On The Map: Why the world looks the way it does

by Garfield, Simon

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  Designed by the Philadelphian Charles Brace Darrow, Monopoly began life in a modest white box with vaguely educational claims on empire building, but it wasn’t long before it was bringing out the greedy worst in all of us. It also rapidly became the impressionable mind’s proper introduction to urban geography. The game was a smash worldwide, the street names easily localised: out went St Charles Place, Boardwalk and other locations in or near Atlantic City, in came Mayfair, Rue de la Paix, Parco della Vittoria and Wenceslas Square. The board provided a shamelessly corrupt impression of the ease of both rent collection and travel, scrambling true and relative distances in rather the same way as the map of the London Underground. And as for Free Parking, it was clearly made in a simpler universe.

  But the Monopoly board also has a secret map history, and it is one that may have transformed lives. In the late 1930s Waddington & Co was making more than playing cards and board games. It was also printing silk maps to fight the war. Air men and women would have them sewn into their jackets or concealed in the heels of their shoes as they flew over Europe: the maps wouldn’t crease, spoil or betray themselves during searches, and they might help to get them home after a parachute mission or capture (the maps were based on world maps printed by Batholomew in Edinburgh and divided into country sheets as required).

  The Americans were making similar maps, but it was only at Waddington that its maps and games divisions combined in this unique way. With the approval of the secret British ‘escape and evasion’ unit M19, silk maps were inserted between two pieces of the Monopoly board, the game pieces were adapted to include a compass, real money was shuffled into the playing notes, and the games were sent to European prisoner of war camps by dubious charity organisations such as the Licensed Victuallers Sports Association and the Prisoners’ Leisure Hours Fund (the special access afforded the Red Cross was conditional on an agreement not to assist escape). Not all the games were so modified; the special ones were marked at strategic points on the board, and there must have been a great temptation to place a mark on the Get Out of Jail Free card.*

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  Inevitably, Monopoly is now available online, and you may play with people you will never meet from places you will never visit. But computer games with maps have been around since the end of 1961, when a group of young hackers at MIT were trying to find a way to show off the capabilities of a newly arrived machine, the PDP-1 from Digital Equipment Corporation. The word ‘hacker’ meant something else then, more like ‘geek’ today. The students were proud of their new machine’s potential (and with a $120,000 price ticket this was just as well), but they were a little bored with its applications, including an early word processor. So they decided to build a game, something that’s now regarded as the grandfather of all computer shoot’em-ups: Spacewar! (Precisely why so many early names of games had exclamation marks after them is hard to say! Perhaps it has something to do with the esteem in which their creators held them.)

  Spacewar! was a simple two-player idea featuring a couple of spaceships trying to blow each other up with missiles. A star added a gravitational pull that threatened to set the spaceships off course, but an early version had something missing – a realistic background that would provide a proper sense of dimension and velocity. So another program called Expensive Planetarium was crashed into the game, a map of the night sky above Massachusetts. The game was copied for other institutional owners of the PDP-1, and the addictive powers of computer gaming were experienced for the first time.

  Thereafter almost all screen games required some sort of map for effective play – either a basic backdrop for ‘shooters’ such as Space Invaders and Doom, layouts for multi-level platform games such as Super Mario or Prince of Persia, a broad perimeter plan for simulation games such as The Sims or Farmville, or a cheat-sheet atlas to aid navigation through open-world challenges such as Myst or Skyrim. The maps sometimes come in the box with the game, but more often they are the game, and the cartographical interpretation of the landscape is the ultimate challenge. In this way, maps continue to tell a story in much the same way as they did with Mappae Mundi, and nowhere is this more true than in the mythical and magic world of Dungeons & Dragons.

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  D&D is a role-playing game involving Dungeon Masters, elves, wizards and the proud and relentless allegiance of those who play it, and no matter that the rest of the world regards them as one orc short of a moondance. Those whose imaginations were first sparked by the mental maps of Lord of the Rings will have little difficulty understanding the appeal or gameplay (gaining life experience, defeating opponents, mastering skills).

