Organize Your Environment With This Psychological Technique
Applying Gibson’s affordances for stress reduction and memory enhancement
I recently lost my sunglasses.
I started to miss them the day after losing them when I was about to leave the house and couldn’t find them. After searching all over the house and seeing that they were nowhere to be found, I began to worry. I wondered where I had left them and wanted to keep looking for them when I got back home.
Upon returning home, after checking every corner, I started to think. I had left them at the café where I was yesterday! I ran there, and the owner told me that someone had handed them in. No one took them home.
How lucky I was.
As I walked home relieved with my sunglasses, the only thing I could think of was assigning them a fixed spot so I wouldn’t lose them again. I’m telling you this because it’s precisely today’s topic: how to take advantage of physical space to streamline everyday processes, save time, and improve our memory.
Gibson’s Affordances
Gibson’s affordances are the interactions between an individual and their environment (Gibson, 2014).
People do not perceive the environment passively; in fact, we can interact with the environment to our advantage. We can use the environment as a tool to reduce mental overload and simplify tasks.
For example, I have assigned a specific place for my sunglasses so I never lose them again. I leave them on the shelf with my favorite books. It might be a strange place for you, but for me, in my environment, it’s an easy spot to remember.
Let me ask you a few questions:
- Do you have a cutlery drawer in your kitchen? Most likely, yes.
- Is that drawer in a convenient and accessible place? Most likely, yes.
Almost everyone has it this way, and we didn’t all agree to do it like this. This is pure human psychology. We are all instinctively using a Gibson affordance in the kitchen with our forks, spoons, and other utensils. If they didn’t have an assigned location, it would be exhausting to go around the house looking for spoons to eat soup. Imagine finding a spoon under the bed.
No thanks.
Now think about it the other way around. What objects are commonly lost? The phone, keys, glasses (that’s me). What do they have in common? In many homes, they don’t have a fixed place.
What Happens in the Mind
On a cerebral level, Gibson’s affordances are related to the hippocampus, a brain region involved in spatial memory and navigation.
The hippocampus is key to orientation and allows us to remember information related to physical space, meaning that the brain is linked to the environment. This might sound familiar; some time ago, I talked about how taxi drivers and birds are capable of remembering numerous locations and how they could chart routes to those places from any point. That topic really impressed me.
On the other hand, there’s chaos. Some people’s homes look like scenes after a tornado has swept through, where nothing makes sense and everything is mixed up.
Having things disorganized makes us secrete cortisol, the hormone linked to stress.
A study revealed that living rooms in U.S. homes often had more than 800 visible objects, with some homes having more than 2000 (Arnold et al., 2012). The craziest part: another study concluded that 3 out of 4 Americans had so much stuff in their garage that they couldn’t even park their car, which is precisely the function of a garage (Sanburn, 2015).
Writing this is making me laugh.
How to Use Gibson’s Affordances
Treat your house like a hardware store.
Hardware stores are among my favorite places. It’s a pleasure to walk in and see everything orderly, clean, clear, open, and well-classified. I could live in a hardware store. This exhaustive classification is very powerful because it allows for random access to memory.
Let me explain: random access means you can access your memory in any order. For example, old music cassettes had songs in a fixed order, but on your phone, you can listen to them in any order you want. The same goes for your memory. Additionally, neural interconnections allow us to access memories through different pathways: a smell, a taste, a name, a date, a sound…
Hardware stores allow for random access. No matter what you ask for, the person will know its location because everything is categorized.
📌 Note: If you notice, this is the same technique used by the Zettelkasten system, which I’ve mentioned in several letters. In the end, you associate information with each other, although in this case, it’s a virtual space. Check it out because it has potential.
We can classify things in 3 ways:
- Purpose: Cutlery drawer (if it’s for eating, it goes in the cutlery drawer).
- Context: Beach items (they are different but have the same context).
- Appearance: Ball section in a sports store (they are all there because they look similar, even though they are for completely different sports).
👉 If it works in a hardware store, do the same in your house.
If you go through your house and organize it similarly, you will drastically reduce the mental effort required to find something and save a lot of time.
Get used to using your environment to empower yourself, not to weigh you down.
What simple changes can you implement in your daily life to apply Gibson’s affordances? I’ll never lose my sunglasses again 😎.
References 📚
- Arnold, J. E., Graesch, A. P., Ragazzini, E., & Ochs, E. (2012). Life at Home in the Twenty-first Century: 32 Families Open Their Doors. Cotsen Institute of Archaeology.
- Gibson, J. J. (2014). The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception: Classic Edition. Psychology Press.
- Sanburn, J. (2015, 12 marzo). America’s clutter problem. TIME. https://time.com/3741849/americas-clutter-problem/
