![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Not long ago, I spent a week in a vast, sprawling Mexican resort. On one side, the ocean was a glimmering, nonnegotiable border. Inland, the resort was a green network of undulating paths--like a golf course without any holes. There were swimming pools everywhere. It was like being trapped in a David Hockney painting. I was lost for a week. One hot afternoon, lost yet again on my way back to our room, I realized that, earlier that day, I had used an iguana as a landmark--and it had moved.
A fascinating and beautifully written book on the neuroscience of how humans (and some other animals) find their way and get lost. Christopher Kemp is a molecular biologist specializing in neurodegenerative diseases, and has absolutely no sense of direction and significant anxiety about getting lost.
Driving into an unfamiliar city evokes sweaty, dry-throated, full-bodied, hyperventilating, white-knuckled, existential dread. Doom. Baroque panic. Gargoyles circle overhead.
Research shows that people tend to accurately estimate their sense of direction. Amusingly, every time Kemp quotes or refers to a scientist he spoke to himself, he puts their self-estimated ability to navigate in parentheses.
This is a fairly dense book so any attempt to summarize will be simplified at best; if you're interested, you should read it. The things I found most interesting were various examples of the brain having specific sets of cells or specific areas that do extremely specialized navigational work, like one set of cells that fires for being in a specific area (ie, in the kitchen) and another set that fires for directions (ie, north), and how much of this had been discovered relatively recently, as in the last 5-10 years.
A lot of neurological experiments involve doing bad things to rats, mice, and in one instance, ants, so there's a fair amount of that referenced. I was relieved when we got to an experiment recent enough that it was mentioned that the experimenter had to rework part of their experiment because the review board decided that the first draft would break rules about cruelty to animals.
If you're OK with that, this is a pretty great book, with lots of fascinating information and interesting anecdotes ranging from death by GPS (don't drive into a lake just because your GPS told you to) to attempts to train people with severe directional problems to get better at mental mapping. Directional issues are largely hereditary; Kemp's mother has the same problems he does, but his children don't, probably because his wife is far above average at navigating. (He tries the directional training, but it doesn't do much.) He also profiles several impressive cases of people getting lost, such as Amanda Eller, who was also profiled in The Cold Vanish for getting lost for 17 days in Maui.
It's hard to read this book without pondering one's own directional (4 out of 10) and mental rotation (7 out of 10) abilities. This is unusual; typically that group of spatial abilities clusters together, so the majority of people are either good or bad at both. I'd also give myself a 8 out of 10 in visualization, but a 1 out of 10 in knot-tying - both of which are also spatial abilities which tend to cluster together with mental rotation and sense of direction.
A fascinating and beautifully written book on the neuroscience of how humans (and some other animals) find their way and get lost. Christopher Kemp is a molecular biologist specializing in neurodegenerative diseases, and has absolutely no sense of direction and significant anxiety about getting lost.
Driving into an unfamiliar city evokes sweaty, dry-throated, full-bodied, hyperventilating, white-knuckled, existential dread. Doom. Baroque panic. Gargoyles circle overhead.
Research shows that people tend to accurately estimate their sense of direction. Amusingly, every time Kemp quotes or refers to a scientist he spoke to himself, he puts their self-estimated ability to navigate in parentheses.
This is a fairly dense book so any attempt to summarize will be simplified at best; if you're interested, you should read it. The things I found most interesting were various examples of the brain having specific sets of cells or specific areas that do extremely specialized navigational work, like one set of cells that fires for being in a specific area (ie, in the kitchen) and another set that fires for directions (ie, north), and how much of this had been discovered relatively recently, as in the last 5-10 years.
A lot of neurological experiments involve doing bad things to rats, mice, and in one instance, ants, so there's a fair amount of that referenced. I was relieved when we got to an experiment recent enough that it was mentioned that the experimenter had to rework part of their experiment because the review board decided that the first draft would break rules about cruelty to animals.
If you're OK with that, this is a pretty great book, with lots of fascinating information and interesting anecdotes ranging from death by GPS (don't drive into a lake just because your GPS told you to) to attempts to train people with severe directional problems to get better at mental mapping. Directional issues are largely hereditary; Kemp's mother has the same problems he does, but his children don't, probably because his wife is far above average at navigating. (He tries the directional training, but it doesn't do much.) He also profiles several impressive cases of people getting lost, such as Amanda Eller, who was also profiled in The Cold Vanish for getting lost for 17 days in Maui.
It's hard to read this book without pondering one's own directional (4 out of 10) and mental rotation (7 out of 10) abilities. This is unusual; typically that group of spatial abilities clusters together, so the majority of people are either good or bad at both. I'd also give myself a 8 out of 10 in visualization, but a 1 out of 10 in knot-tying - both of which are also spatial abilities which tend to cluster together with mental rotation and sense of direction.