Posted on 10/19/2009 12:08:33 PM PDT by GATOR NAVY
When Alison Kendall’s boss told her in 2007 that her civil service job was being transferred to a different building in another part of Vancouver, she panicked. Commuting to a new office would be no big deal for most people, she knew. But Kendall might well have the worst sense of direction in the world. For as long as she can remember, she has been unable to perform even the simplest navigational tasks. She needed a family member to escort her to and from school right through the end of grade twelve, and is still able to produce only a highly distorted, detail-free sketch map of her own house. After five years of careful training, she had mastered the bus trip to and from her office, but the slightest deviation left her hopelessly lost. When that happened, the forty-three-year-old had to phone her father to come and pick her up, even if she was just a few blocks from home, in the neighbourhood where she had lived most of her life.
Kendall (not her real name) decided to ask a neuropsychologist if she had medical grounds for turning down the transfer. He referred her to a neuro-ophthalmology clinic at the University of British Columbia, where a young post-doc from Italy named Giuseppe Iaria was studying the neuroscience of orientation and navigation. After a battery of tests, Iaria concluded that Kendall was perfectly normal. She had average intelligence, memory, and mental imaging abilities, and her brain was completely undamaged. She was simply unable to form a “cognitive map,” the mind’s way of representing spatial relationships.
(Excerpt) Read more at walrusmagazine.com ...
Interesting. I find that I am more aware with it. Being pretty much always on, it makes me think about direction and location versus mindlessly driving.
http://www.us.orienteering.org/
I know that I’m much less likely to remember a route if I follow it on GPS than if I plotted it out on a map, simply because I’m getting turn-by-turn directions. Every once in a while I haul out a good old map just to keep my brain working.
Breaking news: Female found map challenged, situation normal.
Slap a set of butter bars on her and hand her a compass and a map. She's got a commission.
/johnny
Look at the map on the GPS, don’t just listen to the directions. That helps a lot because you can prepare for what’s ahead and know where you are going.
No different than the auto-dial feature on the phone, after a couple of years it’s fun to watch people sitting there going “What the hell is my wife’s cell phone number again?” when it’s gone.
What kind of beginner compass would you recommend?
What do these people do if they are on a road, but the GPS says it isn’t there?
For people like me, who’s sense of direction is the stuff of legend, a GPS is a God-send. I have never had a sense of direction; and that defect has caused me humiliation, embarassment and frustration beyond words.
If I can see the sun, and know what time it is; I’m capable of guessing as well as the next person. But turn me loose in a neighborhood I’m unfamiliar with, and it may just as well be a maze containing a Minotaur. It is blind luck that gets me out, not skill of any sort.
So, when I go driving, I’m not ashamed to admit that I listen to my wife. She has a sense of direction and I do not. However, when I have the GPS, the GPS usually wins the ensuing arguement.
I gave a bush aboriginal fellow a lift one night. It was late about 0300 and he was sleeping in a bus shelter. He had caught the bus down from Central Australia and had got in after most of the public transport had stopped for the night.
He could hardly speak any English (a real tribal fellow) and had only been to Adelaide once before. Adelaide is a city of about 1 million people. I managed to get out of him that he was going to his sister’s house that he had only ever seen in daylight, once before. He gestured for me to drive. As we drove along he would gesture for me to turn right or left and I could see his eyes taking everything about where he was and where he was going. Eventually he lead me straight to his sister’s house which was in a back street in a suburb I had never been in. I was amazed! His sense of where he was in the world was uncanny.
Cheers
Mel
Is she blond?
I grew up in the Cleveland area. For some reason I could always sense where the lake was, so I always “knew” which direction was North. When I moved to Milwaukee, the lake was to the East. Messed me up! I think my directional 6th sense is located in my bladder!
It may well. It is a crutch. Just like spell check has harmed our ability to spell.
Amazing ... I need my GPS to get out of the garage. Some people have an innate sense of direction, others (like me) are completely dependant upon landmarks.
Speaking as a former butterbar, I know where you're coming from.
Fortunately for the men in my platoons, I went to a school with a very demanding ROTC program. I had four years of small unit training, orienteering, etc., so my map skills were fairly proficient.
Map reading in Germany was a relative breeze, thanks to the small towns that dotted the landscape. Still, I spent plenty of weekends traveling the local area to ensure I was more than just "proficient".
2. Keep the detail options low and the scale large.
3. Always have a "real map" for backup. GPSs sometimes go a little wonky or give directions that don't take into account local conditions, so you need to compare with the real map when in doubt.
GPS has nothing to do with ones sense of direction, it's simply a very useful tool (like a compass or protractors).
My husband is completely "tone deaf to directions", although not to the extent of this poor soul. I have an excellent sense of direction and was always able to 'see' where I was in reference to 'North', whether I had a compass or not. I excelled at orienteering in Scouts, he scraped by in the Army by using a good compass and reading his maps with great attention to detail.
Our extensive use of GPS has changed none of this. He's still in trouble if his conks out, and I'm not.
Just got back from wandering over Spain and Italy and used my cell phone HTC Touch Pro2 and a software program called Copilot. It performed quite well but I needed to double check all the directions since 10% of the time it would take me 3 miles out of my way just to go around the block.
GPS is great but it needs to always be combined with common sense and basic map reading skills
I can see how txt msgs have really caused spelling to decline . . . it's the same principle as shorthand.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.