You hear stories all the time about dogs that trek hundreds of miles to find there way home.
And then there’s me: lost in my driveway.
Hello fellow travelers, Julian here for DNews.
There are a number of animals that routinely travel hundreds or thousands of kilometers
without a gps.
Birds, whales, antelope.
Heck even Monarch butterflies make a trip from Canada to Mexico each year when winter
is coming and then find their way back north again.
How is it a little insect can do that while siri yells at me for missing yet another exit?
For a lot of animals they take advantage of the earth’s magnetic field.
Recently it was discovered that dogs, foxes, wolves and some primates have a protein in
their eyes that’s sensitive to magnetism.
We think birds use this same protein to navigate.
Other creatures like ants use smell to find their way to food and then back to their nests.
And monarch butterflies combine the position of the sun with an excellent sense of timing
to stay on track.
For many other animals though, their cartographic prowess is a mystery, but they seem to make
a mental map and follow it much better than most humans do.
Researchers have been exploring just how well we keep track of where we’ve been and where
we’re going and, spoiler alert: we’re not very good at it.
Neuroscientist William Warren of Brown University had volunteers wear VR headsets and taught
them how to navigate a virtual maze.
Once they familiar with the layout, they had to navigate to a target by themselves.
Half the time though, while navigating the maze, the volunteers would unknowingly and
suddenly be warped much closer to the target.
And none of them noticed.
They got to the target faster and with fewer turns than they should have, and nobody thought
anything was amiss.
Basically, they didn’t form a mental map, which would be bad in real world environments.
Obviously no one will get transported all of a sudden, but losing track of where you
are without realizing it could be disastrous.
Another experiment using a good old fashioned blindfold is called the triangle competition.
Volunteers are lead blindly along 2 sides of a triangle and then asked to complete the
triangle and walk back to where they started.
When Jack Loomis of UC Santa Barbara performed this experiment, he found people got the turn
wrong by an average of 24 degrees, and usually either underestimated or overshot the distance.
So we have no sense of direction or distance.
Great.
How did we ever survive?
Actually it turns out our inability to form a concrete mental map may actually be a benefit.
It may have opened us up to traveling to new places instead of following the same migratory
route year after year.
We can travel farther and wider than any other species, and indeed we have.
That’s also because if our thoughts aren’t grounded in the real world, then we can imagine
an unreal world.
I don’t mean a discworld on the back of a turtle, although that’s true too.
But now we can form mental maps of intangible places like the internet or the route to another
planet.
It’s possible that our propensity for getting lost is a more recent phenomenon.
At some point in our evolution we may have lost our intrinsic ability to navigate but
our smarts made up for it.
We learned to track the stars and make compases, and we could use logic and experience when
we did get in a pinch.
Since the invention of the GPS, we don’t need to flex those mental muscles anymore,
and they could be starting to atrophy: younger inuit hunters have recently adopted the modern
technology and have been getting lost when it failed.
Before this the inuits didn’t have a word for lost.
Dozens of words for snow.
No word for being lost.
There may be a genetic component to sense of direction too, because some tests have
shown that certain people just don’t get better at navigating, even with practice.
They may have inherited their parents inability to navigate because their parents grew up
in a city and never wandered into the woods and got eaten by bears.
But like any muscle, It’s possible to work it out: London cab drivers who have navigated
the city’s complex streets for years develop larger hippocampi, the area of the brain associated
with memory.
So there’s hope!
If you’re utterly hopeless, then you’ll probably still need to rely on GPS.
To learn how satellites up in space get you where you’re going, check out Anthony Carboni’s
video here.
So are you a fearless explorer or is the outernet too confusing to bother with?