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Walking a trail isn’t the same as walking cross country. Humans aren’t very good at off trail navigation.
by BRAlNlAC 7y ago
Walking a trail isn’t the same as walking cross country. Humans aren’t very good at off trail navigation.
- jacobush 7y agoMost aren't. Some are.
- jacquesm 7y agoIt's scary how inept people are in general at navigation. Telling the time and obtaining a rough compass heading by the position of the sun should be something anybody can do but surprisingly few people can do this.
- crispinb 7y agoHuman navigation is cultural. Urban culture (for better or worse) tends to cut people off from physical reality. Spend a few days with a Cape York indigenous person and find out how amazingly good people can get at this. John Huth's The Lost Art of Finding Our Way is a good read for anyone interested in improving their navigation skills.
- Buttons840 7y agoFor those who don't know: The natives of the Cape York area speak a language with no words for front, back, left, or right, they only have words for compass directions. Thus, speaking their language forces you to be aware of compass directions at all times. See: https://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html https://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.htm...
- crispinb 7y agoThanks for that link. Fascinating. I had no idea of that linguistic aspect. My comments were just based on having spent some time in Cape York (in the bush & on the water) a few years ago.
- hyperpallium 7y agoI wonder if they'd also be less ego-centric, given that they don't perceive the world in terms of their orientation?
- marci 7y agoHow language shapes the way we think by Lera Boroditsky: https://youtu.be/RKK7wGAYP6k https://youtu.be/RKK7wGAYP6k
- mlang23 7y agoThis would solve an issue I have regularily. Sighted people tend to invert left/right almost more then 50% of the time when telling directions to a blind person, especially if they are not looking in the same direction. In fact, the error is so common that I actually gave up listening to directions from random strangers. The likelihood of them being wrong is so high that it actually is dangerous to listen to sighted people without double-checking if they actually can be right.
- paganel 7y ago> front, back, left, or right, they only have words for compass directions. I know it's not exactly the same thing by I remember my Eastern-European grandma almost never using the words "right" of "left", she was almost always using what I can roughly translate as "upwards" and "downwards", as in: "paganel, give me that pitchfork that is upwards from you" or "pass me the rake that is downwards from where you are". My grandparents lived in a mountainous region, and as such one of their main tools for making sense of where things were was to position those things "higher" or "lower" compared to the position of the speaker.
- goodcanadian 7y agoUrban culture . . . tends to cut people off from physical reality. No, it simply puts them in a different physical environment. People who grow up in a city learn to navigate in a city. People who grow up in the bush learn to navigate in the bush. We adapt to the physical environment in which we find ourselves. Studies have shown that even pigeons follow roads to the extent that if they take a wrong turn, they will backtrack to a roundabout and follow a different road rather than cut "cross country." And why not? The roads are obvious physical landmarks; why wouldn't pigeons use them?
- crispinb 7y agoYou are confusing culture and physical environment. People don't only spontaneously 'learn' about how to get around a space they happen to be dumped into. They are inculcated into a culture. There is a depth of accumulated knowledge and engagement with physical reality in rural cultures (especially, but not only, indigenous ones) that is largely absent from urban cultures. There are good reasons for this (relative differences in cultural longevity, role specialisation, population mobility, navigational complexity of environment etc).
- bencoder 7y agoI grew up on a southern coast where north was almost always with a slight upwards incline. When I'm in a hilly place my automatic sense of direction gives me downhill = south, with about 25% accuracy
- mirceal 7y agowhy? why do humans nowadays need this skill?
- jacquesm 7y agoFor the same reason that you should be able to set up a tent, cook a meal, write some software and repair some piece of kit that you need. It's the kind of thing that comes in handy all the time. Of course you could rely on all kinds of technical gizmos to cover you but that stuff can break, run out of battery power, be lost and so on. Good luck finding your way out of the national park with your empty phone.
