Mapping Mental Space

Mental space is a term introduced by Lucas Derks. It refers to the internal place where we visualize images, events, values, and concepts. Derks is particularly interested in this concept within the context of the “social panorama”—how the location of a person’s image in your mental space determines your attitude toward them. Friends occupy one area, enemies another, and neutral people a third. Similarly, family members, coworkers, and residents of your hometown each have their own places. In other words, every category of people has its own spot.

According to Derks, in the context of the social panorama, the coordinates in mental space—distance, direction, and height—are more important than other submodalities like brightness, size, or color of the image.

Mapping Your Mental Space

In my experience, this rule also applies to other categories, such as values, important concepts, goals, time, and so on. It’s fairly easy to map your own mental space by identifying the locations of important categories for each context and understanding the meaning of the main coordinates.

Afterward, if you wish, you can move objects—values, people, beliefs, goals, concepts—from one category to another: make a concept into a value, make a person neutral, make a goal easily achievable, or make a belief less important. You can also adjust the position of objects in this space: bring a person closer, move a goal’s realization sooner, or make a value more significant.

Coordinates

To determine a location in mental space, you need a coordinate system. Here, it’s not a rectangular Cartesian system, but rather a cylindrical one. The main coordinates are:

• Distance to the image
• Height: Some people prefer “from the floor,” others “from eye level,” or another reference point
• Right/Left: For convenience, you can use the clock method—straight ahead is 12 o’clock, right is 3, left is 9, and behind is 6

In different contexts, changes in these coordinates (submodalities) mean different things. For example, the distance to an image when imagining events usually determines the intensity of the experience; in the context of time, it indicates how near or far an event is; in social relationships, it shows how close a person feels to you.

Frameworks and Variations

Timeline

One of the most well-known frameworks for organizing mental space is the timeline. It helps you organize situations by time—what’s in the past, what’s in the future, and what’s happening now.

Note that the timeline is often logarithmic: an event happening in a week might be a meter away, in a month—two meters, in a year—three, and in ten years—four meters. Once you know how your timeline is currently organized, you can play with the images on it, such as making important goals larger and placing them more clearly on the line. You can also adjust the timeline itself—change its angle, move the past from behind you to your lower left, or make the timeline (not) pass through your body, and so on.

Social Panorama

The social panorama is a framework for social interactions. Depending on which category you assign a person—friend, enemy, relative, family, coworker, authority—their image will be in a different place in your mental space. Each category has a specific location. By moving a person’s image (or a group’s) from one place to another, you can shift them from one category to another: from trusted to untrusted, from close to distant.

You can also adjust the social panorama itself—the location of categories. For example, if higher/lower represents importance for you, you can “lower” the importance of the “enemies” category and bring the “people I trust” category closer (whatever that means for you).

Value Space

Another mental space framework is the organization of things that matter to us: values, anti-values, criteria, and global concepts like “meaning of life,” “purpose,” or “mission.” Although these are all formally values—important things—for a specific person, they may be different categories. For example, you might have separate spaces for:

• What you call “values”
• “Anti-values”—things you want to avoid in your life
• Global concepts: “meaning of life,” “purpose,” “enlightenment,” “mission,” “self-development”
• “Criteria,” including values that serve as criteria
• “Essential states”
• And so on

Exercise

1. Make a list of things that are important to you and divide them into categories, such as values, anti-values, “global concepts,” and goals.
2. Identify the location in your mental space for each category.
3. Determine the meaning of the mental space coordinates in this context: height, distance, right/left.
4. Specify each “important thing” and find a more “appropriate” place for it in your mental space.

The last step often happens automatically as you clarify each item.

“General Cleanup” Technique

This technique is described by Richard Bandler in his book “Time for a Change.” It’s an example of using different locations for categories in your mental space for rapid change. You identify locations for four categories:

• Natural/Want: Qualities you have, are satisfied with, and don’t want to change (at least for now)
• Natural/Don’t Want: Qualities you have but would like to remove or change
• Not Natural/Want: Beliefs, qualities, or skills you don’t have but would like to acquire (these can be someone else’s traits or things you once had)
• Not Natural/Don’t Want: Things you don’t have (even if you once did) and don’t want to have

The process is to safely get rid of what you have but don’t want by moving it to the “not natural/don’t want” area, and to add qualities and beliefs you want by moving them from “not natural/want” to “natural/want.” This way, you can change several beliefs, qualities, or values each week.

Projections

For convenience, you can project your mental space (for a specific framework) into a more tangible modality. For example, write your values on pieces of paper and lay them out on a table—this way, you can see the whole picture and easily move the papers around. You can also substitute coordinates; for example, use rotation instead of height.

Other Frameworks

Here are a few more frameworks you can experiment with in your mental space:

• Goal space: Level of importance, difficulty, size, time to achieve
• Problems/tasks
• Event space: Pleasant/unpleasant, ease of handling, importance
• Knowledge space: Have/don’t have information, understand/don’t understand, important/not important