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

by Garfield, Simon

  This, of course, is also the beginning of cave paintings – humans and animals depicted in their daily round of survival, with representational figures standing for something else, and introducing the concept of scale and directional arrows and spatial difference.*

  But as for the brain, we may have found the reason for expansion and sophistication. Richard Dawkins concludes with a question: ‘Could it have been the drawing of maps that boosted our ancestors beyond the critical threshold which the other apes just failed to cross?’

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  In November 2010 Chris Clark, a colleague of Eleanor Maguire’s at University College London, delivered a talk on brain mapping at the British Library, part of a series to accompany its Magnificent Maps exhibition.

  Clark had trained as an accountant before making the considerable career switch to neuroscience and is now head of the Imaging and Biophysics Unit at UCL’s Institute of Child Health, where he is concerned with a wide range of neurological diseases seen in children, including autism and cerebral palsy. The mapping of the brain – in particular the white matter consisting of connective tissue that links particular functions – may, he hopes, one day provide enough clues to explain the nature of why certain brain functions fail and allow us to understand how treatments might influence brain circuitry and ultimately restore function.

  At the British Library, Clark began his presentation where modern scientific brain mapping started, with the Brodmann maps from 1909. Korbinian Brodmann was a German anatomist who, by examining stained sections of cortex under a microscope, managed to define 52 distinct regions according to their unique cellular make-up (cytoarchitectonics, as he called it). Area 4, for example, is the primary motor cortex, while Area 17 is the primary visual cortex. All of Brodmann’s areas were numbered at the time but only some were named, and even fewer had a defined function. (The most notable and widely accepted was the language/speech centre named Broca’s Area, the left frontal region named after a French anatomist who, during autopsy in the early 1860s, found lesions and other damage in speech-impaired patients; one of these patients was called Tan, the only word he could say.)

  Brodmann’s revolutionary demarcations had a popular natural precursor, albeit one rooted less in advanced neuroanatomy than in pseudoscience. Phrenology – in its baldest sense the study of regions on the surface of the skull as indicators of behaviour traits and personal qualities – had been all the rage in the alternative quarters of Victorian science, and the maps are as amusing to us today as they were once perceived to be revelatory. Once one accepted that all human thought and emotion was processed in some way within the brain (rather than the heart or perhaps an ethereal/religious channel), then it made sense to locate particular attributes and values to particular areas; this is what Brodmann was doing in a more sophisticated form. What made less sense was to believe that these attributes could be somehow measured, gauged and differentiated by bumps and lumps on the brain’s bony casing – the equivalent of diagnosing a car engine by feeling the bonnet.*

  That said, the Victorian maps popularised by leading proponents of phrenology, such as the German physiologist Franz Joseph Gall and the American Fowler brothers in New York, were complex, imaginative and crankily beguiling. The classic china bust of a skull now displayed sardonically in psychoanalysts’ waiting rooms shows the simplest cranial elements: Domestic, Aspiring, Animal, Self-Perfecting, Moral, Reflectives and Perceptives. These resemble nothing less than countries on a world map (or perhaps areas in a Disney theme park), and are usually broken down into regions. So Perceptives contains Order, Individuality and the sinister Eventuality (which actually just means an ability to recall events), while the Self-Perfecting zone has Cautiousness, Self-Esteem and Firmness.

  The leading American Phrenological proselytisers, Orson Squire Fowler and Lorenzo Niles Fowler, travelled the US, Britain and Ireland giving lectures and selling their American Phrenological Journal and books. These days they’d be driven out of town for their conjectures, but in 1876, when their Illustrated New Self Instructor reached its 11th edition, their readers clearly thought the Fowlers were onto something. The book may have been used to find your ideal husband or spot your local psychopath, and the task was made easier by more than a hundred engravings, showing various forms of disjunction. Like the Brodmann maps, each part of the head was assigned a numbered function. Unlike Brodmann, the Fowlers’ diagrams had hair. Area number four for the Fowlers, about half way down the back of the head, represented Inhabitiveness, the propensity to live near one’s roots. A large bulge on the head indicated a large degree of domestic patriotism; but the lack of one indicated the life of a rambler. Similar markings were laid out for Amativeness at the very base of the skull (big sexual urges were revealed when this area was swollen, while a sunken area exposed modest frigidity).

  The Fowler brothers’ phrenology bust with its map of the brain’s perceived activity areas. Oddly, no space for sex or shopping.

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  Fortunately for medical science, it is Brodmann’s work that has set the template for brain mapping for the last century, gradually refined into a neural jigsaw showing both brain function and connection (Broca’s Area was assigned Areas 44 and 45). But it’s only since the 1990s that we have been able to effectively map the function of these areas in a way that may prove clinically useful. The enabling technology – employed by Eleanor Maguire with her cab drivers and Chris Clark in his child health work – is that great forensic scanning tool Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), and in particular the highly evolved specialisations known as Diffusion MRI and Functional MRI.

