I have a keen sense of orientation and direction. I don’t know my innate physical situation however I know I’m an “observer” personality. I am always aware of my surroundings and often people watching, etc. As a kid I just stared out the car window and noticed everything. Then I quickly correlated everything (I’d see a random sign and know to ask for ice cream because the ice cream shop was near, stuff like that.) However, I grew up during the paper maps era and sometimes I’d just take note of street signs and intersections because I was usually helping my mom get unlost.
My wife on the other hand I think I know well enough to say she’s completely oblivious to her surroundings and wouldn’t venture far from home without a GPS. She’s definitely not an observer (ok, sometimes of other women’s clothing if anything) but oblivious is the best word I can use to explain it.
Our 5 year old son is like me. He observes a lot and especially when on drives. It helps we never allowed screens in the car and he’s just bored, which is good. But he notices all the things around places we frequent and also likes to look at the GPS screen and tell what every indicator is.
I don’t know what my point is other than maybe some people just find it more interesting and try harder / practice more from an early age ?
Ditto. I find it really hard to understand how people get lost - it’s like “well, how did you get here?”.
As a small child I would take myself off on excursions, often through deep snow in woods with bears and wolves, or in a post-industrial waste filled with lord knows what hazards - but getting lost was never even something which occurred to me, even as I’d set off off trail, as I would just know that home is that way. I apparently wandered off by myself in Hong Kong aged 2, miles from home, only to then successfully get the right tram back with a backpack full of booty I’d collected on my adventure.
My poor parents I think became numb to it after a while - although the time in the alps had helicopters and all sorts when I nonchalantly turned up back at my grandmother’s a few hours later.
My kiddo seems to be the same. She’s all of 14 months old and can navigate her way through forest from A to B, and isn’t shy about taking a short cut rather than following the path.
My wife is having kittens. For me, it’s “yes this is what children do as I recall”.
I honestly can’t say if it’s nature or nurture - I can’t recall ever learning to navigate, and she seems to just have an excellent sense of what is where from the get go - she’ll set off in a seemingly random direction, I’ll follow her, and we’ll end up at her favourite pond, or by the mint beds, or at the truck, within which she’ll then be like “ok now you drive and I’ll scream if you turn the wrong way, we’d better be going to see auntie Maria”.
I have often been described as oblivious (I prefer "focused") and I have yet to encounter someone with a worse sense of direction/orientation than mine. I could tell endless funny stories about how bad it is.
OP mentions a study involving navigating within a game, and I have the same problem in games. I simply cannot learn my way around a "map", as far back as Doom and still today. I can eventually learn specific routes, and eventually enough of these that I can perform reasonably well, but I don't form a mental model of the map even if I've played it hundreds of times and even if it's relatively small.
But I can follow directions, and I did passably well at military "land navigation" using a map, a compass and a protractor.
I would love to better understand why this is. My best guess currently is that "oblivious" is quite important - I've tried, many times, to start noticing landmarks so that I could use them later to get to a place without GPS or directions, but I always find myself having missed everything, or having "forgotten to notice" anything. My mind wanders, I guess.
As a counterpoint I’m constantly focused on other things than what’s in front of me. I’m often absorbed in my phone or thinking over some problem in my head. But I can almost always instantaneously orient myself as long as I started out oriented or have even a vague sense of the geography of an area.
I just “know” which way to leave an elevator or train station as long as the layout and exits are sensible (NYC is sometimes hard, Paris is often impossible). Even if I’m mentally focused on other things.
I am like you. I grew up without screens, and grew up spending a lot of time in car trips. I remember distinctly being keenly aware of my surroundings out the window, and playing games with my parents on how many exits I had left before we got off the highway. In amusement parks, I was charged with the map and navigating to the next ride (a six year old!).
Now, whenever I travel to a new place, I at the very least make sure to track the journey there so I can, by memory, journey back the same way. I make note of any distinct landmarks along my route, and pay attention to the logic of the local connecting roads, in case I must detour. I then compare that against any heuristics I have about city planning and my initial preview of the area on a map.
The trick is that this is all rather effortless and intuitive, if not instinctual. I wonder if my habits as a child, and my parents’ reinforcements of said habits, made it so.
I'm good at navigating also, I put this down to being out in the mountains, on trails and such as a young kid. I come from the southern hemisphere so I discovered I needed to re-orientate myself when I first went to the northern hemisphere which didn't take long.
I recall being in New York and for a day or so I found myself walking 180° the wrong way - going north when I was supposed to be heading south, etc. Obviously I'm navigating by the sun or the brightest part of the sky. It wasn't until I was first in the northern hemisphere that I realized this as back home I was doing it automatically without being aware of the fact.
My wife on the other hand I think I know well enough to say she’s completely oblivious to her surroundings and wouldn’t venture far from home without a GPS. She’s definitely not an observer (ok, sometimes of other women’s clothing if anything) but oblivious is the best word I can use to explain it.
Our 5 year old son is like me. He observes a lot and especially when on drives. It helps we never allowed screens in the car and he’s just bored, which is good. But he notices all the things around places we frequent and also likes to look at the GPS screen and tell what every indicator is.
I don’t know what my point is other than maybe some people just find it more interesting and try harder / practice more from an early age ?