Just Finished Reading: Dark and Magical Places – The Neuroscience of How We Navigate by Christopher Kemp (FP: 2022) [198pp] 

From what I’ve been told and what I remember I was a bit of a nightmare as a child. My problem was that I would wander off and get lost. I was probably the worst in large department stores. I’d get bored and look for where the toy section was then I’d just wander off to find it. If my parents or siblings hadn’t been paying attention, they would have no idea where I’d just disappeared to. Meanwhile I was in a world of my own looking at toys I knew I could never have. After 5-10 minutes I’d go back to where I thought my family would be and, naturally, they wouldn’t be there – either I couldn’t remember where they had been or, more likely, they’d gone looking for me. Nightmare. For the longest time I thought that I had no sense of direction or that my internal compass was in the wrong way – that if I needed to go right, I’d inevitably turn left. That was just the way I was. Not so. My ‘problem’ was that I just wasn’t paying attention to my surroundings. My sense of direction is actually fine. Once I know where I am (however rough that knowledge is) I can pretty much navigate anywhere. One of my proudest achievements was navigating from a holiday resort on the Algarve to Lisbon with a VERY sketchy map provided by the hotel. We did get lost initially, but as soon as I knew our exact location (after seeing a useful sign), we proceeded with confidence, got where we were going, had a great day, and got back in one piece. Likewise, my last job was based on a sprawling 54-acre business site, and I had few issues (bizarrely except in one particularly bit that always turned me around) getting around as I carried a detailed 3D map of the place entirely in my head, much to the amazement of my boss and new members of staff I was all too often tasked with showing around. But why am I telling you all this? 

It’s a simple fact that some people are good navigators (my older brother is very good) and some people get lost on the way back to their table from a McDonalds restroom. Why? It appears that around 84% of our navigational ability is genetic. If you have close members of your family who get lost in their own neighbourhood where they’ve lived their whole lives, there’s a very good chance that you get lost a lot too. But you can improve things. The comparatively recent addition of GPS (Global Position System) to cars and phones means that internal navigation skills are starting to atrophy. Driving into the ocean or off a cliff because our sat-nav's told us to has become the by-word for trusting technology way more than we should. It also means that when our tools fail us in some way, or we forget to bring them we’re MUCH more likely to get lost. Like most skills, if you don’t practice it enough you start to suck at it and if you’re hiking in the mountains and take a brief stroll off the path not being able to find it again could become a life and death situation. 

Using the very latest information from neurological studies across the globe this is a fascinating look at an ability most of us take completely for granted – finding our way from A to B. Explaining how the brain maps our environment, scopes for landmarks, imagines reverse routes and much else besides this will give you a very good idea of what’s going on (or NOT!) between your ears either when you land in a new town and need to find your hotel or why most of us don’t immediately forget where we live once we turn a corner. This is a MUST read for anyone interesting in how we find our way around an ever-changing world and why some of us get lost in our local supermarket. Highly recommended. One of the best Science books of the year (and my first book this year published in 2022).  

[Labels Added: 0, Labels Total: 73]