Why the Atlas Feels Like Intuitive Visual Search

In this episode, Ted Shachtman talks about his discovery of the Mental Atlas Method, an imaginative new approach designed to strengthen memory retention. He explains how the method works, why it’s different from traditional techniques, and even guides Mike Rohde through a live trial so listeners can experience the process in real time.

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Running Order

• Intro
• Welcome
• Who is Ted Shachtman?
• Origin Story
• Ted's current work
• Sponsor: Concepts
• Where to find Ted Shachtman
• Outro

Links

Amazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast.

• Ted on LinkedIn(https://www.linkedin.com/in/ted-shachtman-70930b239/)
• The Mental Atlas Method(https://www.mentalatlasmethod.com/)

Credits

• Producer: Alec Pulianas
• Shownotes and transcripts: Esther Odoro
• Theme music: Jon Schiedermayer

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Episode Transcript

Mike Rohde: Hey everybody, it's Mike Rohde again. Got my friend Ted Shachtman here. Ted, how are you doing?

Ted Shachtman: I'm good. How are you?

MR: I'm good, man. It's good to have you. So, Ted is a very unique guest for the Sketchnote Army podcast in that he is someone who has discovered and has been developing this concept called the Atlas Method. Is that the right way to describe it?

TS: It's the Mental Atlas Method, but yeah, typically we just call it the Atlas usually.

MR: Yeah, yeah. After a while, you just sort of, the thing. You know, the thing we do. And so, I'm gonna have Ted talk about what he does in his origin story so he can say what it is. But I've experimented with this technique. And it's a way of improving or retaining memory, or I guess both those things. And I found it really fascinating. And I thought for visual thinkers to have expanded memory is always a good thing because in the work we do, where we're trying to take information, complex information, process it, make sense of it, and then put it on a board or on a screen or on a page, is really hard.

And anything we can do to expand our capacity, our cache, our whatever it is that we're using to process this is a benefit for us. And then additionally, the way that we're going to do a little demo, it actually gives the capacity for you to not have to draw anything, if you wish to. I think that would be a fair way to frame it, think?

TS: Yeah.

MR: Okay, so with that, Ted, tell us who you are and what you do.

TS: Sure. So as said, Schachtman. I am an educator and software engineer, and cognitive scientist. I went to Vanderbilt University for elementary education and cognitive studies. I've been a teacher for the past three years, and I'm also getting a master's in computer science. So the story with the Atlas was, in around November, and I asked myself this question, which was, how do I become the most general smart person? Like, almost like by the time I'm 50, how can I become just the best leader, CEO, researcher? And I kind of just embarked on this question and led me to a bunch of research, just kind of explored different paths, started visualizing things, talking while I was visualizing. And then the end result after about like eight months of constant work and research is the Atlas Method.

MR: So that leads me to the next question, of course, is tell us a little bit about the Atlas Method and how you developed it, in with the framing of an origin story like a superhero.

TS: Yeah, yeah. Okay. So, I personally have a really, really bad part of my brain that takes what I'm currently thinking and writes it to long-term memory. You know those games where everyone goes around in a circle and is like, okay, name your name and something you eat, like your favorite food. I'm terrible at that. I'm really bad at watching lectures. I have to watch a video six times. And I wanted to get rid of that because I've always been pretty creative. And I was always looking for some technique or something that would allow me to, I guess, learn faster.

And so, the actual origin story is I started talking out loud and visualizing at the same time back in October or November. And I would be analyzing some lecture I watched. And I noticed that as I was visualizing the lecture and talking out loud, it would really start to make more sense, like doing both of those things at the same time. And just happenstance, I would take another lecture I watched and be like, man, I want to compare between these. I would switch from like visualizing one to visualizing the other, and it would just be awful. Like I'd have to like go like, urgh! Like going from one to the other.

And one day, I just tried putting them in the same space, like visualizing one video here and the one video here, like right next to each other. And it felt so much easier. It felt like I was able to hold both in my mind at once. And this kept going. I would analyze around two at a time. And then one day I was like, all right, well, I want to get a third. I put a third one in there, and it worked. I stayed at three, and then I went to four.