  As with Skyrim, real-world abandonment is all, and unlike the tactical model-army war games that share the game’s inspirational credit with fantasy fiction, the liberating pleasures of inhabiting an imaginary character may stretch well beyond the hours spent playing the game with friends (ultimately perhaps into the online avatars of the once-huge Second Life). The basic (pre-computer) D&D game, created in 1974 by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, requires a map for successful gameplay, though it may be little more than an unlabelled grid over which polyhedral dice are rolled and representational game pieces moved.

  One Orc short of a moondance: welcome to Flanaess, home of mystery and the names of the creator’s children.

  In 1980, the American artist Darlene Pekul designed a 34-by-44-inch multi-sheet map of Flanaess, the easterly part of the Kingdom of Oerik, for the D&D World of Greyhawk campaign. Set on a one-centimetre hex grid, Pekul took Gary Gygax’s original vision and created an entirely workable parallel universe. Regions such as Grand Duchy of Geoff contained the Valley of The Mage, and Oytwood and Hornwood forests, while the Kingdom of Keoland lies between the rivers Javan and Sheldomar, and has a distinctly aristocratic flavour with its many baronies, duchies and earldoms. The names on the map are rarely found within the Times Atlas, and are often anagrams or homophones of Gygax’s children, friends or favourite things: Celene, Flen, Urnst, Linth, Nuthela. But the sea is still blue and the forests still green, and the margin of the map contains a key to the colour-coding and symbols that wouldn’t look too out of place on an OS chart: a red dot for a castle, a red square for a walled town, three bars across a river denoting rapids.

  The transition from dining room table to computers was a natural one, with programmers able to eliminate a lot of the game’s more tiresome calculations and in so doing speed up the action. Zork! and Alakabeth: World of Doom were primitive 1970s combinations of role-playing games and treasure hunts, and they relied on punctuation marks and other text graphics rather than the 3-D images we are used to today. But the development was swift, and the black-and-white line drawings in such things as Ultima and Wizardry soon gave way to faster graphics and colour in Tunnels of Doom, the improvements aided by the code-writing possibilities of the first home computers, and the excited exchange of floppy discs in Ziploc bags at video and computer stores.

  And so an entire generation of potential television viewers and scale model builders were lost to a more modern and exciting way to spend their time and money. And in this way, with no fanfare and very little resistance, a whole generation of parents were alienated, and (many years before mobile apps on phones) maps stealthily entered the lives of young people in an entirely new way. For what is Skyrim if not a huge, playable imaginary atlas? Would Ptolemy and Eratosthenes not have recognised it as a thing of wonder?

  Chapter 22

  Mapping the Brain

  When Albert Einstein died in April 1955, a pathologist had his brain on a slab within a day. There was of course only one big question: would the brain of a genius look the same as the brain of a mortal? It turned out that some parts of his brain appeared narrower than the norm, while others were wider; some areas were almost non-existent, but these were compensated for with others that had clearly once pulsed with frantic activity. The findings caused quite a fuss at the time, because our understanding of the human brain was still i
n its infancy. We could master relativity and quantum theory without any firm understanding of how our brain managed it.

  But this is gradually changing. Thanks to technology, brain mapping has entered an exciting phase, a phase where we can actually see things that twenty years ago were purely theoretical. Partly this is due to the work of Einstein himself. And one of the things we’re beginning to grasp is how – and where – we are able to read a map.

  It always amuses people to learn that Einstein couldn’t drive; he probably had other things on his mind. But every time he took a cab – say from his office at Princeton to Newark Airport an hour away – there was one thing he could be relatively certain of: the person driving him had a brain bigger than he did. Or at least a certain part of it was bigger, the bit that successfully selected the quickest route, taking into account traffic conditions, the newest roadblock and the time of day. It was bigger because Einstein’s cab drivers (okay, the better ones) had learnt a large map of the state of New Jersey, unknowingly broken it down into a system of molecules, cells and neurons, and reassembled them in just the right order to take their valuable cargo to his next assignment.

