Lost & Found

Wayfinding: The Art and Science of How We Find and Lose Our Way

by Michael Bond (Picador, 2020)

We are wanderers. Twentieth Century GPS worshippers with hunter-gatherer brains. Neuroscience has identified specialised brain regions adapted for specific navigation skills. There are boundary cells, grid cells, head direction cells. How they are coordinated is the focus of current research, but it is clear that these brain functions may flourish with practice or wilt with disuse. And the development and practise of the cognitive maps in our heads may also help organise other aspects of our mind such as abstract thinking, e.g. in the Memory Palace memorisation technique where information is pictured in a visualisation of a building.

Language provides a window into aspects of how spatial thinking maps onto social skills. Toponyms show the importance of distinctive places to indigenous communities. We use physical metaphors all the time when we talk about relationships (CLOSE friend; growing APART; social CLIMBER) – these are the Metaphors We live By (to borrow the title of Lakoff’s great book). High activity in the brain’s navigational centres appear to be correlated with good social skills, confidence and emotional resilience. Getting out and walking – whether in city or countryside – may literally navigate us out of loneliness.

How do I get there?

There are two styles of navigation: egocentric and spatial. The first makes moves in relation to the self – turn second left, third right, straight ahead, turn around at the first opportunity – with instructions like beads on a string. The second orientates the self in a landscape – Where am I relative to North? Or to the Sun or those landmarks? GPS Man vs Map Girl. He asks can you direct me to there? She asks where am I on the map?

Skilled navigators invariably use the spatial style, paying attention to the relationship between landmarks and not shackled to one route. Such a thinking style leads to an enlarged hippocampus, specifically of the areas that specialise in wayfinding. This was first found in London taxi drivers when they learned The Knowledge. Alzheimers sufferers get lost because their hippocampi are damaged. There are hints that practising good navigation skills may even stave off some effects of cognitive decline!

These skills are not a matter of intelligence. But why do some people have apparently no sense of direction while others instinctively(?) know where they are? There are related skills that we each possess in different measure: remembering landmarks, knowing how they are positioned relative to each other, the ability to “dead reckon” how far we have travelled etc. It could be personality type, for certainly anxiety (vs. confidence) is the enemy of when you step off the beaten path and need to think clearly and not succumb to the natural panic when we are lost.

The book covers a good discussion of wayfinding skills and whether they are correlated with gender and culture and whether they are acquired primarily through nature or nurture. There are marvellous exemplars of great navigators: early aviators such as Harold Gatty; pioneer yachtsmen such as Francis Chichester and most celebrated of all polar explorers such as the peerless Shackleton. But indigenous genius may shine above all of these. Inuit hunters and herders, Polynesian settlers etc. attend to the weather, the stars, the ocean currents and other patterns in the natural world.

How did I get here?

There are so many fascinating threads running through this excellent book. One is the the psychology of lost persons. There are insightful interviews with search and rescue experts. There is a discursion into the spatial awareness of city dwellers (for it’s not just in the deep dark woods that we can lose ourselves). Urban design can be dizzyingly haphazard, yet memorable (like London or Paris) or grid-like and disorienting. Similarly building design can help or hinder the wayfinder: some help with sightlines and landmarks; others deliberately hinder like the Ikea maze, leading customers by the nose.

But where are we now? In a 21st century where devices are eroding our navigation skills, and where most children unlike a generation ago are subject to such misplaced protective parenting that they have lost their “Right To Roam” and not given the experience that will fully develop their growing brains.

Elsewhere

• Navigation-related structural change in the hippocampi of taxi drivers by Eleanor A Maguire et al. in Proc. Nat. Acad. Sciences 97 (8) 4398-4403, March 2000.
• Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (University of Chicago Press, 1980) – if you only ever read one book on the linguistics of English, make it this one: it’s revelatory.
• The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin (Franklin Press, 1987)
• Book Review – How to Draw a Map (sort of…) – Welcome (grandpops-bookshelf.co.uk)