problem-solving information stored? "Is it in her head," Japyassú asks, "or does this information emerge during the interaction with the altered web?" The web serves as both sensory apparatus and computational device. Through vibrations in the silk, the spider processes information about prey location, web integrity, and environmental conditions. But more than that, the web's physical structure constrains and enables certain cognitive operations—the spider thinks with the web, not just through it.

Japyassú and Laland When confronted with novel problems, the question becomes: "Where is this information? Is it in her head, or does this information emerge during the interaction with the altered web?" It is a form of embodied problem-solving, where cognition happens through physical interaction with the structure.

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The character of Mr. Norell in the book Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell neatly illustrates the appeal and the problem of mind palaces. In practice, he relies on a particular mind palace (his library at Hurtfew Abbey) to an absurd degree; he has spent years cataloguing and indexing his books, and nearly all his conscious beliefs are held with reference to the things contained there. When he moves temporarily to his home in Hanover Square, his sole and overwhelming concern is that only part of the library can accompany him. But as in so many other areas, his stated opinions do not agree with his practice:

Mr. Norrell was speaking. “Many magicians,” he said, steepling his hands, “have attempted to confine magical powers in some physical object. It is not a difficult operation and the object can be any thing the magician wishes. Trees, jewels, books, bullets, hats have all been employed for this purpose at one time or another.” Mr Norrell frowned hard at his fingertips. “By placing some of his power in whatever object he chuses, the magician hopes to make himself secure from those wanings of power, which are the inevitable resut of illness and old age. I myself have often been severely tempted to do it: my own skills can be quite overturned by a heavy cold or a bad sore throat. Yet after careful consideration I have concluded that such divisions of power are most ill-advised. Let us examine the case of rings. Rings have long been considered peculiarly suitable for this sort of magic by virtue of their small size. A man may keep a ring continually on his finger for years without exciting the smallest comment — which would not be the case if he shewed the same attachment to a book or a pebble — and yet there is scarcely a magician in history who, having once committed some of his skill and power to a magic ring, did not somehow lose that ring and was put to a world of trouble to get it back again.”