And then I remember I had about nine full videos, like nine full 20-minute lectures all in the same visual space, and it was somewhat different than it had been before. Like, I started noticing connections between all the videos that I didn't typically find. And it stayed at this point. I'd visualize where 9 or 10 at a time. But I always had this idea that was, surely, I can't keep going, right? Surely nine, like it's impossible. I was like, what am I doing?

MR: Set boundaries.

TS: And then I started reading a lot of research. I started reading a lot of research that essentially said when people switch visual contexts, they lose so much information, and when people are searching from the same context, they can hold so much. Like visualizing someone's hometown, for instance, they can hold that whole thing, but as soon as you go hometown and then like a college campus, they incur so much cost. It's almost like it's hard to think of when you do that cost.

And so, the origin story, how this all started, is I was on a call with my friend Ben, and at this point, I've been telling him like, you know, my cognitive science ideas. You know, just techniques to try to improve this process, and he wasn't super into all of them. He would be like, "Okay, that's a fine one." And I told him the following idea. I said, it seems like if I actually stored everything in one big space, meaning not just nine videos, but every single video I watched, every concept I'd want to think about, in one big space, it seems like that should be more efficient, all the research points to that.

And I was waiting for him to say, all right, sure, maybe, but, you know. But he didn't. He paused for about 10 seconds and said, "You know, Ted, that's not a bad idea." And I just kept going with it. So essentially, the journey is exploring the following question. What if you take your hometown, like Memory Palace, like a method of loci style, and you're building these huge interactive visuals and doing a voiceover on top of them, like describing what you see, the patterns you notice.

And you just keep putting these huge visuals all around your hometown. And you don't stick with nine. You go higher and higher and higher. And so, I kept practicing this. And so, the real origin story, where I guess this technique became not just a way for me to remember things, but kind of the Atlas as it is today, is I was reasoning about one of the videos, and I noticed a pattern about one of them.

And as soon as I noticed that pattern, my visual attention just zoomed, snapped over to another one. And it felt like automatic. It almost felt like if somebody says, say you're looking at a wall of food in the grocery store, and someone says, find the cheese, and your eyes just go to the cheese. Except this happened with a really complex pattern.

And I was like, that was weird. And I added more videos to the Atlas, and it kept happening. And then I sat with a hypothesis. I did the following experiment. I visualized my bathroom and then said, find the sink. Found it, visual attention snapped there. You guys can try to follow along. I said, find the shower curtain. And that was fine. And then I visualized my hometown. Like my whole hometown, I said, okay, find the front door to my friend's house. Find the apples in the grocery store. And it snapped, just like that.

And I thought to myself, it doesn't seem to be any different to my visual system, whether I'm searching among my bathroom or whether I'm searching among my entire hometown. And this snap that I would get between simple objects like the apple in the grocery store or the shower curtain felt exactly the same as the snaps I was getting between these incredibly complex videos and the patterns in these complex videos.

And so, I really sat there and I said to myself, this seems preposterous, but the logic says that I should be able to scale this up. And as I scale this up, the snapping will work just as much, and I'll probably find a lot better patterns. And it turned out I was right. So it wasn't an easy journey. Many pitfalls, many weeks of me doing the wrong thing, not realizing why it was the wrong thing and then figuring out why.

But then the end results, I shared this in May on Reddit, an R/pneumonics, and it got a really, really great response. Like now it has like 10,000 views, like 60 upvotes, like 100 comments. And kept sharing it. Now it's getting researched by Professor David Uttal. It's got endorsements from a neurosurgeon neuroscientist who just found the technique. And it's kind of great. And I use it all the time, like eight hours a day, just to think. And you can use it to do some really, really amazing cognitive feats. So that's the origin story, superhero style.

MR: Wow. Wow, that's interesting, and it seems to me like when you tell that story, it feels like the brain just works this way, and you're sort of like reverse engineering the features in a sense, right?

TS: Yeah, yeah.

MR: Like so, like well, what if I plug this in here, just got a shock that's probably not good, you know what I mean, like it's almost like that, right?

TS: Yeah, the best way I guess to describe, like exactly what you're talking about is like your visual system has four properties. First one is huge, durable storage. You can like pull up your visual of your hometown, super easy, and it's super light on your mind too. Not only do you have the storage, it's like really easy to use. And then also the method of loci says you can write to that storage. You can like store if you want to remember, like your grocery list, you can store a picture of zucchini, and it's really durable.

