Are you an expert navigator?

[+Cardinal Red]

Author, psychologist Colin Ellard has a new book and an interest in expert navigators.

 

Doubleday Publishing

You are Here (Why We Can Find Our Way to the Moon, but Get Lost in the Mall) by Colin Ellard

We live in a world crowded by street signs and arrows. With the click of a computer mouse we can find exact directions to just about anywhere on earth, and with a handheld GPS we can find our precise latitude and longitude, even in the remotest of places. But despite all our advancements, we still get lost in the mall, can’t follow directions to a friend’s house and, on camping expeditions, take wrong turns that can mean the difference between life and death.

 

In You Are Here, psychologist Colin Ellard explains how, over centuries of innovation, we have lost our instinctive ability to find our way, as we traverse vast distances in mere hours in luxurious comfort. Some cultures, such as the Inuit, retain the ability to navigate huge expanses of seemingly empty space, as their survival depends on it, but the rest of us have been so conditioned by our built-up world that we don’t really know how to get from point A to point B.

 

Colin Ellard's blog

June 26, 2009

Calling expert wayfinders: It was certainly true that one common strand among the experts was that they felt that they paid close attention to their surroundings and maintained some level of awareness of their place at all times, but there were also listeners who told me that they never ever ever got lost and they didn't really know why that had this special ability. They just always knew where North was, or home was, or the water was, or where SOMETHING was. This fascinates me.

 

I'm thinking of starting a little research project on sense of direction in expert navigators. I'm not quite ready to set things up in a formal way yet, but if you think you qualify as an expert, if you're one of those lucky people who never get lost whether in the woods, in the confusing labyrinth of Venice, or in the most byzantine corridors of a confusing government complex, I'd like to hear from you.

[+Hrethgir]

I get lost pretty easily. As soon as I make a couple turns, I lose track of which direction is where. Me != mediocre navigator.

[+TheAlabamaRambler]

I've been hunting, fishing, hiking and camping since I could get around by myself, call it 45 years, and only gotten lost twice... once hunting when a heavy fog settled into the woods and once when I wandered away from my broken-down car in the open desert at night. Both times I was without any sort of bearing. Other than that I have a pretty reliable sense of where I am and what is around me.

 

Since the late '50s and till today I fish the Gulf of Mexico in small boats without navigation gear, running out 15 to 18 miles, well beyond the visual range of anything to take a bearing on, trolling around in circles all day, and when it's time to go home navigate pretty much right back to the jetties at the port entrance. It really is as simple as knowing where North is no matter what your direction of travel.

 

What amazed me was teaching my kids to drive!

 

After 16 years of riding in cars, pretty much in the same city, once they got cars they had no idea how to get from A to B! They had ridden certain routes dozens or even hundreds of times in their life, but once they had to drive it was foreign territory to them!

 

How can that happen? My sons born in '75, '77 and '81 caught on pretty quickly, my 18 y.o. daughter has my natural sense of place and can get anywhere with basic directions.

 

My 20 y.o. son on the other hand would be totally lost all the time if it weren't for MapQuest.

 

Birmingham's layout is real simple... except for a few renamings that could be confusing (20th Street is now MLK Blvd on the signs but we still call it 20th Street) our streets run north-south, numbered ascending as you go north or south of a central divider (...2nd Street, 1st Street South, a railroad, then 1st Street, 2nd Street North...) and Avenues run East-West numbered ascending from west to east... so the address gives you the intersection in the grid. Therefore 2310 5th Avenue is near the corner of 5th Avenue and 23rd Street. How hard can that be? But the kid (who is making A's in his college math) just doesn't get it, and without Mapquest turn-by-turn directions from home he likely won't find the place!

 

It's weird how spatial orientation is natural to some and foreign to others even within the same family.

Edited July 10, 2009 by TheAlabamaRambler

[+ngrrfan]

It is almost impossible to "get lost". You always know where you are unless you are taken to a location while blindfolded.

 

So, I never get lost, I always know where I am. It's where I want to be that is in the wrong location.

[+WRASTRO]

I am much like TAR in that I rarely have any real difficulties finding my way around be it in the woods or in the city. My Son and I have done a few point to point bushwhacking hikes and we have never come out more than a few hundred yards from our intended destination. Without using maps or compass. We had them with us but didn't need to use them.

 

In the Seattle area if someone gives me an address I can almost always drive to it without directions. The grid pattern sounds similar to Birmingham.

 

My Son says caching helped him a lot when he started driving a few years ago. He would think about how to get to a cache that was near his destination.

 

Many years ago my Wife and I were on a tour of the Lewis and Clark Caverns in southwestern Montana. About 20 minutes in the guide asked everyone to point to the north. Out of about 20 people I was the only one who got it right. I thought about how we had come in and what twists and turns we had made so far. My Wife says it was just dumb luck but I think I really did know.

