How do you remember the road? - graph theory

My travelling history - and how I remember the road.

Oh.. amount of travelling I have done. Four hours on the road for eight years in a row. From home to school, from school to home. It deserves a blog article, or two, as it is just the tip of the ice burg when it comes to my time on the road. Even in UK I took the bus most of the time, out of convenience and met the nicest bust driver ever. Yet, this article is about the memory.

Buses: https://unsplash.com/@kingtographer

I used to travel in the front seat of the local bus. Unlike UK Buses these Indian built TATA and Layland Buses were worn off ones when fully loaded they even tilt a bit to the side, giving me anxiety of impending tipping over feeling every bend. Yet never once it happened. And I survived to tell you the story of how I remember the roads.

As you can understand the travelling by bus is a boring affair. There is no novelty in it. Same roads, same bends, same boring routines day after day, I was kind of hoping it would end. But did not and would not. Often, I would remember the road. I can go back to my memory and access every junction in the 18 km ride from my school to home. Every bend, every major landmark, but here is an interesting fact, I can do it in five minutes! Faster than it takes for me to travel by bus. How is it possible? Did you ever think about this?

The reason you can memories an entire journey even faster than you travel is because the way we store memories. We just keep the snapshots of the past in our memory. If you go back to all the junctions of the way to your work and try to remember, you will only recall just a couple of snapshots. On either direction. And more you will remember in places where vehicle slow down, like bus stops or junctions. As it allows your mind more time to process information. (In mindfulness slow is new fast) So, you are not reliving the entire journey, just skipping from junction to junction Like a myelinated A type neuron and no wonder it is faster than the bus, which is a C type slow neuron.

London underground and graph Theory.

Maps: https://unsplash.com/@stalebg

This is not a new wisdom. I had my hands on the London underground the other day and guess what all the railway lines were shown in a half a page map. As they only wanted to show the pivot points and the connections. even it did not need to represent the bends accurately as, nobody would know the tunnels, only the stations make sense. This easy representation of a mental map of places, just like the one in my and your head, is expanded to form the modern graph theory.

Graph theory is the mathematical model used to represent maps, in a mathematical way. It is just simple to memories of the road from home to school. But it is entire new thing to find out the best and shortest route between two points in united states, from west cost California to New York. And trying to figure this out by hand is impossible. Hence mathematicians invented graph theory and there are many applications from google bot crawlers to efficient Scheduling of London Subway. But I am more interested in mindfulness aspect of it.

As I see even though I thought, I kind of "know" the road to school. I just know few nodes of the entire journey just a simple "Map". It's even worse than Google street view. But is accurate enough for me to find the way back if I broke down the bus and my phone is out of battery. But, If I chose to walk a couple of bus stops, and observed, I would make an entirely different representation of things which I thought I "Knew". I would see the roofing of the houses, shelter homes, nurseries and closed church gates on Sundays. No wonder the tourists who walk on the bridges of London enjoy it more than the Londoners. Try next time to be a tourist in your own city if you want to know this firsthand.

Just a tower: https://unsplash.com/@norbuw

I can conclude by saying, no matter how much I try, the past, would just be just an approximated "map" of the present. I wonder this even exists outside those snapshots. What do you think?