And next, you have like semantic meaningful search across your whole visual space. Like the example I gave is you can find the pairs in your grocery store if you're searching in your hometown. Totally fine. And it's kind of like as soon as the idea of pair enters what you're thinking of, you just snap to it. So you have like search among this. And also, your visual system it doesn't only just represent like shapes and like objects, like a triangle, it can represent real meaning.

Like, if you try to pull up right now a visual of your family member, it feels like them. Like, when you pull up that visual, it feels like you're looking at the idea of them. And so essentially, the Atlas technique is asking, what can you do to make these things useful, where you have this one huge space where everything is durable? You have search across it, and you can store everything with tons of meaning. And through a lot of cognitive science and research and discovery, I guess.

MR: Experimentation?

TS: Yeah, experimentation. That's what the technique does.

MR: So when you first reached out to me, the first thing I thought of was Memory Palaces in the type of or the Momento Mori, is that?

TS: I think the name is--

MR: Is that the name of it? I'm not sure. Oh, yeah, maybe.

TS: Yeah, maybe. I think that's of loci. Yeah, yeah, I think it is, yeah.

MR: So talk to me about that concept and how this differs because I think that might be the most similar thing that someone listening or watching would snap to and think about, right?

TS: True. The method of loci is static, meaning--well, I guess here's the mechanical differences. With the method of loci, you don't use dual coding, meaning you don't verbalize, and you don't talk and look at the same time. And also, it's mainly to store just like objects. It's mainly for memory. With the method of loci, you walk around to remember things. With the Atlas, you actually never walk around. Like I remember in our demo, I actually instructed you to store things miles apart in your town. You don't walk in the Atlas. Instead, you snap around, just like that demonstration of find the apples in the grocery store, or find the front door to your friend's house.
Next, the mind palace is for memory, meaning if you want to remember all the digits of pi, use the mind palace. The Atlas is extending the mind palace to include those other features of your visual system, not just durable storage, but also the semantic search and the meaning. For instance, a lot of practitioners of the mind palace say, okay, it's useful, but let's say I want to use this to really for dynamic problem solving. I can't store the concept of supply and demand in a meaningful way where it's useful for reasoning. I can store like supply where it's like the word supply or like a supply drop or something.

MR: A symbol for it.

TS: Yeah, a symbol for it. Where the Atlas is fundamentally about reasoning and fluid reasoning, and I guess creativity and thinking, and intelligence usage and all that good stuff. It looks a little bit like the memory palace, it's built on that foundation, but it is fundamentally for a different purpose, which is, I guess, reasoning and learning.

MR: So this is like the extended capabilities would probably be attractive.

TS: Yeah.

MR: I'm thinking of a sketchnoter who we deal with concepts and metaphors and those kinds of things, or anybody doing visual thinking, those are kind of the places that we work. And I think there's something that struck me and I think about before, and that is that our brain--so our eyes are the way that we perceive the world. For those of us who can see, right? But effectively, what we see is translated by our brain, right, to mean something. So our brain is actually doing all the work to manufacture meaning, and we're sort of interpreting it in our brain.

So basically, what you're saying and in the test that we're going to do in a minute, I close my eyes, right, for some of it and imagine with my eyes closed. So in a lot of ways, the same tool that we might be using visually to draw and stuff is actually happening in the brain. It's just that we've trained ourselves as visual thinkers to take what we're seeing in our mind's eye and then translate it to the page or the screen or the board, and for graphic recorders, right?

TS: Yeah.

MR: So that stands to reason that if we could develop this capability of our mind's eye, in a sense, or this Atlas technique to visualize concepts that that would be really fascinating and potentially a game changer for visual thinkers. And I'm going to bring up somebody else who I know and I know has been experimenting with this, is my friend Andy Gray. And he's talked about--so his story, and I'm hoping to get him on the show soon.

His story was he went to an event. He was supposed to do graphic recording, which is basically this big board and markers. He listens to what's happening. He processes the information and he does a metaphorical or representative on this board of like the discussion. Both what the person says from the front and any reactions, right? He sort of tries to capture this. And normally, you do this inside on a stand with a board. But the guy decided, the speaker decided, hey everybody, let's go out and sit in the yard under the tree and I'll tell you for an hour and a half or whatever about this concept.