[+DavidMac]

...but there were also listeners who told me that they never ever ever got lost and they didn't really know why that had this special ability. They just always knew where North was, or home was, or the water was, or where SOMETHING was. This fascinates me.

 

I've always been like this, and it wasn't until recently that I discovered that this wasn't the norm. With the exception of a few parallel suburban streets (maybe they're overstimulating or something), if I find my way in I can find my way back out by memory. For example, in 2003 I drove from Tennessee to Yellowstone. Six years later I can still tell you turn by turn which roads I took, the highway numbers, what cities they go through, and many of the landmarks along the way. I have a really strong sense of "north" which is usually accurate indoors or out, but occasionally I can get "turned" 90 or 180 degrees.

 

Several years ago I was talking to someone who described how they had no idea where the next city over was in relation to them; they just followed the road signs until they got there. To me this seemed impossible, but I talked to a few other people and realized that this lack of a sense of direction was more "normal" than I had thought.

 

It's almost as if I keep a large mental "map" of the world, and always know where I am within it. When I travel somewhere new, I'm just adding to that map, and the GPS just supplements that by reminding me where I am in relation to everything else. I can get the big picture pretty well on one visit, and after a couple more visits I usually have it down.

 

Maybe I need to send that guy an email or something

[+TheAlabamaRambler]

Many years ago my Wife and I were on a tour of the Lewis and Clark Caverns in southwestern Montana. About 20 minutes in the guide asked everyone to point to the north. Out of about 20 people I was the only one who got it right. I thought about how we had come in and what twists and turns we had made so far. My Wife says it was just dumb luck but I think I really did know.

That reminds me of hiking old mine shafts when I was a kid. Red Mountain runs pretty much east-west and is riddled with old iron ore mine shafts dating from Civil War times up till they abandoned mining when import ore got cheaper in the '70s. We could enter the mines in Homewood and travel through the maze of shafts to Ishkooda almost seven miles away. Nobody I know ever got lost in the mountain, though we did hear the occasional news report of a SAR team having to go after kids in there. They've blown and filled most of the entrances now, but if you know your way about you can still get in. All closing the entrances really did was give the SAR teams and caving clubs who have keys to a few gated entrances fewer quick ways to get to certain parts of the mines.

 

How we knew which shafts went in what direction (these are iron ore mines, compasses are useless!) is just something we 'knew'.

Edited July 10, 2009 by TheAlabamaRambler

[+RS67Man]

I know I have a stronger sense of direction than most, I have amazed the wife on many occasions. When I am traveling, by what ever means, I have this mental image of my location on a map in my head. The one exception is air travel. Getting off a plane for me is disorienting, and it takes me a while to get my directional senses together again. In a way I feel like I was teleported to a new location, and have lost my bearings to north etc.

[+succotash]

My husband has this ability as well. He calls it "dead reckoning." I'm still amazed by how effective he is, particularly in placed we've never been before or in places we visited once years ago. I had a feeling it was a trait more common to men than women and the first few posts in this thread indicate that may be so.

[+Team Veverca]

I never got lost. Somehow I always find a way home. It's not necessarily the same way I came though.

On the other side... My GF constantly gets lost. It like she doesn't have a sense of direction. She can travel the same route a few times and still manages to get lost.

[Dinoprophet]

I tend to think in straight lines, so if my path deviates from NSEW, I get confused pretty easily. And my wife can't find north on a map (sorry, honey). Yet somehow, our 8-year old daughter has an astounding sense of direction. We've approached places from two completely different directions in the car, and she's known where we were headed.

[+SgtSue]

I stay lost. The only time I could point to north was when I lived in Colorado Springs and then I had to look to see where I was in relation to the mountains. My 83 year old Mother can still point to north no matter where she is.

[+Kit Fox]

I consider myself an intermediate navigator when it comes to maps and a compass. I would consider myself an advance navigator on the streets. I grew up "pre gps" and learned very early how to navigate streets using only a Thomas Guide. If you can navigate the streets and freeways in downtown LA (with only a Thomas Guide) you can find your way anywhere. I've never mastered the art of sticking to a bearing using a compass. I use landmarks for navigation. I recognize most of the mountain tops near me, and use them as visual guides while hiking.

 

GPS has allowed an entire generation of people "with no clue" to drive farther from home and visit areas they wouldn't normally visit.

[Dinoprophet]

Here's a somewhat-related article that was on Slashdot yesterday. It's about how satellite navigation is killing local knowledge. It opens some some really neat history on in-car navigation devices (who knew it existed in 1909?!).

[Skippermark]

I rarely get lost. I'm not sure why, but I can usually find my way around places I've never been, both in the woods and on the road. My wife and friends joke and call me the human map and then proceed to sing the Dora the Explorer Map Song. Friends often call and say, "Is this the map? How do I get to..."

