Where Am I? Why We Can Find Our Way to the Moon But Get Lost in the Mall, by Colin Ellard, HarperCollins, 336 pages, $32.95
Whether human or honeybee, animals must be able to navigate from one place to another in order to survive.
We search for food, avoid predators (or other dangers) and find our mates by observing the space around us and setting a route from A to B.
But just what exactly sets apart the successful hiker from the one who gets picked up by search and rescue, or makes Toronto easier to navigate than Paris?
In Where Am I? , Colin Ellard, an experimental psychologist at the University of Western Ontario, offers a fascinating and exhaustive rundown of the processes involved in keeping us and other animals moving in the right direction.
The book also examines how our sense of space influences our lives, from the placement of a favourite reading chair at home to the way large numbers of people distribute themselves within a city.
Animals have different talents and limitations when it comes to navigation. Scavenging ants count their paces and track the polarized light of the sun to know the direction and distance of their nests. Sea turtles complete their long-distance migrations by being able to read a magnetic map of the ocean floor. Honeybee scouts reveal the distance between hive and nectar to their peers through an elaborate waggle dance. We, on the other hand, rely heavily on visual landmarks to look for routes. Though Montreal's Mount Royal Park may not be the final destination, the cross on its peak can help a person choose a route to a favourite café.
We construct these spatial maps to get us where we want to go. The distances between points may be inaccurate, but we take mental notes of busy intersections, the rise of a slope and other objects, and scenes along the way to pinpoint our destination, which is often invisible from our start point.
Humans become disoriented much more easily than other animals, Ellard writes. Experiments show that when we lose our sense of sight, we quickly lose our way and we fail to tap into other body-based senses to keep us on course. Ellard asks whether this failure is a biological deficit or a skill once possessed by our ancestors and lost over time. He suspects it's a bit of both.
The first part of the book looks at the way humans and other animals navigate space. Ellard draws on an extensive body of scientific work that has tried to make sense of the animal world through observation and experiment, and anthropological studies that offer insight into the navigational talents of certain populations. The Inuit, he writes, “have an exquisitely tuned ability to pay attention to the visual features of objects and scenes. ... Survival on the land is so dependent on careful visual attention to detail that it is embedded in their language. ... Inuktitut requires that the location and orientation of an object be specified as part of the grammatical structure of a sentence.”
In the second half of the book, Ellard examines our relationship to space: the way our minds shape our behaviour at home and work and how the design of city spaces can affect the way we feel about a street or an open space and they way we use it. For example, the shape of a gambling space can encourage riskier behaviour among patrons – and a bigger profit for casinos.
In addition to the big names – Le Corbusier, Jane Jacobs, Frank Lloyd Wright – and their take on space and urban planning, Ellard mentions the contemporary work of artist Christopher Nold, who uses polygraphs to map out the emotional qualities of a neighbourhood. Chapters near the end of the book explore the intersection of technology and space and our growing disconnect with green space.
Overall, Where Am I? is an absorbing read. It's the kind of book that sparks resolutions: Be more observant; read up on Le Corbusier; look into auditing an urban-planning course. But it also leaves some questions unanswered.
Technology has had an indelible effect on the way we navigate space. We no longer need to take note of the highway exit number to get to our favourite U-Pick berry farm or the route to recover a freshly discovered roti restaurant. With the tap of a few keys, the GPS will take care of it.
But just how does this newfound reliance on technology affect our ability to comprehend our surroundings, and how will it affect the way our cities are designed in the future? How are our sense of space and our navigational abilities affected when each of us is plugged into an iPod or yapping away on a cellphone as we stroll our streets? Ellard writes that breaking our connections with the natural world has consequences. Namely, we get lost.
Hannah Hoag is a science journalist with a great sense of direction. Most of the time.