  When Einstein came to London in the early 1930s to speak at the Royal Albert Hall it was the same: the cab driver would have the entire A-Z crammed up there. It was thought likely that this brain area in cab drivers would be larger than in those who, for example, were constantly getting lost on their way from their front door to the shops (apparently another Einstein occurrence). But it was only very recently that this theory was proven, in a scientifically elegant story that combines both everyday practical maps and the grander notion of the way we read and memorise them: the software and the hardware.

  In 2000, a young woman called Eleanor Maguire and a group of colleagues at University College London published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that got its readers thinking about an obscure and vaguely mythical qualification called The Knowledge. London cabbies knew it only too well as the fiendishly frustrating series of routes or ‘runs’ they needed to learn before they could earn their licence. There used to be 400 runs to learn, and even though there are now only 320 (Run 4: Pages Walk SW4 to St Martin’s Theatre WC2, perhaps, or Run 65: St John’s Wood Station NW8 to Brompton Oratory SW7, each twisty enough to make you yearn for the Manhattan grid system) it takes an average of two to three years to learn them. Indeed, only about half of those who start on The Knowledge will stay the distance and get their badge (for as well as having to navigate some 25,000 streets, there are also about 20,000 ‘points of interest’ to memorise.)

  Maguire is a cognitive neuroscientist, and thus concerned with how learned behaviour affects the structure, function and passageways of the brain. But there was also a personal reason for her interest in cab drivers and mental maps. ‘I am absolutely appalling at finding my way around,’ she explained. ‘I wondered, how are some people so good and I am so terrible? I still get lost in the Centre for Neuroimaging and I have been working here for fifteen years.’

  Her breakthrough paper – Navigation-Related Structural Change in the Hippocampi of Taxi Drivers – produced headlines around the world for its key finding: that London cabbies who had the A-Z in their brains had a significantly larger right posterior hippocampus (the part responsible for spatial awareness and memory) than those who hadn’t taken The Knowledge. This news was so handy, and perhaps surprising, for the Public Carriage Office (the body that licenced the black-cab drivers), that they started using it in their recruitment ads, the best boost since the cab driver Fred Housego won Mastermind in 1980. But the findings also provided hope to people unable to read a map or find their way around. Or, rather, to those who say they are unable to find their way around, like Eleanor Maguire. Her work suggested the opposite was true: spatial awareness and erudition is not an inherited trait, but a learnt one. Anyone with regular brain capacity and without brain disease can follow a compass, read a map, remember a route, and find their way back to their car. Learning a lot of maps showed that the brain was malleable plastic.

  The brain mapped. If your right posterior hippocampus is a lot bigger than this, you’re probably a London cab driver.

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  In 2001, a year after Maguire’s research was published, a new study of two slides of Einstein’s brain showed something equally intriguing. Einstein had significantly larger neurons on the left side of his hippocampus than on the right – that is, the opposite side to cab drivers. This suggested stronger nerve cell connections between the hippocampus and the neocortex, the part of the brain associated with analytical and innovative thinking, but no marked increase in cell growth on the part linked to the reinforcement of memory.

  The methodology of the ‘plastic brain’ research did leave a few unanswered questions, however. Only sixteen cab drivers were used in the research – all male, right-handed, with a mean age of forty-four and a mean cab-driving duration of 14.3 years – and there was no way of being sure that they didn’t become cab drivers because they already had a larger hippocampus before they began driving, and thus a propensity to retain vast amounts of mapping information and a vocational urge to exploit it.