And so, Andy had been training himself with memorization techniques. I don't know that he's run across your techniques, so I've connected you with him. But basically, he sat out in the yard, and he basically used the techniques they did have to memorize the talk and then come back in and reproduce it on demand.

I thought that was really fascinating and that's where I think like this thing that we're talking about could be really valuable both for, let's say you know you're going to go into a complex talk, you can do the research on what this person's talking about, use the Atlas system to memorize the concepts and store them in your brain. So when you get on the board or on the page or the screen, you now have access to the concepts that they're talking about.

That often is a challenge with--so another friend, Rob DiMio, talks about the challenge he faced with sketchnoting scientific speakers. They kind of come in assuming you've read all their research up to that moment, right? And they'll present some new thing to you, assuming that you know all the basics. They're not going to give you a primer and talk to you about all the stuff prior. That's just not the way it works.

And he realized that. So he talked about when he started doing sketch noting of scientific talks, he would do a lot of research, but these were like amazing scientists that would come right to his installation, where he worked. So he would research them, learn about the basics, learn about their perspectives, and sort of build up this, group of knowledge before he then went to the event to listen to the thing they talked about. He now had background. And I could see again this atlas method being really fascinating way to do that preparation and have it immediately on demand in your mind by just closing your eyes, oh that, this and this and then and then making it happen, so.

TS: Yeah. So you speak to a pretty cool, I guess, novel ability of the Atlas, which is learning speed. So I have demos online that involve a couple other people, and other people can have also like tried this. And you've actually experienced this in the demo--

MR: Yeah.

TS: -where you watch really complex subjects. And the Atlas essentially allows you to absorb and remember and really understand conceptually the topics and videos really well in a way where you retain it excellently and you're able to use it immediately for creative tasks and reasoning. To speak to this use case of researching the scientist and then having it all right into your brain, that is absolutely an amazing use case where you really can with it learn quite quickly.

Like I referenced in the beginning of this talk how I guess what sparked this whole journey was my brain is not very good at learning. Meaning like, yeah, when I watch a lecture without the Atlas, I'd have to watch it like six times. With the Atlas, you can see the demos online, it's pretty quick. yeah, like I have no issue in, for instance, like watching like a 30-minute rules video on some complicated board game and then just playing immediately and knowing all the rules, which is a cool skill to whip out on game night.

MR: Yeah.

TS: But yeah, so that is a really awesome ability of the Atlas. Yeah, so thanks for bringing that up.

MR: Yeah. No, and when we were when we did the tests, we did a short version which will do a demo for you in a minute around goals and then we did a longer session, which Ted recorded it's up on his YouTube channel, where he walked me through watching videos and memorization techniques. It was pretty fascinating. And I'm pretty you know it was the first time I did it, and I was getting something out of it so I would imagine the more I practice the more natural it would become. But the thing that I sort of reacted to is that it's a little bit like the matrix you know, Neo goes in and they put the cartridge in he says, "I know Kung Fu," right? It's kind of not quite like that, but it's pretty close, right as close as we can get.

TS: Yeah, that is a good way to describe it. It's a little bit like when you're actually absorbing the concept, like something you're able to do is in real time, watch the video. And this is one of the coolest things that I guess I'm able to do is you in real time, watch a complex video and you're building the video as a 3D model in your head, and you're describing how this 3D model works. And at the end of the video, you've watched the whole thing in real time, you have it in your head. Like in a fully inspectable, full detail model, and it's super durable.

So in that way, it is like downloading Kung Fu. Like it feels very different than just watching the video regularly, where you're like, sure, yeah, I get it. Yeah, I get it, and then you end up you end the video and you're like, what was that again? With the Atlas instead, it's like it's literally right there, like the whole videos right there, and yeah, that is a really cool feature.

MR: And what you think about it is basically very intentional listening and building, so you're doing something in a lot of ways like sketchnoting visual thinking is over and above listening. So if you just go and sit and listen to a talk that's like level one, but if you can now like really intently listen and then the next level is I'm actually drawing the concepts. So, for me, I do sketchnoting physically with an iPad or a piece of paper and a pen or whatever because for me, once I switch into that mode, I am really engaged with the content. I'm really processing it. I think I'm using a lot of these features and don't realize that I'm using them. But then my purpose is to get them on the page in a concise, compact way.