- thaumasiotes 7y ago> Good luck finding your way out of the national park with your empty phone. That's why the national park is full of clearly marked trails. If you're backpacking through unmarked wilderness, you need a navigation system, and you know you need it. That's 0% of people to several significant figures.
- nradov 7y agoI assume you haven't gone hiking in many places. In national parks and similar areas the trails are often vague, poorly marked, and easily confused with animal paths. Get just a few steps off the path and it's easy to become completely disoriented, especially in dense forest where you can't see anything but trees. https://www.foxnews.com/us/hawaii-hiker-amanda-eller-apologizes https://www.foxnews.com/us/hawaii-hiker-amanda-eller-apologi...
- mirceal 7y agoas someone who has gone hiking in most of the national parks in the west of the US I can tell you that trails are marked pretty well and whenever you’re in doubt you should just go back. most people that get in trouble are a little too adventurous for their own sake (or just plain stupid in their decision process)
- 7y ago
- bigiain 7y agoI'm pretty good at this at home in the southern hemisphere, but I'm much worse when visiting the northern hemisphere and the sun "goes the wrong way"... My instinctive sense of direction doesn't work with "the sun in the south midday" thing, and I need to pull that up into the intellectual part of my brain all the time. "Ummm, I'm in SF, if the sun's over _there_ and it's mid morning that much be, ummm, south east-ish I think. Yeah. So north must be (turns around) _that_ way". I _never_ end up thinking those things at home, I just "know" which way north is. It doesn't even occur to me to question how or why I know that.
- xarope 7y agoI know how you feel. I used to live in OZ, and when I visited NYC, I'd always end up going in the opposite direction of where I was supposed to go (and no, taking the opposite of the direction I "felt" I should go, didn't work either... haha)
- KineticLensman 7y agoYes. I live at 50° North so can assume that the Sun is always in the southern half of the sky and always goes from left to right across the sky (as you look at it). So if it's sunny I can make a good guess at the compass directions, especially if I know the time. I can reverse this process, e.g. in South Africa, with a bit of thought. The Sun still seems 'wrong' though. Where I get confused is the equator, where my simple rules don't work.
- umanwizard 7y ago> ...should be something anybody can do... Why? Certainly anyone could learn to do this, but is there any practical reason for someone like me who absolutely never goes to the wilderness to spend time doing this?
- irrational 7y agoI can't tell you how many times I've told my wife something using cardinal directions (it's due west of here) and she has no idea which way that is. Frankly its frustrating. Cardinal directions are so very useful that not knowing naturally which way is which is self-limiting.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoI'm so annoyed when somebody gives me cardinal directions, because it requires me figuring out where the north is, when half the time I couldn't even tell you where the sun is due to high buildings and cloud cover. There are countless better ways of giving directions when you're within 100 miles of civilization.
- lqet 7y agoI am always impressed and a little bit worried that some people I know completely rely on Google Maps (or competitors), even for basic navigation tasks like driving to some nearby village or getting to some tourist attraction in a foreign town they are visiting. With some of them, it is obvious that they don't have the mental representation of a city you normally would have after living/staying there for only a few days. I don't know whether this is sad / dangerous or even unhealthy for their brains, but it worries me enough that I make a conscious effort every day to only use route planning software to get an understanding what the optimal route would be. After that, I always rely on printed maps, general handwritten waypoints or just wandering around a foreign town in roughly the right direction.
- todd8 7y agoIt’s hard to walk on a straight heading for most people. A simple trick helps. Pick a landmark on the horizon, walk toward it checking for it periodically, and once you reach it pick a new distant land mark in the direction you’d like to travel and repeat. Of course this requires knowing which direction is which. That’s a separate skill using gps, compass, sun, moon, stars, moss, or whatever.
- BRAlNlAC 7y agoIt’s not the sense of direction or ability to find our way that I was referencing, but simply that we are large, bipedal, ground dwelling animals. Picking through the brush is much faster for a Fox. Inclines that would have to be carefully negotiated by a person can be simply scampered up by an agile quadruped.