Preframe: This post plays with the idea of using physical space as a metaphor for the layout of our inner worlds, and it explores some ways to potentially use concrete math to make maps of this “psychological space”. It is important to me to start by acknowledging that there is so much more to the human experience than could ever be categorized, mapped, or measured. This conversation is not meant to constrict our relationships with ourselves, but instead to muse and expand on existing psychological studies in a way that might offer some new perspectives and tools for relating with the beautiful, complex, and mysterious beings we are.
Do our inner worlds have a shape? A psychological equivalent of a physical landscape? If so, can we make maps of this inner space? Can we do calculable math to learn more about who we are?
This question stems from the concept of psychological distance, a studied phenomenon within our cognition which interestingly behaves a lot like physical distance does, at least in terms of how our brains process the information involved.
The basics of psychological distance are quite intuitive, and you can think of painting as a helpful analogy:
To paint a single tree up close, you need to make thousands of individual strokes. Nuanced colors nestle in the shadows cast by each ridge of bark. Veins traverse the closest leaves as the light shines through.
To paint a forest in the farthest distance, all you need is a single stroke of green.
Just like this makes it possible to depict distance in a physically flat canvas, our minds paint pictures of the worlds around and within us using these same strategies. Things in the “distance” are simplified, making it possible to conceptualize them more efficiently. On the flip side, we experience the rich complexity and nuance of things that feel “close”.
Of course this makes sense when we’re talking about things that are literally far away from us, however it’s profound to realize that we experience this aspect of closeness and distance in many different aspects of our psychology.
This is formally discussed in Construal Level Theory, a framework for thinking about psychological distance as the extent to which something feels “close” or “distant” from a person’s sense of self in the here and now. It suggests that we think more abstractly or generally about things when they psychologically seem farther away from us — not just physically, but also socially (how “close” to this person do I feel), temporally (how close or distant is an event in the past or future), and hypothetically (how likely or unlikely is a possibility).
This theory states that a kind of generalization happens at a higher level of psychological distance (comparable to the earlier example of how a whole forest in the distance can be painted in a single brushstroke), and this is referred to as a “higher level of construal”. Something that is psychologically “closer” to a person’s sense of self, on the other hand, is associated with more individualized details and nuances in their mind. This is discussed as a “lower level of construal”.
(That’s ironically quite an oversimplification of a very complex theory, but hopefully it at least conveys enough of the concept for us to play with these patterns through some direct explorations.)
Playing With Some Examples
Let’s see what the brain does to conceptualize social closeness:
First, think of a friend — someone you know well. What comes to mind? Sit with this long enough to evoke some memories and details about this person.
Now think of a relative stranger, maybe someone you just met. What do you notice? Give this a bit of time too.
Give credit to the nuances of what you feel. If you’re like me, thinking of someone you’ve gotten to know at a deep level likely evokes more specific details and nuances in your mind than thinking of a stranger does, even if you give a lot of time to considering the possibilities of who that stranger might be.
It’s almost as if the two people are standing at different physical distances, one up close with lots of visible details, the other far away, seeming relatively unspecified. That lack of specificity is what a higher “level of construal” feels like — your brain is literally trying to paint a picture of something that feels farther away.
In some ways, it’s like your social world is spread out across a concrete spatial landscape. Can we be more intentional about how we explore and understand this landscape? Can we make maps of this kind of psychological space?
Exploring More Dimensions
It’s fun to note that social distance is a place where we already use spatial terms like “close” and “distant” quite naturally as ways to describe relationships. With this parallel already being present in the English language, perhaps social distance is able to offer an intuitive avenue into thinking about psychological distance in general. Let’s touch briefly on a couple more “dimensions” of psychological distance that you can also take a moment to experiment with and explore.
Like we just felt with social levels of closeness, time can also behave as a dimension of psychological distance. Imagining your life tomorrow is likely to feel easier and more concrete than imagining your life in fifteen years. Does yesterday literally feel “closer” to you than a day that happened 1000 years ago? What does this form of distance feel like to you?