As an example, when I go to church, I'll do the sermon and I use my iPad. I'll produce a sketch note. It's pretty basic. It's nothing fancy. And I send it off to the team, and it gets bound up with questions that people ask about the sermon in between weeks, right? So it serves me to help me to stay engaged, but then it actually produces a reference that other people can scan what the sermon was about in about five minutes and then have a discussion about it without having to watch the whole 40-minute thing, right?

I just think this could be really useful, and I think what we want to do is, Ted is gonna have me walk through a demo so you can actually see what it looks like and sounds like. I'll be the guinea pig. And I think before we begin, it would be helpful for you to describe like--because I think this audience would appreciate like describing for them maybe even individually like what are the components and how do they work together, before we do the demo? So then they as they're listening to me do this, they can sort of in their mind put together and make sense of what's happening.

TS: Totally, yeah. So a small note is this will only work for people who answer yes to a couple questions. You need a certain level of high visuospatial ability to really get the full benefits from it. So the first question is, can you visualize your hometown as a 3D model that you can fly around in? And it's almost like the whole thing doesn't--you don't have to wait for each part to load. It's kind of just like one big model you can fly around in.

The next question is can you stand outside of your house in your mind's eye and, without moving, confidently point in the direction of landmarks? For instance, you point in the direction of the library, point in the direction of your favorite restaurant. The next question is, when you're holding a visual, does it take a lot of focus? You don't want it to take a lot of focus. For instance, people who answer yes to this question can really easily just visualize the front of their house while they're talking, their eyes open. So if you answer yes to these three questions, then you can go ahead and follow along, and it'll work for you.

MR: Okay.

TS: So with that being said, the actual mechanisms of like, how is this thing gonna work? So it starts out just like the mind palace, where you're gonna visualize a place you know really, really well. Let's take your hometown. Then choose a specific spot you can clearly visually see, such as let's say in your house, let's say your kitchen table. What you're going to do is when you get a concept you want to put into your atlas, you're going to come up with a symbol, like an analogical symbol that represents the concept you're going to build that as a 3D model and you're going to put it on that spot in your house or in your big space.

And then once you've built that 3D model, you are going to while visualizing that 3D model talk and describe what you want that symbol to mean. So an example of this would be, say you want to understand the concept of heat stroke, you might visualize a bison falling over and panting, and a little sun above it. You might put that in your kitchen sink. And then while visualizing that bison with the sun over it, simultaneously, you might describe this is the concept of heat stroke.

Some examples of heat stroke are a runner who's running a marathon and they get too hot, or a bison who's been out in the sun too long. So while you're saying that, you want to be simultaneously visualizing the 3D model. That's pretty much the only mechanism you use to actually put things in your Atlas. And then we'll figure out, we'll see later what it looks like to actually use the Atlas to solve a pretty cool, I guess, goals task, where you plan for what goals, you want to accomplish.

MR: Okay. So Ted and I talked a little bit, and we thought it might be fun to do the first test that I did, in maybe an abbreviated banner just for time purposes. And that was to set goals using this technique for something that I need to do this week. I've got plenty of things that need to be done. So it seemed like a really logical thing to do. So with that framing, why don't you go ahead and start the test, and then we'll run it. And I think maybe let's go for like two goals just for time purposes. I think I have two goals in mind I can pick.

TS: Yeah, perfect. Okay, so the first step is choose a spot in your hometown that you can clearly see.

MR: Okay, got it.

TS: Okay, and where is it?

MR: I think for this demonstration, I'm sitting at my dining room table.

TS: Sure, great. So now what's the first goal?

MR: So the first goal is I need to pull some weeds today, now that it's cool, it's been blazing hot, so.

TS: Great. Awesome. So, can you come up with an analogical symbol that represents this idea of needing to pull weeds? An example might be you reaching down and literally pulling weeds.

MR: Yeah. The physical act, yeah. I can imagine the weeds that I need to because I've seen them a lot and I can imagine--actually it's very satisfying this particular weed when you pull it it's sort of like if you pull little bit it actually pops and the whole root comes out with it so I can use that--I can imagine that.

TS: Cool. Okay. So now take that 3D model and put it on your dining room table.

MR: Okay.

TS: Okay, now, while visualizing the 3D model you just put on your dining room table, describe what you want this to represent.

MR: Okay.

