Mental Space Mapping

The term “mental space” was introduced by Lucas Derks. Essentially, it refers to the place where we see our internal images—events, values, 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 in this space, enemies another, and neutral people a third. Similarly, family members, coworkers, and residents of your hometown will each have their own locations. In other words, every category of people has its own place.

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

Mapping

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

After this, 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 turn a belief into just a not-so-important statement. You can also adjust the location of objects in this space: bring a person closer, make a goal happen sooner, or make a value more important.

Coordinates

To determine a location in mental space, we need a coordinate system. Here, it’s not a rectangular Cartesian system, but a cylindrical one (pardon the math). So, we have:

• 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 o’clock, left is 9 o’clock, behind is 6 o’clock

In different contexts, changes in these coordinates (submodalities) will 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 is to you.

Examples

Timeline

One of the most well-known frameworks for organizing mental space is the timeline. It helps organize situations by time—these are in the past, these are in the future, this is happening now.

Note that the timeline scale is usually logarithmic—a week from now might be a meter away, a month two meters, a year three meters, and ten years four meters.

Knowing how your timeline is currently organized, you can play with the images on it. For example, you can make images of important goals larger and place them more clearly on the timeline.

You can also “tweak” the timeline itself—change its angle, make the past not behind you but to your lower left, or have the timeline (not) pass through your body, and so on.

Social Panorama

The framework for social interactions is the “social panorama.” 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. In fact, each of these categories has a specific location in your mental space. By moving a person’s image (or a group’s) from one place to another, you can shift them from one category to another: people you trust to people you don’t trust, close person to distant person.

You can also adjust the “social panorama” itself—that is, the location of categories. For example, if higher/lower means importance to 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 are important to us: values, anti-values, criteria, global concepts like “meaning of life,” “purpose,” or “mission.”

Although these are all formally values—important, significant things—for a specific person, they may be different categories. For example, separate spaces can be for:

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

As an exercise:

1. Make a list of things that are important to you and divide them into categories, for example: values, anti-values, “global concepts,” 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”

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

You find a place in your mental space for four categories:

• Characteristic/want: what is characteristic of you, what you’re satisfied with and don’t want to change (at least for now)
• Characteristic/don’t want: what you have but would like to remove or change
• Not characteristic/want: beliefs, qualities, skills you don’t have but would like to acquire; these can be someone else’s traits or things you once had
• Not characteristic/don’t want: things that aren’t characteristic of you (even if they once were), and you don’t want them

The whole process is about safely getting rid of what you have but don’t want by moving it to the “not characteristic/don’t want” area, and adding qualities and beliefs you want by moving them from “not characteristic/want” to “characteristic/want.”

This way, you can change several beliefs, qualities, or values per week.

Projections

For convenience, you can project your mental space (for a specific framework) into a more convenient 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 swap out certain 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 to achieve, size, time to achievement
• Problems/tasks
• Event space: pleasant/unpleasant, how easy it is to handle, level of importance
• Knowledge space: have information/don’t have information, understand/don’t understand, important/not important

Conclusion

In my opinion, mapping mental space for categories of different frameworks can be a (relatively) new direction in NLP development, allowing you to easily and effectively work with a person’s sets of representations and providing new tools for optimizing and changing these representations.