Your First Icon: A Think Aloud Journey

We will carefully walk through the process of using the Mental Atlas Method to understand a short but challenging piece of explanatory text. I’ll model each step, showing you not only what to do, but how to think as you apply this technique to build a durable mental model of what you read.

The Core Reading Process of the Mental Atlas Method

The way we build icons from a text is grounded in foundational cognitive science principles like dual coding theory and elaboration. The process feels both active and intuitive. It generally works like this:

1. Read a Small Piece of Text: You begin by focusing on a manageable segment—usually a single sentence or a few related sentences that introduce a key idea.

2. Create a Symbolic Icon: After reading, you consciously come up with a visual metaphor or a simple icon that represents the core concept you want to remember.

3. Narrate and Define the Icon (The "Voiceover"): Next, you use your own words to define what this icon means. This dual step—creating a visual icon paired with a deliberate verbal definition—is what anchors the deep meaning to the symbol.

Key Features of the Mental Atlas Method for Reading

The Mental Atlas Method has several key features designed to create a powerful and lasting understanding of texts:

• Dynamic 3D Models: We encourage you to build rich, three-dimensional mental models for your icons, helping you grasp complex systems intuitively.

• A Single, Coherent Visual Space: The Mental Atlas Method has you build all your icons within one central, continuous mental landscape (like your hometown). This allows you to see how ideas from different parts of a text (or even different texts) relate to one another.

Our Focus Text: System 1 & System 2 Thinking

We’ll use a classic excerpt from Daniel Kahneman's book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, that describes the two fundamental ways our minds work.

“Psychologists have been intensely interested in the two modes of thinking, which they call System 1 and System 2. System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control. It's the system that allows you to instantly know there is a lamp on your desk, orient to the source of a sudden sound, make a "disgusted face" when shown a gruesome picture, or answer "2 + 2 = ?". The activities attributed to System 1 are largely involuntary and happen automatically.

System 2, in contrast, allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations. The operations of System 2 are often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration. When we think of ourselves, we identify with System 2, the conscious, reasoning self that has beliefs, makes choices, and decides what to think about and what to do. For example, System 2 is engaged when you search your memory to identify a surprising sound, focus on the voice of a particular person in a crowded and noisy room, or compute the product of 17 × 24.”

Building Your Icon: A Guided Walkthrough

Let’s begin building. Remember to pause and do the mental work alongside me.

First, Choose Your Mental Space

Before we create our first icon, we need a large, familiar mental space to serve as our Atlas. A perfect place to start is your childhood home and its surrounding area. Your brain has an incredibly detailed map of this space already.

Pause now and bring your childhood home to mind. See the front door, the lawn, the street. This will be our canvas.

1. Creating the Icon for System 1

First, carefully re-read the paragraph describing System 1. The key idea is a mode of thinking that is fast, automatic, instinctual, and not under our voluntary control. It also includes highly practiced skills.

Step 1: Find an empty spot in your map.
Let's place our first icon on the front lawn of your childhood home.

Step 2: Create a symbolic icon for System 1.
A powerful symbol for this is a lizard in a futuristic mech suit. This captures both the primal, automatic "lizard brain" and the sophisticated, powerful "mech suit" of expert skills that run on autopilot.

Pause now and visualize this icon on the front lawn in your mind. Make it about the size of a person.

(For clarity in this demo, we've created an image of this symbol for you here. In the future, you can create these images purely from your imagination or even use an AI image generator if you find it helpful, but imagination is often sufficient and faster.)

Step 3: Define the icon with a voiceover.
This is the most crucial and nuanced step. The process requires that you are visually focusing on the icon you created the entire time you're describing what it means, AND that the icon itself does not change as you're defining it. This may feel challenging at first, but this feeling of "challenge" is actually the experience of your brain deeply encoding a large, abstract meaning onto a simple symbol.

Voiceover Example:
While looking directly at your 'Lizard in a Mech Suit' icon in your mind, say something like:
"This icon represents System 1. System 1 is my fast, automatic, and involuntary thinking. It’s my gut instinct and my expert skills on autopilot, like knowing 2+2 or instantly recognizing a face."

It is critical that you are not just mentally repeating the words. If you are just thinking about the words themselves, then that is what will get tagged onto the icon—just a string of sounds. To execute this technique correctly, you have to genuinely hold the idea and the meaning of System 1 in your mind as you speak. You have to mean the words you use to describe what the icon represents.

Now, pause now and look at your icon on your mental front lawn. In your own words, with genuine understanding, define what System 1 means.

2. Creating the Icon for System 2

Now, read the second paragraph describing System 2. The key idea here is a mode of thinking that is slow, effortful, deliberate, analytical, and under our conscious control.

Step 1: Find an empty spot.
Let's place this icon on the front porch of your childhood home, about ten feet away from the first icon on the lawn.

Step 2: Create a symbolic icon for System 2.
An excellent symbol is a restaurant owner carefully managing a busy kitchen. This captures a calm, deliberate agent focusing their attention on specific, complex problems amidst the surrounding chaos of automatic routines.

Pause now and visualize this new icon on your front porch.

Step 3: Define the icon with a voiceover.
Let's practice the crucial encoding step again. Find your 'Restaurant Owner' icon in your mind. Keep your visual attention locked onto it without letting the image change. Now, with the meaning of System 2 held clearly in your mind, define the icon.

Voiceover Example:
"This icon represents System 2. System 2 is my slow, effortful, and conscious mind. It's the part of me that solves hard problems, makes deliberate choices, and focuses my attention."

Great. Pause here, look at your icon, and define it in your own words with clear intent.

Testing Your New Understanding

Excellent work. You've now built a two-icon Mental Atlas Method for the core ideas of this passage. Let's test it.

Hold your visual of your front lawn and porch clearly in mind. Notice how, as you consider each question below, your attention can naturally snap to the relevant icon, giving you immediate context.

When you get a "gut feeling" about a situation, which icon does that connect to?

If you have to carefully budget for the month, which system are you engaging? Which icon represents that work?

Think of a time you made a snap judgment you later regretted. Which icon was likely "in control"?

The Beginning of Your Journey

This "think aloud" walkthrough was intended to give you an idea of what it's like—step by step—to create icons in your Atlas as you engage with complex texts. Although you've only created two icons so far, applying the method to longer texts simply involves repeating these same three steps consistently.

You've now gained experience with the core mechanism behind the Atlas Method: placing icons within a single, expansive mental space, visually representing abstract concepts through images, and verbally embedding information into those symbols.

Developing this skill—transforming abstract ideas into visual symbols—can be valuable not only for improving your reading comprehension but also for understanding and mastering many kinds of complex information, such as scientific processes, philosophical concepts, and legal frameworks.

While the Atlas Method is straightforward enough to quickly grasp and can offer immediate benefits to your comprehension (as you experienced with this text), the reality is that there is always more to discover. Over time, you can explore additional techniques for creating and connecting icons, experiencing deeper effects as your Mental Atlas grows richer and more comprehensive.

Next Steps

If your primary goal is to enhance your reading comprehension through the Mental Atlas Method, you're already well on your way. Feel free to fill out the contact form and request a free tutoring session tailored specifically to your learning style. You can also explore our CustomGPT if you'd like an interactive, hands-on way to further understand the method.

However, the Atlas Method offers more than just improved reading. We invite you to explore our site further to discover how you might apply this method in other areas or to learn more about the science behind its effectiveness.