The Map is not the Territory

The Map Is Not The Territory is a cryptic sounding phrase first publicised by Alfred Korzybski, a Polish-American scientist and philosopher in 1931. When the phrase is explained it becomes very clear and can serve to give you a good understanding of the "why" some people argue. 

So what is it......?

In short the phrase illustrates the differences between belief and reality, it suggests that our brains create our perception of reality which is called our "Map", which is written in neural patterns. Actual reality exists outside of our minds but we can construct models based on our glimpses of this reality which we receive through our senses, these models that we construct are known as our "Territory". 

The way that we come to these conclusions and the way that our maps are produced is through our internal perceptions of our external experiences. All of your thoughts, opinions, feelings and beliefs are a result of how you are perceiving that external event. To you, your thoughts, feelings, opinions and beliefs on something are YOUR reality, but it may not be the same as someone else's and the lack of this realisation can be the result of a lot of disagreements. 

Let me give you an example

Say that you were walking along the street and you see one of your friends on the other side, you call out to your friend to say "Hello", but as soon as you call out your friend picks up their pace and walks straight past without even glancing at you. 

Given this information, how do you perceive that event......? Common thoughts and questions that arise are:

"Why did they ignore me?"

"Have I done something wrong?"

"Are they annoyed with me?"

Now what you didn't see was that your friend was walking past you wearing their headphones listening to their favourite music or podcast so they didn't hear you and they picked up their pace because they were trying to catch a bus that they were late for. Given this new information do you still have the same thoughts and questions as you did before?

This is a very simple example but it shows how we can perceive a situation to be something other than what it actually is, part of the problem is that our brains filter out a lot of information because it can't process all of it, so it decides what is important and then discards the rest.

How can we make it easier to understand?

Given what we now know about how we perceive reality and what makes up our map we can change some of the words around in the phrase to make it clearer. 

"The Map Is Not The Territory"

Can quite easily to be changed to......

"Our Perception Is Not Reality"

Summary

By understanding this principle and remembering it in times of disagreement or conflict can aid you in coming to a peaceful resolution. Since knowing this I have been using to better understand the people around me and found that my relationships have got better. 

At the end of the day, all our map is, is a summary of what we deem to be the most important features. A key word there is deem, what our brain thinks are the most important features may not be, it may have filtered out some critical information to understand the situation better (like someone not hearing you because they're wearing headphones).

If you want to know more or if you have any questions please get in touch in the comments below.