Mental Representations

Mental representations are the internal structures you use to perceive, understand, and act on the world. They are not the world itself; they are your compressed, structured model of it — patterns, relationships, and procedures stored in memory. A chess master doesn't see 32 pieces; she sees threats, pawn structures, and typical plans. A surgeon doesn't see tissue; he sees anatomy, landmarks, and sequences of moves. The quality of your representations determines how fast you make sense of situations and how accurately you predict outcomes.

Expertise research (e.g. Ericsson, Chase & Simon) shows that experts have richer, more differentiated representations than novices. Novices rely on surface features and step-by-step rules. Experts recognise deep structure and retrieve whole chunks — "this is a Sicilian," "this is septic shock." Better representations reduce cognitive load: you see the pattern instead of computing it. They also support anticipation and simulation: you can run scenarios in your head because the representation encodes how the system behaves. The goal of deliberate practice is partly to build these representations — to rewire how you see the domain.

In understanding and analysing, the model applies directly. When you build a mental model of a market, a product, or a team, you're building a representation. When you decompose a problem into first principles, you're making your representation explicit and testable. When you pattern-match to past cases, you're using stored representations to classify the current situation. The discipline is to notice when your representation is shallow (you're reacting to surface cues) and to invest in deepening it — through study, feedback, and repeated exposure to varied cases.