At Eduporium, we search all over the world to find the most innovative, exciting and useful new technologies to deliver to the academic community. If products can boost creativity and spark a new enjoyment of learning, we want to tell you about them! With that, let us present SpatialNote, a brand new space-related way to remember things crucial to your success! This inventive tool helps users understand and remember things more easily due to its utilization of spatial mechanisms, which nature has been perfecting in us all for millions of years. But first, let’s examine these spatial mechanisms and why they are important.
For generations, our ancestors’ lifestyles were tremendously different from what we would consider mainstream today. Being hunter-gatherers, they needed brains that were great at remembering exact physical locations of targets and hazards. They also needed to know how to travel between those locations without a modern-day GPS system. Thankfully, millions of years of evolution have fine-tuned our cognitive abilities to be able to complete these tasks much more efficiently today. However, around 100,000 years ago as languages emerged, there began a widespread and expedited accumulation of knowledge among people. Lifestyles changed dramatically. And now, with the mass spread of literacy combined with the power of technology and the Internet, the information that we need to remember is most often abstract and textual in nature rather than being tied to specific locations. Since the new verbal mechanism is not mature enough, memorization tends to suffer.
This statement might sound a bit harsh, but let’s face it: when we need to remember some important information we tend to take notes in one way or another. And when it comes to memorizing foreign words, historical facts or names of newly met people, it’s the technology tools we have that lend a hand in our learning—not usually our personal environment. Technology has made memorization a lot easier with apps that are designed specifically to aid retention. Different ways of learning? Yes, but, before the onset of technology, making use of any available tools (that era’s own form of technology) as efficiently as possible was the best approach.
Hunter-gathers had no literacy, let along language, and had torepeatedly rely on some viable method for millions of years when carrying out their common memorization tasks. That thing, we now know was, spatial mechanisms.
Let’s look a bit closer at an example of how we currently use these seasoned spatial mechanisms even though most of us would probably have never realized it. Most people do not take notes on simple, everyday tasks like how to get back to the place they parked their car, for example. Rather, on their way back to their cars, at each landmark (place of significance along the route) people recall what would be the right direction for them to head next: turn left or right, go forwards or backwards, or even up and down. The process repeats until they reach their destination. Sound familiar?
And it is exactly this process that the creators of SpatialNote decided to implement to make modern-day learning more innovative, effective and interesting.
SpatialNote ingeniously allows for a simple way to create locations (represented as rooms or cubes) and add information to different surfaces of the rooms to turn on the spatial mechanisms in the brain that support our memorization functions. Each cube has six primary directions: up/down, left/right, or forwards/backwards—similar to the landmarks we make use of when navigating back towards the car. And similar to the process of moving from one landmark to another, we use information that we surmise cognitively to move from one cube to another with SpatialNote. For example, when we need to go into greater detail on a topic, we can knowingly choose the proper direction in the “parent” cube and go into the “child” cube to add or read more information there.
Let us first add some context to that. A SpatialNote document is a collection of cubes organized using parent-child relationships. This type of relationship is commonly used in organizing information for better understanding of any topic during any research. For example, most textbooks utilize this structure and we can see the organization as soon as we open the book itself, with the neatly outlined components, including its chapters, sections, paragraphs, and so on. The primary difference of SpatialNote is that it adds a powerful mechanism of spatial memory and embodied cognition, so that information can be easily navigated, memorized and efficiently recalled when necessary.
SpatialNote offers two views of the structure. The first is an outside, impartial third-person view, which is somewhat similar to mind maps, though it is fully three dimensional. The other is an inside, first-person view. The first-person view is critically important in fostering greater memorization skills as it not only activates our spatial mechanisms, it also triggers spatial metaphors—the parts of verbal mechanisms that rely on space. Further, it happens to be an important and perhaps even essential part of our language as well. Human cognition develops based on the way people operate with concrete thoughts in the physical world. Later, the same patterns are applied to words and to more abstract concepts. As a result, tens of thousands of words are built upon just a handful of concepts, all of which are related to space: the concept of space itself, the concept of time (typically perceived as a line in space, going from left to right or back to front), concepts of cause, consequences and force (interaction of objects in space), matter and objects (a part of space that does not change when moving), etc. As we already mentioned, tens of thousands of words have come about just from these basic concepts. Life, project and career are derivatives of the concept of time, which in itself is a path or journey in space.
Since languages have come to rely heavily on spatial mechanisms, traces of them are commonly noticeable and include what are referred to as spatial metaphors. Author George Lakoff shows multiple examples of these in his books, including “Metaphors We Live By..” Some examples are: people imagining goals in front of them while keeping ideas above them or somebody continuously grasping a tool with their dominant hand (right for most), and so on. The same kinds of things work for abstract ideas as well. With SpatialNote’s unique 3D inside view, it is possible to take advantage of these mechanisms when organizing information, resulting in substantially increased amounts of associations, which are key to both understanding and memorization.
Of course, there are many other tools that people use to try to solve the same problems, like offline and software tools for note-taking, flashcards, mind-mapping tools, brain training solutions and other technologies. But, they almost always fail to take advantage of the mechanisms that have been honed and fine-tuned by nature for millions of years. SpatialNote fills that void and provides unique possibilities in this regard.
it’s definitely worth creating an account (which is free) to see for yourself how going back to the old powerful brain mechanisms can bring you into the future of more effective and powerful learning. Give it a try today!
About the author:
Vladimir Babarykin is a Co-Founder & CEO of SpatialNote. He has backgrounds in both linguistics and technologies. He leveraged his education, experience in running a tech company and his real passion—effective and powerful learning—to invent SpatialNote, an innovative solution we’ll be talking about today.