TS: So here's the best way I found people can understand what this task is. Imagine if you just drew this 3D model on a whiteboard and then a whole room of people are wondering, like, what does this thing mean? Like, what does this mean in the rest of the lecture? Now, you need to be visualizing the 3D model you built the whole time while you're talking. You can imagine if your eyes are going somewhere else, or if you're like picturing something else, or you're not even picturing it, that's like you're pointing at something else on the whiteboard, and the whole class is like, what's this guy talking about? So as long as you're visualizing a 3D model the whole time and you're speaking, describing what this symbol is supposed to represent, it's gonna work. So give it a shot.

MR: Okay, all right, here we go. So I'm sitting at my dining room table, and here we go. So I'm imagining me pulling out these weeds, which have a nice satisfying pop as the root comes out. So I need to pull the weeds on the east side of the house because they've grown outrageously high in the sun and the heat, because my wife is being frustrated by these weeds being there, and she would be happy for them to be gone. So tonight, after dinner, when it's cool, I will go out and I will spend 15 minutes pulling as many weeds as possible.

TS: Awesome. Okay. So you just executed the three steps, which is choose a spot, make a model, and then do a voiceover. Now you're just going to repeat those, but like we referenced earlier, you're not going to put this on a journey. You're not going to walk between these. Instead, find a place in your hometown that's like miles away from this spot. And let me know when you have it and where it is.

MR: Okay, I think I picked a good spot.

TS: Okay, and where is this?

MR: So this is a little coffee shop that's about a mile away.

TS: Cool, awesome. So now, what's your second goal?

MR: So my second goal is I'm helping a friend with a logo, and I need to do the style guide for this logo. So colors and rules and such.

TS: Okay. Awesome. So now what's a 3D model that might represent as a symbol this goal?

MR: Well, in this case, I've got a logo so I can actually imagine her logo and make that into a 3D model, which would make a lot of sense here.

TS: Yeah, so go ahead and place that in the coffee shop.

MR: Okay, got it.

TS: And now do the voiceover. What does this symbol mean? What do you want this to mean?

MR: All right, so this is the Westfall Law logo design. I produced the logo, the customer is pleased with it, but now I need to take the logo and produce the branding document or rules so that when the logo is passed off to printers and other people that need to use it, they will have references to colors and limitations, and good and bad uses for the logo.

TS: Awesome. So, now you have two icons in your Atlas. You can use these to reason about a problem. So, this would work for if you had like 20 goals. We actually did a demonstration earlier where you had more goals. But since we have two, it's totally fine. The task you're going to do is now come up with a plan that accomplishes both goals. And your job is to come up with a synergy plan. So don't be like, I want to pull the weeds and then do the logo. So, an example might be like, okay, if I pull the weeds on Tuesday, then I'll be too tired to work on the logo. So you want to see how they interact.

And what you'll notice while you're doing this is when you're focused on one and you're analyzing it, as soon as you notice something that would have to do with the other goal, your visual attention will just snap. You won't have to go, I remember that it has to do with this other goal, and then you'll move your visual attention over manually. It'll just happen.

And the other thing you'll notice is as soon as your visual attention snaps over, the entire idea of the second goal is going to hit your mind immediately. And you'll kind of just understand how these two things interact. So what you're going to want to do to start is visualize just one of your goals, and you can talk out loud and start analyzing it and try to be almost as abstract as you can, like analytical as you can when you're analyzing it.

MR: Okay, I think I'll start with the second first and see if somehow the weeds relate to my logo problem.

TS: Sure. Yeah.

MR: All right, so I'm going close my eyes. I'm sitting at the cafe and imagining this logo. So the reason that I need to work on this is, conceptually there's a problem when logos tend to go to third parties, is they tend to screw them up. They use the wrong colors, they put them in the wrong proportion, they stretch them. There's weird things that happen with logos. And if I don't define how I want them to appear, all bets are off, and it could appear in any number of ways. So the goal around doing this guide is so that those people who use the logo have a clear idea of what it is they need to achieve, and then they can produce the logo in the right context in the right way to make my client happy.

And as I'm thinking about this, actually, this is pretty weird, but there's something visual about pulling the weeds on that side of the house that I'm imagining that just come to me. So it's oddly enough that the idea of the weeds just automatically snapped into mind. And there's something about the alignment, like I'm defining for my house how I want the plants to operate, and weeds are not part of that plan. Is that weird? Okay, that's like pretty bizarre. Like I didn't--

TS: Yeah, yeah.