  A few months after his talk I met Clark at his office in Bloomsbury. He shows me more slides – brain slices that display Ordnance Survey-style contours, images of thin long cylinders known as axons, fabulously coloured bundles of these axons known as tracts. And then there is a map of diffusion, an image that shows the passage of brain molecules moving through water in a random manner. And then an image of Einstein, who developed the coefficient establishing the ‘time-dependent’ process in which molecules move further and further away from their starting position as time increases.

  Why is this significant? Because the movement of water through the underlying tissue structure – the slower the movement the darker the area on an image – suggests a concentration of structure that may be mapped over time. In the early 1990s diffusion MRI revolutionised the detection of brain damage only hours after a patient had suffered a stroke. Then tractography arrived to provide a method for mapping the connectivity of the brain, allowing the study of so-called disconnection syndromes such as Alzheimers disease and indeed normal aging.

  The MRI scanner that lets us gather these images is an other-worldly-looking thing. But for clinical and experimental purposes it has one great advantage: unlike other forms of diagnostic imaging such as X-rays, it is thought to carry no risk of harm to the patient.

  ‘You should have a look at the journal Human Brain Mapping,’ Clark says. So I do. The March 2012 issue contains articles on changes in the hippocampus of bipolar patients who take (and do not take) lithium, and the results of localised brain activation in stroke patients after directed stimuli. These are not theoretical concerns, but may soon feed back into treatment programmes. Clark’s work also already has practical applications. His unit is frequently called upon to provide diffusion images of a patient before surgery, particularly in cases of epilepsy where a patient isn’t responding to drugs and requires the removal of a part of the temporal lobe. It’s an effective operation but also a particularly delicate one, as the surgeon needs to avoid damaging the adjacent area known as Meyer’s Loop for fear of causing a defect in the visual field. Tractography can play a crucial role in guiding the surgeon here, as it can with tumour removal; prior to the directional mapping of the neuro-pathways there was a much greater risk of cutting the motor cortex that attaches to the spinal cord. Clark says he does have ‘a little bit of uncertainty’ when patients submit themselves to t
he knife assisted by his imaging work. ‘The culture in science is to constantly question what we do. Is this correct? What are the sources of error? Can we improve on what we are currently doing?’

  Where are we heading with all this? Somewhere exciting. Advances in brain mapping have mirrored the development of the human genome with something called the Human Connectome Project, a US-based enterprise that will eventually lead to an entire map of the brain’s physical wiring. Unlike the Genome Project, which shows what makes us who we are, this neural ID will demonstrate how we process and store information, and why we behave the way we do. This ‘anatomy of thought’ involves capturing some 150 trillion neural connections, and to do this the neuroimaging division of Massachusetts General Hospital took possession of a new scanner at the end of 2011 with some excitement (‘4 times the fieldcoils and 4 times as many water cooling layers!’ as the machine it replaced). It was hoped that the brain mapping of 1,200 people would begin in the middle of 2012, about half of whom would be twins.

  Brodmann’s brain maps – in specific parts of the brain certain cell characteristics group together.

  The study of connectivity is ‘as hot as hot can get,’ according to Susan Bookheimer, a UCLA neuropsychologist and the head of the Organisation of Human Brain Mapping. But Bookheimer and her colleagues were naturally reluctant to put a timeline on delivering practical applications from the completion of the Connectome. And of course even with completion there will be other, bigger, more contemplative questions to answer. The questions of consciousness and human purpose, for instance. The eternal question of how to produce a 3-D map of the planet.

  Epilogue The Instant, Always-On, Me-Mapping of Everywhere

  The headquarters of Google Maps in Mountain View, California, contains the sort of diversions you’d expect in any standard office at the forefront of world domination – table football, table tennis, air hockey, a copious range of free quality snacks. The campus on which it stands, the Googleplex, also has a picnic area, a vegetable garden, cycle paths, massage rooms, a car wash, a dry cleaner, a crèche, a beach volleyball court, a dog parlour, a medical area with a dentist, a hairdresser and a carbon-free bus service to take you anywhere you’d like to go, personal security access permitting. There is visual humour too, such as the giant doughnut in an outdoor eating area, and the enormous red map pin outside the Google Maps building.

  Inside the Google Maps building there are other jokes, including a green road sign that hangs above a cubicle. ‘Welcome to Earth,’ it reads in a Douglas Adams way. ‘Mostly harmless!’ On the reverse: ‘Now Leaving Earth. Please check oxygen supply and radiation shielding before departing. Y’all Come Back Now!’ And then there are the wooden signposts. There are two of them, each about five-feet tall, deliberately chipped and distressed to resemble something from a hundred years ago, something from a mid-west hiking trail perhaps, or a post you’d hitch your horse to. But they were made in the first years of the twenty-first century, the period in which Google Maps did away with the need for signposts altogether, and established itself as the newest revolution in cartography since – in fact, it is hard to think of a similar event since the Great Library of Alexandria opened for business around 330 BC.

  The directions on the signpost point to the names of Googleplex meeting rooms, and read like the dead wood that they necessarily are: Eratosthenes, Marco Polo, Leif Ericsson, Sir Francis Drake, Ortelius, Vasco da Gama, Vespucci, Magellan, Livingstone, Stanley, Lewis and Clark, Shackleton, Amundsen and Buzz Aldrin. One day, perhaps, they will name a small plank on the signpost after Jens and Lars Rasmussen, the brothers who brought Google Maps to the world; or after Brian McClendon, the man chiefly responsible for inventing Google Earth.

