How good is your sense of direction? Mine is pitiful; I'm always getting lost. I wondered what other people's spatial sense was like so, in the last year, I have asked lots of people, both strangers and friends, if they can tell me where north is and then checked their answers with a compass. I've decided that people fall into one of three categories that I've called the NATURALS, the SCOUTS, and the CLUELESS.
The NATURALS are very well-oriented people who know where north is automatically. As they move about, they continually update their position on earth with reference to external cues although they are not usually aware that they are doing so. My brother-in-law is in this group: he only once lost his sense of compass directions - and that was in New Jersey.
The SCOUTS can also tell where north is by using external cues, but they have to stop and think about it. The most commonly used cues are major roadways, large landmarks like mountains or rivers, and, of course, the sun. Some people take a sophisticated approach to using the sun as their compass by taking into account, not only the time of day, but also the month of the year and the tilt of the earth.
CLUELESS people are unaware of where they are with respect to north and south. They may not pay attention to large external cues at all and are often disoriented. Many people in this group will readily admit their cluelessness. I fall into the CLUELESS group. Although I usually have a good idea of how much time it will take to get from place to place, I don't see the geographical connection between different places. It feels like I am "beamed up" from one place to another just like the characters in Star Trek.
I initially thought that I could predict which of my three groups my friends fell into by knowing a bit about their powers of observation or their visual imagery. But I was wrong. One of my colleagues is a superb naturalist, but his keen powers of observation do not extend to his sense of direction. He was completely stumped when I asked him where north was and happily confessed to being in the CLUELESS group.
I would have thought that my friend Jill was CLUELESS. I've known Jill since she was a child and, it seems to me, that she went from reading fantasy novels to studying theoretical physics without ever setting foot in the material world.
When Jill was first learning to write her name, she did not put the letters of her name in a straight line like this: J I L L. Instead the "J" might have been in the middle of the paper, the "I" up on the left hand corner and so on. While she loves abstract math, she does not like drawing graphs. She can't tell her right from her left. I figured she would be CLUELESS, but she is not. She falls squarely in the SCOUT group.
Then there's my friend Marcia, a mathematician. Since she is quite absent-minded, I thought she would be in the CLUELESS group too. But Marcia fell in love with mathematics when she discovered that algebraic equations could be represented graphically, and she is still smitten by this idea. Maybe it's her geometrical way of thinking that makes her a NATURAL. Despite her absent-minded-professor persona, she always knows where north is.
Recently, while traveling by plane, I sat next to a commercial airline pilot of thirty years. I thought for sure he would be a NATURAL or, at the very least, a very competent SCOUT, but when I asked him about his sense of direction, he laughed and said,
"Talk to my kids about this! I have gotten them lost umpteen times. I can't find my way anywhere on the ground. In the air, it's different. I can see everything." The pilot actually fell into the CLUELESS category when walking or driving!
Since I am in the CLUELESS group, I not only get lost easily but I have a very bad memory for the layout of different places. My husband Dan and I met as graduate students at Princeton University in the mid 1970's. Although I was at Princeton for four and a half years and in my twenties at the time, I have very few visual memories of the campus. Recently, Dan and I visited the campus, and, except for the buildings where I worked and lived, most of the campus seemed new to me. To my dismay, I didn't recognize the central library, the very large chapel, the archways, or any of the other large landmarks. Dan recalled it all. After all these years, he still carried around an accurate map of the campus in his head. I think, with my poor spatial sense, I never developed a mental map at all.
This bothered me and got me wondering if our sense of direction is inborn or a skill we can develop. Could I improve my spatial sense? Thanks to a special hat that my husband made for me, I set about learning my compass directions, but that will be the subject of a future post.