MR: Okay.

TS: Yeah, that's actually kind of the really cool part of the Atlas. The types of connections you find are not like, oh, you know, this is this has colors. The weeds are like have a color. It typically works on extremely deep, unintuitive, creative abstract pattern finding. So the when you say like, was that weird? Is that a weird thing to snap to? That's actually like why it's good.

MR: Okay.

TS: So the what happens when instead of storing like two goals, right, two pretty simple concrete things, what happens when you store something like 16 lectures, which is one of the demos I did, is you'll be analyzing one of the lectures, like the anatomy of the heart, and you'll notice something where it's like a bilateral mechanism. And as soon as that idea enters your mind, you'll just snap over to some other lecture that in incredibly abstract way shares this pattern.

And in a way that you just wouldn't have thought of. And if someone said, up with something that like complicated and abstract, what you'd essentially have to do is hold the idea of one topic in your mind and then iterate through every other topic. I mean, like go over one by one and go, does this have this exact pattern? Does this have this exact pattern? Which is just really slow and also not fun.

MR: Right. Yeah.

TS: With the Atlas, you almost get a different mechanism. It essentially asks this question across in your Atlas. Let's say you notice a pattern like you did when you were designing the logo, or you were fitting the logo to exactly what you wanted it to be. What essentially happened in your Atlas is that pattern, that complex idea, entered your thoughts, entered your working memory. And it got sent down to the part of your brain that stores the Atlas. And it asks this wonderful question. What object in the entirety of Mike's hometown is this pattern?

And it evaluates this in parallel. It goes to your couch in your living room, and goes, is this this incredibly abstract pattern of designing the space? And it's not. And it goes to every single object. And there's one that's more that pattern than the others, which is you designing your house and pulling the weeds. It's like a big competition where all of these circuits in your brain that represent the objects in your hometown compete, and the one that matches this pattern the best wins, and you just snap to it immediately. You experience this in less than a fraction of a second.

MR: Right.

TS: You experience this as just a connection and the real like I guess magic or wonder of the Atlas and why it's kind of like the realization I came to in the origin story which is what happens at scale is you did this with two items, right? You did this with two goals. The question is, what happens when you practice this for nine months? Like I have in my case, and you have not two things, but you have 4,500 things. And the objects aren't simple goals, but like really complex lectures.

Essentially what happens is you will snap to the best pattern, but it's not the best pattern among two things. You snap to the best pattern among all the things. And so, what practitioners at the Atlas get when they scale up is incredibly unintuitive and wonderful connections. Well, they'll be analyzing some lecture and then they'll just snap to some lecture they've watched months ago that they wouldn't have thought of this ever, but it has the exact same underlying abstract structure.

Like in your experience, when they snap to it, the entire connection and idea just kind of pops into mind at once. And the really, really cool part is for typical cognition, that task is tough, like almost impossible. If you ask somebody, if you give someone just a concept, and you say, generate a super abstract, deep analogy with something else. People struggle as in experimentally, this is like an impossible task. With the Atlas, it's easy.

And you might be wondering, why does that task matter? Like, why would I want to see connections? Throughout history and in the research of like, what makes a good scientist? What makes someone who can actually make breakthroughs in fields? It typically is someone who is more skilled at seeing connections between different things that nobody else can.

MR: Hmm. That's really fascinating. Going back to that, I was totally focused on describing the logo problem, and the idea of how the plants fit it just snapped themselves onto what I was talking about that was really interesting. So that brings me to another interesting question is if your brain always finds the best match. Let's say you've now got 4500, let's say it brings to you an idea that's the best match, can you tell your brain, or you can enact this activity that says what are the other 10 things that are similar? Can it do that kind of stuff?

TS: Yeah. Yeah.

MR: Okay.

TS: You can. Yeah, so the way it feels is like you snapped the best match, but you almost get this tingly feeling, how people describe it, where if you hit something. Like say in my Atlas, I go like the color green, that almost goes like, it's almost like it's too bright in my eyes.

MR: Yeah, it's too many things, right? A lot of green things in there.

TS: Yeah, but when I hit on something that's maybe like four patterns, it feels like a burst and almost like I have to fight to not think--to think of them one by one. When it gets to around 10, it's a little overwhelming. If I search for something like rotation, that's a little uncomfortable because there's just too many things. It's like, what do you mean rotation? There's hundreds of things that have rotation.