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  I am standing with McClendon at Google’s eight-screen map-wall, also known as the Liquid Galaxy. He swoops around the world he helped create with the same planet-on-a-string omnipotence that was once enjoyed by Mercator, or maybe God. ‘This is really cool,’ he says as he zooms out to the spinning blue-green earth, before zeroing in on a basketball court in Lawrence, Kansas, his home town.

  When I visited in the spring of 2011 this was the big new thing – going inside buildings. It was still early days for internal mapping (McClendon said it would be a real palaver getting permission to take photos inside private homes), but it signified the company’s – and cartography’s – intentions: to map every place on earth in more detail than anyone had ever managed before, and in more detail than most people had previously considered necessary. It brought to mind the absurd vision of Lewis Carroll in his last novel Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, where the ultimate map was on the scale of a mile to a mile, or Jorge Luis Borges’ fantasy conceit On Exactitude in Science, published in 1946 but purportedly written in 1658, recalling a time when ‘the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it’.

  The whole wide world at your control: the Liquid Galaxy map wall at the Googleplex.

  This time, of course, the entire map of the world, inside and out, wasn’t being drawn to be big, but drawn to fit on a mobile phone. And it wasn’t really being drawn, but photographed and computerised, rendered and pixelated from street level and satellite level. It was the product of applied science, and as such it was impersonal, unemotional, factual and more accurate and current than any map we’ve ever used. And such a thing is useful: according to the research company comScore, about sixty million people per month used Google maps in the first quarter of 2012, and the company was by far the most dominant player, with 71 per cent of the market of online computer maps. On smartphones, Google had a 67 per cent share of the fifty million people who used mobile maps to get around. In the summer of 2012, Google estimated that about 75 per cent of the world’s population had been covered with its high-resolution maps; about five billion people could say they were able to see their house. But there was still a long way to go.

  Brian McClendon, a youthful-looking forty-eight in his Google uniform of polo shirt, jeans and trainers (he actually looked a bit like a young Bill Gates), was the first to admit that he was not a cartographer, despite the fact that he was in charge of Google Maps, Google Earth, Google Ocean, Google Sky, Google Moon and Google Mars. The clue was in his job title: Vice President of Engineering. His stated ambition was nothing less than a digital, instantly accessible live atlas of the entire world, something that would show not just the things that old-school atlases showed (major cities, geological facets, coastal contours, comparative data) but every house on every street and every car in every driveway. Then there would be the inside of buildings, enabling, say, a tour of the Louvre, and universal 3-D imaging with which to better judge distance and height, and then all that route-planning and live traffic information we’ve experienced with sat nav. Not forgetting all those apps that use Google to coordinate the other gimmicks on our computers and phones, such as photo location, the precise whereabouts of our friends, or (the ultimate dream of commerce) an app with the foresight to offer us a special deal just a few seconds before we walk past the shop where that special deal awaits. And that’s just on the ground in our cities; the wilderness too will be fully mapped, the poles and the deserts, and names will be apportioned by Google where none existed before, just like cartography of old. And don’t get McClendon started on the mapping of coral on the ocean floor, or the seamless recreation of craters of the Moon.

  In such a way Google would not only show the entire world, but also have the power not to show it; it had the power to control information in ways that the most crazed eighteenth-century European despot could only dream about. This ambition, and this power, is less than a decade old, and is already very far removed from Google’s original purpose when it began in 1998, which was to build a search engine which ranked web pages in order of popularity and usefulness (five years before there had been no need for such a company, for in 1993 there were only 100 websites in the world). But now ‘sea
rch’ wasn’t the dominant thing any more; it was allying the results of search to maps.

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  In the spring of 2005, Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder, wrote a letter to his shareholders in which he made clear that the company was keen on new directions. Accordingly there were several new products that had been (or were just about to be) launched, including Gmail, Google Video and Google Scholar. There was also Google Maps, which would provide planning and driving directions from the web, and Google Earth, a downloadable program providing almost sixty million square miles of stitched satellite images. The first of these developments was nothing exceptional to those familiar with the services of AOL’s MapQuest and MultiMap, although the increased speed at which the pre-rendered map tiles appeared on a screen and the integration of maps into Google search results was rather handy. But the introduction of Google Earth offered one of the Internet’s ‘hey wow’ moments. No one, with the possible exception of Neil Armstrong and friends, had been able to see the earth in this way before, swooping and zooming from zero gravity, breathlessly zoning in on places we had visited on our holidays and places we would never visit if we lived for ever.

  And where did people search first? The very same place they had looked for when they viewed the Mappa Mundi at the end of the thirteenth century, the place where they lived. ‘Always,’ Brian McClendon told me. ‘And every new version, people go and say how does my town or my house look.’ This is a part of human nature – the desire to know where we fit within the grander scheme of things. But it is also emblematic of the new form of cartography that Google and its digital counterparts represent: Me-Mapping, the placing of the user at the instant centre of everything.