Hypotheticality is another such dimension, or in other words, how “far-fetched” something is. A possibility with less chance of actually happening might feel as if it is literally farther away compared with a more likely possibility. Think about getting a promotion at work, then feel how your brain imagines the details of that possibility relative to imagining yourself being suddenly chosen for a space mission to Saturn’s moons. Reality tends to feel “closer” than fantasy. At least a lot of the time.
Those are the dimensions of psychological distance that have already been most thoroughly studied: physical, social, temporal, and hypothetical. In addition to these, I like to think about how many more dimensions of psychological distance there might be.
While not formally discussed in Construal Level Theory, I experience scale (how much bigger or smaller is something than I am), number (is a number comprehensible to me, or is it so large or tiny that I have to use my imagination), and speed (is something much faster or slower than my current speed, such as the slow movement of continents or the fast pace of a hummingbird’s wings) as acting similarly to the other dimensions.
A solar system feels psychologically “closer” to me than a massive cluster of galaxies. Imagining one flower allows my mind more detail and less generalization than imagining ten thousand flowers. And I can observe more depth in each detail of a tree when I walk by it compared to when I am coasting past in a fast-moving car.
(As a side note, I wonder if construal levels may have a strong interplay with my time perception while listening to music. Perhaps time feels like it passes differently based on how efficiently my mind “construes” the sounds I hear? Maybe human time perception is influenced by how much our brains simplify the nuances of each second’s-worth of sounds?)
The Impacts of Psychological Distance
All of this can be discussed in very abstract ways, but it impacts each of us in very concrete and grounded ways as well.
For example, it turns out that if you ask someone to write a letter to themself one week in the future, then to write another letter to themself ten years from now, you’ll see the writer changing some of their wording.
Ask them to write a letter to a physically close neighbor and then a second to someone in another country, and you’ll see some of the same changes in language as if they are writing to someone who is closer or farther in the future.
In essence, there are common threads to how we tend to speak to and about “close” people compared to “distant” ones, even across completely different kinds of distance. One such thread tends to be how “formal” or “informal” the writer’s wording is, tending to be more informal and friendly while writing to someone “nearby” but more polite and formal with a “distant” one. That holds true even when the person is writing to future versions of themself, which is fascinating to me. (Patterns in wording choices across different kinds of psychological distance are discussed in this paper.)
There are many other consistent patterns that have been discovered for how we treat things differently based on their psychological distances:
When given multiple seating choices, we tend to sit closest to people we feel psychologically closest to, an example of how we often tend to externalize our internal worlds into our concrete realities.
We have an easier time recognizing general patterns from a greater psychological distance, but recognizing individual details and differences happens best from “psychologically nearby”.
We classify pictures into more categories than words describing the same objects (words are considered more “psychologically distant” than pictures because our minds are already construing the ideas symbolized by the words rather than directly experiencing the individualized details shown by images. This higher level of construal makes it easier for our minds to omit nuances and details about objects when they are described in words — it makes them seem farther away — compared with the same objects shown in images).
(These and lots of other patterns and predispositions are explored and referenced here.)
I imagine that artists and writers are constantly changing their own positions (or at least their perspectives) across these internal dimensions of distance. A prime example is the process of creating characters. Writing a character requires articulating their sense of self not just in terms of their physical location, but also their social location, their place in time, and their personal sense of reality.
Writing a second character with key differences in perspective from the first requires the author to move to a different “psychological location” in their inner world. Some writers may even more thoroughly empathize with having a character’s unique inner landscape by imagining an entirely different inner world than their own, with completely different arrangements of what feels close or distant for each given character.
An author must traverse psychological space along multiple dimensions of distance — social, temporal, physical, and so on — in order to articulate these different perspectives with nuance and realism. Perhaps we are internally mobile and can navigate psychological space.
Making Maps (and Playing with Geometry)
If these dimensions within our psychology behave similarly to physical space (and this is a big “if”), can we make maps of the worlds within us? Knowing how complex and dynamic my inner experience is, I can only bet that such maps would be beautiful.
Let’s play with this idea, even just for the sake of fun.
Let’s say that we are thinking of a person who is very close to us socially speaking, but we’re thinking about the experience of spending time with them five years in the future. And for the sake of argument, let’s say that we can measure the “level of construal” it takes to imagine this.