MR: Right.

TS: But yeah, you generally cannot just find one best match, but you can find 10 if you just keep searching in this really, really cool way. And then also allows you to do an amazing feat, I guess, which is you notice a pattern, and then you snap to something that has that pattern. You start analyzing this, you snap to something else that has that pattern, you snap to something else that has that pattern, and you get like 10 items deep all within the span of 20 seconds where you just snapped all these 10 things. And you sit there with yourself and go, what's going on? I just have 10 abstract ideas, like how a Vibro hammer works or how back propagation works or something really, really complicated subject.

And you notice this abstract pattern among all 10 of these lectures that you had no idea existed. And you sit there, and you go, wonder what this thing is. And you actually get to explore. typically, personally, if I try that task without the atlas, I literally can't. The act of thinking across 10 things at once and rapidly finding patterns across just things you've learned in the past. I can't do. With the Atlas, though, I can. And this experience is shared by at least like, I guess, 15 people now who have active testimonials saying they experience this exact same thing.

MR: So it almost seems like our brain has the capacity there and like us trying to manually brute-force it is not a great solution. It's better to just work with a system that exists like the giant river, right, or whatever.

TS: Yeah. Yeah.

MR: I mean the other question I had with the last question I'll ask before we go to where to find this reference is could you theoretically sit and say you know work snap through these things and then group them like imagine a new place and then take all these things that relate to each other and then drop them down in this new place and have another, almost like a grouping so you could take those 4500, take a subset and then group them and stick them in a new place and now this becomes--it's still the same 4500, but now you've got a different grouping that could then all these things related to rotation that I think are important are now in a place could you do that?

TS: So, you can't do that specifically, but the intention of what happens when you notice an abstract pattern, like how do you store that? That is actually so wonderful. You can do the same thing that you would do with a heat stroke icon, which is what we call the visuals. You essentially, let's say you notice this rotation pattern in 110 items. You make that itself an icon and it turns this abstract idea into this concrete thing that you can then see and manipulate. And you can do this at infinitum, where typically when I'm thinking, I'll think of around 20 things at once, and I'll find patterns among them, and then I'll notice a pattern, I'll make an icon, and then I'll notice another pattern among the 20, and I'll make another icon, and then I'll notice a pattern between the icons, and so I make an icon. And you end up with this pretty expansive system--

MR: Network really. Yeah.

TS: -or just map of this sea of abstractions, but they don't feel hard to think about at all. The way a medical student who found the technique describes it is when you get experienced with the Atlas, it feels like walking through your imagination. And I really, really like that verbal description. It very much does feel like that, where you have pretty much everything you've thought of, every thought you've had since you've been using the Atlas, at your fingertips. And you can just see it all, like all at the same time. And you would think this is exhausting or heavy, but it's not. It feels light.

MR: Only because our brains have built over a long time to work in this way, and we're just uncovering these functionalities it seems like.

TS: Yeah.

MR: So Ted, I think the next thing we need to do is just tell people where they can go to see the demos, to read the materials, like what's the best place to go or best places to go.

TS: Sure. Yeah, you can take a look at the Mental Atlas Method, sorry, mentalatlasmethod.com. We have all the resources there, links to the demo, me and you did, a couple other demos, the research, all the testimonials. And then also reach out if you're interested in doing research or learning more about the method, or you think you have something to contribute to this burgeoning idea. Yeah, absolutely reach out.

MR: Well, this seems like the right audience to ask that question of because these are typically visual thinkers who I can imagine could imagine their hometown and do this visualization pretty straightforwardly so you might have a nice collection of regular people who can do the tests.

TS: Yeah, true.

MR: Cool. Well, Ted thanks so much for making time to be on the show and explain this and do this little demo. And, you know, I was thinking like well what if it doesn't work, and it did, so I don't know what to think about this, but it's pretty cool and I you know I'm still trying to figure out like how do I integrate this, but I think it's great to have the option, and I'm gonna keep on working it, so thanks so much for making time to be here.

TS: No problem. Awesome. Thank you, Mike. My pleasure.

MR: Well for everyone who's watching or listening it's another episode in the CAN, we'll see on the next episode of the Sketchnote Army podcast.