 

That said, I have been known to bushwhack directly to a cache for 1/3 of a mile, only to find the big, wide trail when we get there.

[+wimseyguy]

I don't know if I would label myself "expert navigator. But after reading the linked to articles in the OP, perhaps I am? I do seem to have an innate sense of where I am and how to get where I want to go almost all the time.

My internal compass is pretty strong, and I do tend to pay close attention to my whereabouts.

 

I'm not a big outdoorsman, and do not fish/hunt/hike except for the hikes that geocaching takes me on. But I've always loved maps, and enjoy seeing how routes connect and allow people to move about an area. Friends who had lived here for years commented that I knew my way around better than they did shortly after we had moved to NC.

 

But I will confess to the same arrow slavery that skippermark does which is leaving the trail too early, and finding the easier way back to the parking area/trailhead.

[+Cardinal Red]

Another update to Colin Ellard's blog

Edited to highlight main points. Read actual blog for full text.

 

July 10, 2009

Gender differences in spatial navigation

I should probably begin by saying that the work I do in my laboratory never focuses on gender differences in the navigation tasks that we use. Yet my students and I know the literature well enough to know that when we look for differences, we are likely to find some.

 

In simulations of real world tasks using either laboratory situations, or virtual reality, or sometimes even in field studies of human beings doing real world tasks, a difference that often seems to arise is that women appear to rely more on a strategy based on keen observation of landmarks and men appear to rely more on a strategy based on an understanding of Euclidean geometry. This distinction has been observed repeatedly and it also has an interesting analog in non-humans. Even laboratory rats show some signs of a similar difference in spatial strategies between the sexes. As with all aspects of human behavior, there are some modifiers that we need to attach to this basic finding. The main one is that there is a tremendous amount of variability in performance on these behavioral tasks and that there is a great deal of overlap between the genders in the distribution of that variability. What this means is that it isn't too hard to find men who do better with landmarks than geometry, nor is it hard to find women who do better with geometry than with landmarks --

 

The implications for modern human wayfinding are very interesting as well. I think one of the main implications of such strategic differences, whether they're gender based or not, is that the two strategies that I've described -- landmark-based or Euclidean, are more or less likely to work well in different kinds of situations.

[AZcachemeister]

I truly do not recall a moment in my life when I did not know exactly where I was in the world.

Perhaps I have subconsciously blanked out the bad moments?

There have been a few times when I was not where I wanted to be at the moment, but that is a different issue.

[Dj Storm]

Sometimes I know where I am and can find my way out, other times not so much. It depends on the situation that brought me to that place.

 

For example, if a friend drives me to a location I don't know and I have no idea of the "map" of the area, and I don't expect having to find my way back, I "shut down" my sensors (or more likely I don't power them up). If later I have to drive myself back, I have difficulties remembering where I am and in what direction should I go, especially at night.

If I walk with said friend to that location, even if I don't expect having to find my way back and I don't pay attention to the surroundings, I can walk back without problems.

If I know that I'll go back alone, then I look at the surroundings and memorize landmarks, to be able to walk back on the same roads.

 

When I hike in unfamiliar territory, without maps, compass, GPSr (I did that a few times), I use the sun to approximate the north, and by approximating the distances and headings I traveled I can say in which direction is the starting point.

 

Two examples that happened to me, when I didn't knew my way out, but eventually found it:

 

In a city I didn't knew, I went to the railway station using public transit; Because I had 2.5 hours until my train's departure, I started walking without a target. I walked about 6km during the next 90 minutes, taking 3 left turns (that would bring me back to the starting point, or so I thought).

The kicker was that the streets weren't straight, having been laid out 5 centuries ago. They were almost straight, intersecting at almost 90 degrees, but forming a pentagon instead of a square. When I saw I wasn't arriving where I wanted, I traveled back on the way I come, and arrived to the train station just in time.

 

The second time I was hiking in unfamiliar territory, without a map; I looked at a satellite view before I left, that was all. I was in a valley, but had the impression that I'm in the next one, and wanted to reach the trail on the ridge. My GPSr (a basic Etrex without maps) had difficulties locking even on 3 satellites, and since the information it gave me conflicted with where I thought I am, discarded it as a fluke. The sky was cloudy, I couldn't see the sun given the deep valley, the trees and clouds, so I discarded that reference as well.

Found a trail and walked up the hill, then once on top I could see the terrain around me. Even without being there before, I realized I'm on another ridge, mostly because I trusted now my GPSr (and the sun, now visible, confirmed the cardinal directions on the GPSr). I continued my hike and returned to the starting point on another trail; had I not been able to sort out my location, I would have returned on the same trail I walked in.