Blurry Maps: On the Road and In Your Head

Here’s an article that I wrote a few years ago while I was still working as a Travel Physical Therapist (hence the road map analogy), but I think the message is still (and maybe always will be) relevant! Enjoy!

-Dr. Sean

Blurry Maps: On the Road and In Your Head

We were about to hit the road, starting the long journey to our next assignment—a cross country trek from South Carolina to California. We had plans to stop in several cities along the way and were going to make an entire week’s adventure out of the otherwise dreadful 40-hour haul.

You’d think that a couple of bright, young professionals like us would be able to self-navigate our way to California. Just head left, right?

When I get into my car to go someplace unknown, I instinctively plug the address into my smartphone, as I assume most of you do as well. We have a map to anywhere in the world with precise turn-by-turn directions at our fingertips. But what would we do if that map decided not to load one day? What if your GPS was steering you wrong, telling you to turn left when there is clearly a lake to your left? (Shout out to Michael Scott)

How would you feel when the map is blurry, illegible, or feeding you misinformation? Personally, I get pretty annoyed when I don’t have the information I want after about 5 seconds—I don’t care if the information is coming from outer space…I want it now!

Do you, the operator of the vehicle, feel safe when you have no clue where you’re going? Add some fog; now you can’t see more than a few feet in front of you. Would you drive fast? Would you slow down? What if there are no road signs to help guide you? I’m starting to panic as I write this…

Keep that in mind, but let’s shift gears.

Our brains, the metaphorical drivers of our flesh ships, rely on information coming in from our senses in order to make sense (pun very intended) of our environments. Your senses are your brain’s only access to the outside world. The brain is otherwise trapped in the dark cave that is your noggin, like a driver in a car surrounded by fog.

Having a clear picture of our environments, both internal and external, allows us to navigate our world with fluidity and grace. Don’t believe me? You should see me dance. GRACEFUL.

But imagine that you wake up in the middle of the night and nature is calling. Your bathroom is on the other side of the dark house and you’re only half awake. Maybe you forgot to turn on the nightlight like a real asshole. How does your movement look? Are you gracefully dancing to the bathroom? Probably not. Your movement is likely somewhat stiff, slow, and apprehensive. Without clear input from our senses our external environment is somewhat threatening, and we will see changes in our movement.

The same can happen with our internal environments. You actually have a map of your entire body embedded in your brain’s “somatosensory cortex.” That’s a fancy way of saying that a slice of your brain is dedicated to you feeling stuff. When someone touches your arm, receptors in your arm send signals to your brain, your brain processes those signals, and responds with a sensation of touch on the arm. Very complex, but overall pretty simple. Touch, temperature, pressure, vibration, MOVEMENT—they all send signals to your brain, and those signals help to keep that map clear. Your brain relies on this information to keep a crystal-clear map.

Let’s use my Great Aunt Debbie as an example. She doesn’t actually exist, but in this hypothetical, she is very sedentary. She can’t be bothered to exercise unless it’s stamping her bingo card or reaching to pinch my cheeks. I’m 27 years old, Debbie, quit pinching my damn cheeks.

She hardly moves—let alone moving in new ways—so her brain map is not being constantly refined by all those great signals we were just talking about. Her brain’s map of her body is akin to the constantly buffering GPS map that we couldn’t load in paragraph 4. Her brain has no clue what is going on in different parts of Debbie’s body because the map is blurry. This is a phenomenon known as cortical smudging. Her brain finds these “blurry” body parts to be a threat and thinks it would be valuable to give Debbie some low back pain. Ideally, this pain is a motivator to move more. Unfortunately, the opposite often happens.

Debbie is afraid to move because of pain, and the map gets blurrier and blurrier. She falls into a vicious cycle of chronic pain, and never starts a business with her daughter, Little Debbie. How terrible! If only she had seen a PT who could help her with her pain! Oatmeal cream pies for all!

Okay, maybe a little far-fetched, but you get the point. We will get into addressing cortical smudging and blurry maps in another blog post, but for now:

If you’re a clinician—consider the signals that you are sending to your client’s nervous system.

If you’re a human—move more of yourself more often and keep your brain map sharp.

If you’re a driver—throw an atlas in your glove box. You never know when your maps will get blurry.