Now let’s think of someone who is right next to us in the present moment, but who is a bit more of a stranger. In fact, let’s imagine that we can figure out exactly how much of a stranger this person has to be in order to match the same level of construal as it takes to think of our close friend five years in the future.
In this (very simplified and imaginary) example, we’ve just established an approximate unit of measurement that can apply to both social and temporal distance. We can start to do some geometry.
Let’s say we want to calculate the psychological distance between us and a third person. This person is 5 years in the future (let’s call this 1 psychological distance unit away in the “temporal” dimension, just like the close friend we just imagined), and is also just as much of a stranger as the second person in the above example (1 psychological distance unit away in the “social” dimension).
We can use the Pythagorean theorem to calculate the distance to this person across psychological space:
In this case, a can be temporal distance (which we’re calling 1), b will then be social distance (since it’s intended to be approximately equal, let’s also call it 1), and c is the total psychological distance between us and this stranger five years in the future.
1 is its own square, so this person is the square root of 2 units away (about 1.4 times the psychological distance outlined in each of the first two examples). In the spatial layout of our internal psychology. We can even map this new point out on a grid relative to the other two people we’ve just imagined.
Because of the subjective nature of our psychology, this metric probably isn’t exact, but it does allow us to make a map of relative locations. Imagining a stranger in the future does involve a higher level of construal than imagining either a friend in the future or the same stranger in the present.
This kind of soft math might let us start to chart out the relative locations of things within our inner landscapes (just like how early mapmaking was often about describing relative locations instead of fully describing reality). And just like our physical mapmaking has gotten more precise over time, we might be able to get more accurate in making these internal maps as we advance our collective understanding of psychology.
In the prior example of finding relative distances between people, we simplified everything down to two dimensions (social distance and time) by ignoring both physical distance and hypothetical distance (as well as any other possible dimensions of psychological space). But we can include those too. One fun thing about the Pythagorean theorem is that it holds true in any number of dimensions:
In this case, a, b, c, & d can stand for the physical, temporal, social, and hypothetical dimensions of psychological distance, with each kind of distance being possible to map out as if it was literally a physical direction you could travel. More variables could be added to include any number of other dimensions such as scale, number, and speed if these are also found to behave similarly to the better-studied dimensions.
Existing dimensions like physical distance and social distance might even be broken down into multiple sub-variables of their own to acknowledge their internal complexity (e.g. height, width, and depth all contribute to physical distance; familiarity, agreement, trust, respect, and other social factors may all contribute to social distance).
And in theory, each value in this equation might be possible to standardize relative to the others as long as we can derive the level of construal involved in the contributing distances individually.
Such an equation could let us calculate the approximate/relative psychological distances between our sense of self and any object in our inner worlds. If we can establish relative measurements for distance along each dimension, perhaps we could then use the same process to calculate the distance between any two points in psychological space regardless of where our sense of self is located within that landscape.
If it holds true, this kind of equation could be used to identify new dimensions of psychological distance any time a predicted level of psychological distance that is calculated across the known dimensions differs significantly from the level of construal felt within a person’s actual experience. If consistent patterns can be identified across these differences, it may be possible to identify new dimensions to examine within future research.
If relative locations are established and the multiple dimensions of psychological distance become clearer, it may become possible to begin charting out both scientific and artistic maps of our internal worlds. And this may provide new ways to understand ourselves as well as track the changes that occur as we move through life and change as people.
This idea suggests that our inner worlds can be thought of as having “hyperdimensional geometry” in the sense that they contain more dimensions than we experience in our physical universe. While this perhaps makes it challenging to visualize familiar analogies for “psychological space”, it is also exciting in that it provides a concrete way of contemplating our inner worlds. And we might be able to learn a lot about ourselves from this contemplation.
The Shape of The Self
One thing we might learn is whether different people can experience different relative distances across the same dimensions of psychological distance, and these differences might be able to reflect key traits of our identities.
