The Strange Link Between Geography and Memory

It’s as though the brain just starts downloading…

I got in a few minutes ago from a laid-back afternoon, driving around the neighborhood where I grew up and still live.

Sometimes, over-scheduling creeps into my life. Too many activities, like visits with friends, restaurant meals, opera, ballet, and concerts. When that happens, I always find time to drive or even walk through parts of Toronto that feel emotionally nourishing to me.

Today, I passed McLean Animal Hospital, where I hypnotized my very first subject, Wayne Gibbs, way back in 1965. It’s looking a bit worse for wear now, as does the tiny creek that runs between the clinic and the ground-floor apartment where I lived during my formative years, from age ten to twenty-one.

From there, I wandered over to Surrey Avenue, zipped around Inniswood Crescent, and paused at the back entrance of Wexford Public School, where I spent three fairly memorable years. I got out of my Subaru and stood there for a long moment, breathing the fresh air as a collage of memories flooded my mind. The sights, sounds, smells, and feelings all returned at once.

It’s why people scrapbook, listen to songs from their youth, and take vacation pictures. Though to be fair, my father preferred slides. Hundreds of them. They required a projector and a collapsible screen.

It used to amuse me endlessly, watching Dad present his Kodachrome slides on his Bell and Howell projector. It was funny for a number of reasons. Chief among them was that Dad had somehow damaged the projector, making it completely manual. Instead of loading a cassette of slides, he had to insert them one by one, painstakingly.

This took forever, of course, and it became even slower when Dad got so absorbed in a memory that he’d sit there, staring at the screen with a vacant smile for an uncomfortably long time. Our guests would wait awkwardly for him to snap out of it.

“Ken! Stop staring at the screen and change the bloody slide!” my mom would shout. He’d come back to earth, change the slide, and then drift off again with the next one.

Memories. They’re all around us.

And I mean literally.

One of the most fascinating discoveries in the hypnosis and NLP world came from Dr. Richard Bandler in the late 1970s. He realized that all of us connect our memories to the space around us.

Naturally, when I stand outside my old public school, my mind is filled with memories that rise to the surface. The physical location itself seems to unlock them, because those experiences are tied neurologically to that specific place.

But here’s the thing.

All our memories are connected to spatial locations. That’s at the heart of something called “Timelines.” When I think of a past event, I’m accessing something that appears behind me. When I imagine a future event, something that hasn’t happened yet, it shows up almost directly in front of me.

This is what’s called being “In Time.” In this experience, the present moment is the exact spot we’re standing in. People who are In Time can jump straight into their memories, fully immersed in the feelings, sounds, and colors they contain.

There’s another group known as “Through Time.” For them, the past is often off to the left, and the future to the right, forming a kind of arc or V-shape. In their experience, the present sits directly in front of them.

These are the people who talk about putting things behind them, or looking forward to an event.

For “Through Time” people, memories tend to be viewed from a distance. It’s more like flipping through the pages of a book than stepping into an event, and these are usually very organized people.

The amazing part is that by using hypnosis, we can guide someone to float above their Timeline and actually edit the past. We help them pull out painful memories, rewrite them, and put them back in a new form.

Once the revised memory is placed into the Timeline, it sends a ripple through the person’s entire history and into their future as well.

It really is astonishing, and it belongs in the toolkit of every hypnotist, coach, and agent of change.

I remember teaching the Architecture of Hypnosis in Toronto, watching a woman struggle to recall a traumatic memory. I asked her where she’d prefer to sit, and she immediately pointed to a chair a few feet away. I told her to move.

And just like that, by simply changing seats, she unlocked a powerful memory that had been buried in her unconscious. All the emotion it carried was released right there, and she was permanently freed from its grip.

Sometimes all it takes is a shift in physical space to create a shift in mental space. And when that happens, when memory and geography align, something opens up. Healing becomes possible. Change becomes easy. And the past becomes something we can finally rewrite.

So ask yourself…

If you were to ask your unconscious mind what direction the past is, where would you point?

And if you asked which direction is your future, where would you point this time?

And where’s the present for you?

Knowing where past and future memories lurk is the first step to gaining power over them, and ultimately changing them.

- Mike Mandel