Can’t see? Try Mental Map Making

Published: March 26, 2021, 8:21 p.m.

So far, everything I have discussed, and the tips to go along, can be done sitting down. If getting up and walking around are not in your wheelhouse, there are many more things you can do, but for now, I want to shift to walking around. I'll get back in future episodes of Blind How to the wide range of stuff you can do without needing to walk. Let me just skip right over how easy walking around is if you can see. I can't see and walking around is for me, a daily challenge. Let's also get past the notion that, even though you can't see, it's possible for you to learn to walk around, never tripping, bumping into things, knocking things over and not even occasionally banging your head or other sensitive area into a wall or stray chair. Maybe someone who can't see, somewhere, but not me and most likely, not you either. Bumps, bruises and similar annoyances are inevitable, if walking around is in your daily routine. I have a robot vacuum cleaner that has learned to vacuum the floors in my house, without any additional directions or intervention. Okay, it only usually vacuums my house without any intervention by me, except when it gets stuck or can't find its way back to its dock. I call it Jake. If it successfully vacuums and returns to its dock, I can say, "That's just Jake." If it gets stuck or can't find its way home, that's just a Jake mistake. Here's the point. Jake made itself a map of my house which it now uses to vacuum. With a little human help, it knows where each room is, how to get from room to room and its way back to its dock, most of the time. Making its map took a while, but it is pretty independent now. Just Jake, don't you think? Here's the deal. I'm smarter than Jake, and so are you. I can make a mental map of my house and can use it when walking around. Making my mental map took a while, but now that I have it, walking around my house is just Jake, most of the time. Step one is to make the mental map of my space. I have one for my house and others for places I regularly go. When I go to a new location, I immediately start making a mental map of that place. The longer I am at a specific location and the more often I return there, the better my mental map for that location gets. "How do I make a mental map," you ask? If possible, I get someone to show me around, I ask about the location where I am, I listen to the sounds and noises around me and to what people around say about where things are and what they look like. Over time, I collect more and more data about the place. The more data I collect and the more familiar I become with the location, the more useful my mental map becomes. Is that the end of it? Is having a really good mental map of a place all there is to it? Would that that were true. I could just focus on my mental map and walk around with no mistakes, errors or issues. But instead of being the end of it, having a working mental map is what gamblers call table stakes. You need that mental map just to get into the walking around game. Without it, you are lost and would be well-advised to stay seated. At least, in your chair, you aren't likely to bump into a wall or trip over the dog toys on the floor. – But if that's not Jake for you, make a mental map everywhere you are and everywhere you go. That's enough to think about for this episode of Blind How. In the next and future episodes, I will have some tips and suggestions for making mental maps and for how to use them, successfully and safely. Here's a hint: it's all about the angles.