Someone who has lived for eighty years may associate a five-year gap with less psychological distance than they previously would have when they were a teenager, as an example. If this kind of variability is indeed the case, as I imagine it is very likely to be, then any way of measuring and calculating inner space using construal levels would have to be unique to one individual at a specific point in time.
This might preclude us from making any generalized maps or standardized “units” for psychological distance across whole populations, but it could open up incredible leverage for learning more about differences in individual psychology. It might even make it possible to discern the hyperdimensional “shapes” of different individuals’ identities.
At least according to Construal Level Theory, our perceptions of psychological distance are believed to be anchored relative our sense of self — things feels farther or closer to us relative to our experience of who we are in the here and now. This may suggest that any differences in our relative perceptions of psychological distance might reflect differences in the actual shapes and sizes of our individual senses of identity in psychological space.
Returning to the prior example of time distances possibly feeling shorter with age, we can reframe this as possibly having to do with the “size” of a person’s sense of self: Experiencing a longer life might make a person’s sense of self bigger along the temporal dimension, so the same number of years would seem smaller in comparison to the lengthening amount of time they’ve experienced. Our psychological bodies might literally grow along this dimension as we age.
To play with an additional example, someone who has traveled the world may have a sense of self that is spread out across a larger span of the physical dimension of psychological distance, placing them psychologically closer to more different places at once compared with the sense of self (or sense of perspective) they had prior to their travels. Our internal bodies may be able to spread and branch out across lots of psychological space at once.
Another way of framing this is that internal space may warp and contract and rearrange in ways we don’t observe in our physical universe. We can assume that each person’s inner landscape will be completely different from that of any other person. Different people will feel socially close, different physical spaces will feel like home, and so on. It seems natural then to say that the arrangement of the psychological landscape itself is changeable and personal.
Regardless of whether a place is far away in the physical universe, it may become psychologically closer after a person has visited it. In other words, our inner maps of physical space may not reflect physical geography as much as experiential geography.
In this sense, the world traveler from before would be bringing many different parts of the the world closer to them, rather than spreading their sense of self out into multiple other places. Either way of framing this process might be a helpful analogy in specific situations, but in both cases, it feels a bit like magic to me.
If we start to be able to map this all out, it might provide us with incredibly helpful tools for healing. One way this may be possible is in the treatment of Dissociative Identity Disorder, where a person exhibits multiple separate senses of self.
Each given identity or “alter” might be possible to locate as having its own unique psychological location by measuring if they have different levels of construal associated with specific people, places, and times. Discerning the differences between these locations may make it possible to map out which dimensions are at play. For example, differences in the levels of construal that have to do with the time dimension might make it possible to pinpoint a specific moment in a person’s life when a significant traumatic event occurred that might have contributed to the dissociation they experience.
There may be intentional ways to influence this inner spatial landscape as well. I have never been one to pursue mind-altering substances, but one pattern I have noticed in many stories documented by both friends and study participants using psilocybin is a strong theme of experiencing interconnectedness and unity.
It may be that this substance is condensing the social dimension of psychological space, or it may be stretching the shape of the self along that axis, providing a closer and more intimate sense of connection with larger communities and the world.
Since any dimensions of psychological distance are likely mediated by concrete neurotransmitters or neurological structures, it makes sense that psychological space itself would be as dynamic as our brains are. And it’s cool to visualize a spatial landscape as fluid, changeable, and complex as our minds.
Relating With Ourselves With Reverence
Having just dived into a very esoteric and analytical analogy for our inner worlds, I think it’s important to shake this off and clarify that this is all just a metaphor.
Playing with the idea of our inner worlds having all of these dimensions might be fun and inspiring when it comes to making insightful art or gaining some meaningful perspectives, but it’s not meant to contain or articulate the full richness of who we are. Any study of identity that happens through math will be extremely limited.
We are dynamic and ultimately uncategorizable beings. I’d argue that there is even an important component of health that comes from preserving a sense of mystery and expansiveness within our identities.
Hopefully these concepts can expand rather than contract your ability to relate with yourself with reverence and kindness. And maybe, if you’re someone who studies this more formally, it might offer some exciting new perspectives to chew on!
Wishing you all an easeful inner world,
—
Alex