Why Humans Can't Navigate out of a Paper Bag?

Why humans can't navigate out of a paper bag

18 August 2009

by Chris Berdik

THE journey seemed simple enough, on the map anyway. Allison Fine left her home to drive to Pretoria, just a few hours north on a major highway. She had studied the route and had a GPS gadget to help her. Nevertheless, she soon had absolutely no idea where she was. "I don't know what happened," she says, "but I pulled over in tears, called my husband and said, 'find me on Google Maps and talk me to Pretoria'." This he did, staying on the line for more than an hour.

Fine is an extreme case, but the feeling of getting hopelessly lost is something that most of us can relate to. In fact, along with our flair for language and our unparalleled intelligence, poor navigational skills are among the things that can be considered uniquely human. While the vast majority of animals have no trouble finding their way around, most people, when stripped of maps or signs, are notoriously bad at it. A handful are so terrible at orienting themselves, even in places they know well, that they rarely leave the house alone. "I try to study maps," says Fine. "But when I get out into the real world, it just looks completely different."

Until recently, little was known about how the human inner compass works. This is partly because "sense of direction" is not one neatly defined ability. Instead, it is made up of many different skills, such as awareness and memory of your surroundings, sensing your speed and direction changes over time, and tracking the location of objects and places relative to you as you move through an environment. Humans remember webs of landmarks such as the store, our office, the church where we turn left on our way home, yet have little sense of how these fit together spatially. Of course, some species find their way with the aid of specialised senses that we simply do not possess. Migratory birds can sense the Earth's magnetic field, for example, while some insects can see gradations in the polarity of sunlight. Yet even animals that lack any huge sensory advantage, such as hamsters, navigate better than many of us.

Studies of people that live closest to the land, such as the Bedouin in the Sahara, Arctic Inuit and Australian Aborigines, show that reasoning and experience can be very useful for finding your way. Such people can navigate perfectly well using subtle, learned directional cues from the landscape, even in what looks like the most barren expanse of snow or desert. The trouble is, unlike an innate computation of distance and directional change, this connection to the landscape is all too easy to distort or lose entirely. Claudio Aporta, an anthropologist at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, has observed how young Inuit hunters, who have begun to rely