  And so, buoyed by the initial enthusiasm towards her work, Maguire and her colleagues at UCL designed further studies. In 2006, many of the doubts surrounding her initial survey were dispelled when she plotted the grey matter in the hippocampus of cab drivers against that of London bus drivers. Both had an aptitude for driving and stress, but the bus drivers were not required to memorise anything but relatively simple and repetitive routes. The bus drivers chosen as the control group had driven for the same number of years as the cab drivers. Again, only the cab drivers showed a significant enlargement in the right posterior hippocampus. The cab drivers also fared better than the bus drivers on memory tests on London landmarks (learned information), but less well on short-term recollection. This was reflected in the larger anterior hippocampus of bus drivers.

  The implications of this work are great, and represent a potentially exciting advance in our understanding of spatial skills and memory. It opens doors to other areas, including the possibility of repairing memory loss caused by Alzheimer’s, dementia and brain injury through accident. That is to say, the new mapping gives us structural knowledge of the brain and also functional knowledge, the possibility of clinical treatment. When it is complete, the mapping of a pulsing lump of protoplasm may hold the key to eradicating some of our most impenetrable diseases, and in so doing our greatest miseries.

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  There is a very deep history to this. We are cave men, and we have learnt to walk upright, and our brains have suddenly become very big. Somehow, in the last four million years, we have transformed ourselves from Australopithecus to Homo habilis to Homo erectus to ancient Homo sapiens to modern Homo sapiens, and towards the end of this run the size of our brains has swelled, probably more than any other creature, and the tasks we can perform as a result have increased greatly. We can, for instance, imagine other worlds beyond our own, and we can anticipate life before and after our own, and we can contemplate our role in the universe, and our own death. Not bad for something that weighs about three pounds, and (we think) unique among the animal world.

  One of the other tasks we can perform is to speculate how this brain expansion came about. There are several theories, and prominent among them is the development of language. At some point we managed to make recognisable and repeatable sounds, and to assign these sounds a meaning and a vocabulary. Without knowing why, we developed grammar too. Even the most primitive form of communication would make the most basic tasks easier, and so our talent to make ourselves understood continued to expand (and obviously continues to do so). Our larynx would have had to expand in size and capability as well, and the power to accommodate these changes and possibilities would have caused the brain to expand, feeding on its own possibilities.

  Another theory, popularised by the neurophysiologist William Calvin, wonder
s whether the growth spurt wasn’t triggered by the physical, specifically the expansion of nervous tissue caused by our ability to throw and kill. The most successful hunter-gatherers were the ones who could lure their targets and dispose of them accurately and efficiently, and for this they needed a combination of strength, spatial awareness, cunning and timing. These are big things to lug around, and hence the need for more cranial computational space.

  And there is a third theory, lucidly examined by Richard Dawkins in Unweaving the Rainbow, his celebration of the scientific imagination. Dawkins set out to find the deus ex machina that would have remodelled our brain capacity in the same way that the growth in personal computers coincided with the reduction in size and price of the transistor. Our brain capacity developed far more slowly than the capacity expansion of the computer, of course, but the metaphor is a hard one to resist: Dawkins looks for a revolutionary event that was to the brain what the development of the mouse and Graphical User Interface was to the birth of the Apple Mac and Microsoft Windows. And he may have found one.

  Back on the African plains with the hunter-gatherers, the skill of tracking is invaluable. The ability to read footprints, dung deposits and disturbed vegetation will lead to edible rewards, but this knowledge is insufficient in itself. The expert tracker needs expert spear chuckers, and an ability to communicate expert findings. If there was as yet no language, our tracker may mime his intentions to kill an antelope – a silent watch followed by a stealthy stalk and a sudden pounce – but miming precise location of the prey would be trickier. Dawkins suggests there was another way. ‘He could point out objectives and planning manoeuvres on a map of the area.’ A tracker would be ‘fully accustomed to the idea of following a trail, and imagining it laid out on the ground as a life-size map and the temporal graph of the movements of an animal. What could be more natural than for the leader to seize a stick and draw in the dust a scale model of just such a temporal picture: a map of movement over a surface?’