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Has Achieved Nirvana |
https://www.bbc.com/future/art...r-sense-of-direction Not sure that I have 'pigeon sense', but I do have a pretty good sense of direction. Maybe it's just a good memory. I traversed London with the help of a map in the mid-1980s, and when I went back ten years later I found I was able to move around quite well without the map.
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Minor Deity |
Yeah, whenever I go to a new place I quickly form a mental map, sometimes before I go. After that it's pretty easy.
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Beatification Candidate |
We tend to use a variety of clues in our environment to aid our navigation. Some are expressed in old aphorisms like "moss grows heaviest on the north side of trees" or "water flows downhill." Others are thing that we learn such as avenues generally run north-south while streets run east-west in some cities or if the river is on your left, you're headed toward downtown. One clue that I was not conscious of was that north of the tropic of cancer, the sun is always to your south. As someone who lived in the northeast US from birth, this fact was embedded somewhere in my mind, but I only became aware of it when living in Australia. There, in New South Wales, just the opposite was true. The sun was always to my north. I didn't really identify why I felt I was turned around sometimes until I was talking with an Aussie who had just been to the Netherlands, his first trip outside Australia and he remarked on the feeling of being turned around. As we compared experiences, we settled onto orientation with the sun as being the source of our feelings. I hadn't noticed this issue in Brazil, but that might have been because I was deep into the equatorial region where the sun has a much less noticeable orientation to either north or south and that orientation changes with the seasons. Big Al
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| Unrepentant Dork Gadfly  |
I have a lousy sense of direction. Rob’s is great. But it’s a problem when we travel because I am the one who does all the research and has the bird’s eye view map in my head, but he is the one who can do the actual 3D orientation on the ground. So I will frequently be insisting something is one way and he is saying another. We have both been right at times. In my first year of university, a friend of mine from Windsor kept getting turned around. I couldn’t figure out what was going on until we got in an argument about which direction we should go. We were pointing in opposite directions. Frustrated, we both at the same time said something like, “but the lake is that way!” True. But where I grew up on Lake Erie and Toronto are both oriented so water is always south. He grew up in Windsor, where water is north.
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Has Achieved Nirvana |
I'm glad I'm not the only one. Of course I've lived next to the equator. I don't know why but the sun was much less harsh. It had something to do with the mountains. The sun is glaring here in FL with no relief except for rare cloud cover. | |||
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Has Achieved Nirvana |
Yesterday I went to one of those new developments with houses sold to retirees that had wandering streets and the GPS was no help. The guy with the banjo I wanted to see was horrible at directions. When I found the place the guy told me he was having memory problems. He had more problems than he knew. I found my way out of there and got home with only one wrong turn. I have always had a great sense of direction. Have started using the GPS less to avoid losing that sense. Men have more iron in their nose bone, which can help with navigation.
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| Minor Deity |
It may be more important than we think. https://www.usnews.com/news/he...arly-alzheimers-sign
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| Has Achieved Nirvana |
Check link? (eta: Thanks!)
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Minor Deity |
I stopped thinking about “sense of direction” shortly I bought a GPS navigator. I may still develop mental maps of localities if I drive or walk them enough times, but I don’t deliberately do that anymore, I just let it happen (or not) through repetition.  Oh, I deliberately memorize one or two turns ahead of me from the GPS navigator when I walk in an unfamiliar locality, but that’s just so I don’t have to hold the GPS navigator in my hand and look at it constantly when I walk.
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| Minor Deity |
Fixed link.
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| Beatification Candidate |
Apropo of this discussion: Don't always depend on GPS. Your sense of direction will thank you Big Al
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| Foregoing Practicing to Post Minor Deity  |
I still get confused emerging from the subway and have to look at the numbered street signs (such as W. 51st) to confirm which way to walk. LOL. But in suburban or more open country, I’m about average in wayfinding, I guess.
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Minor Deity |
I have poor spatial skills generally, and they can manifest as a poor sense of direction. I'm sometimes remarkably able to find my way around a new city but it's generally not because I have a map of the place in my head. I can usually find the cardinal directions, because (as Big Al mentioned) the sun is always to the south in our hemisphere, but that's more useful in a city with a north-south grid layout. Thus, I'm pretty good in Manhattan, but we live in a neighborhood where the grid is set on the diagonal and it weirds me out. Even so, when a landscaper wants to come plant bushes and decides where the shade is by assuming my front yard points north, I'm able to say, "Nope nope nope," and prevent fried hostas.
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| Minor Deity |
I think I depend almost exclusively on visual landmarks for navigation. Once, Muffin and I were driving up I-75. Every time we stopped at a rest stop between the northbound and southbound lanes, I would be utterly flummoxed as to which side of the building we were parked on. There were no visual cues. Look out the door to the left and you see a parking lot and an interstate highway. Look out the right and ditto. The sun wasn't visible inside, so my directional orientation was opaque to me until I went outside. After I'd gone out the wrong door at three consecutive stops, Muffin said, "You really don't have any sense of direction, do you?" On the other hand, I was working alone in Providence, Rhode Island in the pre-cell phone era and left my hotel to work for the day without taking its address with me. I couldn't even remember its name. (I was on the road a lot in those days and the hotels all blurred together.) I was able to get back to it without much trouble, not because I knew which streets to take, but because the state capitol building was on a hill and easily visible. I remembered that the hotel was at about the 4 o'clock mark if one presumed that the capitol was facing 6 o'clock, and I remembered about how far the hotel was from the capitol as the crow flew. I am not still lost in Providence, so this method clearly worked.
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| Beatification Candidate |
Mary Anna, your Providence story reminded me of an experience my wife and I had there. We were driving to the art museum and following directions on her cell phone. About a mile from the museum, her cell phone stopped working and proved to be completely dead. We proceeded in the general direction we had been heading, but the maze of one-way streets and a location bounding on the river made finding the museum mostly tial and error. My wife was very annoyed at her phone for leaving us in the lurch. Her mood became even worse when we later stopped at a Verizon store and the salesman would not even attempt to determine what had happened to the phone, but inisted on trying to sell my wife a new phone. I only had, and still have, a simple flip phone so we made the rest of our trip depending on the maps in the car and a couple of AAA guide books. Big Al
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well-temperedforum.groupee.net The Well-Tempered Forum Off Key How to improve your sense of direction