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Wayfinding: The Science and Mystery of How Humans Navigate the World
At once far flung and intimate, a fascinating look at how finding our way make us human.
In this compelling narrative, O'Connor seeks out neuroscientists, anthropologists, and master navigators to understand how navigation ultimately gave us our humanity. Biologists have been trying to solve the mystery of how organisms have the ability to migrate and orient with such precision—especially since our own adventurous ancestors spread across the world without maps or instruments. O'Connor goes to the Arctic, the Australian bush, and the South Pacific to talk to masters of their environment who seek to preserve their traditions at a time when anyone can use a GPS to navigate.
O'Connor explores the neurological basis of spatial orientation within the hippocampus. Without it, people inhabit a dream state, becoming amnesiacs incapable of finding their way, recalling the past, or imagining the future. Studies have shown that the more we exercise our cognitive mapping skills, the greater the grey matter and health of our hippocampus. O'Connor talks to scientists studying how atrophy in the hippocampus is associated with afflictions such as impaired memory, dementia, Alzheimer's Disease, depression, and PTSD.
Wayfinding is a captivating book that charts how our species' profound capacity for exploration, memory, and storytelling results in topophilia, the love of place.
In this compelling narrative, O'Connor seeks out neuroscientists, anthropologists, and master navigators to understand how navigation ultimately gave us our humanity. Biologists have been trying to solve the mystery of how organisms have the ability to migrate and orient with such precision—especially since our own adventurous ancestors spread across the world without maps or instruments. O'Connor goes to the Arctic, the Australian bush, and the South Pacific to talk to masters of their environment who seek to preserve their traditions at a time when anyone can use a GPS to navigate.
O'Connor explores the neurological basis of spatial orientation within the hippocampus. Without it, people inhabit a dream state, becoming amnesiacs incapable of finding their way, recalling the past, or imagining the future. Studies have shown that the more we exercise our cognitive mapping skills, the greater the grey matter and health of our hippocampus. O'Connor talks to scientists studying how atrophy in the hippocampus is associated with afflictions such as impaired memory, dementia, Alzheimer's Disease, depression, and PTSD.
Wayfinding is a captivating book that charts how our species' profound capacity for exploration, memory, and storytelling results in topophilia, the love of place.
368 pages, Hardcover
First published April 30, 2019
206 people are currently reading
2772 people want to read
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April 30, 2019
This may not be the best book I read all year, but it is the best non-fiction book I’ve read so far in 2019, and any future non-fiction book this year is going to have to work hard to unseat this one. Wayfinding: The Science and Mystery of How Humans Navigate the World snuck up on me. When I received my eARC from NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press, I was anticipating a mildly interesting book about navigation: maps and charts and compasses and whatnot. Instead, what I ended up with was an intense, fascinating, mind-blowing experience that exceeded all expectations and led to me pre-ordering 2 copies of the hardcover: one for me and one as a belated birthday gift for a friend I think will appreciate this.
M.R. O’Connor is interested in how we get around. Specifically, she wants to know how humans—both as individuals and culturally—can navigate and explore without the aid of devices like maps and GPS. Her quest takes her on a journey around the world, from offices in American universities to the Arctic tundra to Polynesian islands. Along the way, she brings in a wealth and variety of sources, from the oral histories and knowledge of Inuit elders and hunters to the intricate MRI results of neuroscience research. How much of our navigation skills come from innate, physical abilities? How much are culturally-dependent? Like so much in science, this is a thorny, difficult-to-answer question. O’Connor communicates her findings with style and contagious curiosity.
My first inkling of how much I would come to appreciate and revel in Wayfinding came from reading O’Connor’s discussion of Inuit wayfinding. O’Connor weaves the practices of Indigenous peoples throughout the book, first discussing the Inuit, then Australian Aboriginals, and finally Pacific Islanders. While discussing the Inuit, she mentions residential schools—and not just in an offhand, let’s-acknowledge-this-part-of-the-history kind of way, oh no. What impresses me so much is the way O’Connor goes much deeper than that. She explains to her readers—many of whom, I’m going to guess, remain ignorant of residential schools and the depth of the damage they have done to Indigenous peoples—exactly why these schools were so abhorrent. She explicitly connects residential schools to the intergenerational trauma and loss of culture, including knowledge of traditional wayfinding.
This becomes a recurring pattern in Wayfinding. As O’Connor discusses Aboriginal peoples in Australia, or the peoples of the Pacific islands, she never misses a beat when it comes to acknowledging colonialism’s impact. At the same time, she also highlights how all of these cultures remain vital and alive—even if some are hanging on through a few particularly dedicated practitioners. She emphasizes the resilience of Indigenous peoples the world over, and shares their stories in their own words. Through her travels to these places, whether it’s the desert in Nunavut or the desert in the Australian Outback, O’Connor speaks to individuals who have been raised in these traditional ways and still practice them. She shares their perspectives on how being connected to the land is healthy. As Inuk Solomon Awa says:
Although she does draw these spiritual connections between how people relate themselves to the land or ocean, O’Connor’s ethnography avoids exoticizing these cultures. Rather, O’Connor is careful to point out that in many cases, Indigenous cultures were practising science as much or more than Western navigators and explorers, for thousands of years. If anything, over-reliance on Western technology and cartography has dulled our awareness of how our surroundings provide natural cues:
As Awa says, “We have a hundred megapixels of memory, not one … because we were taught oral history. Our memory is way bigger.” I enjoy that analogy. Similarly, O’Connor points out the European obsession with maps and related navigational tools is inextricably tied up with the European penchant for imperialism and colonialism: you need to be able to map the territories you claim to own. This contrasts with how many Indigenous peoples view themselves as co-existing with the land and water and moving on/through it as part of their everyday reality.
What really cemented Wayfinding’s claim to being the best non-fiction book of 2019 so far is how O’Connor builds atop these anthropological journeys by diving into neuroscience and biology. Yes, she looks at our brains on wayfinding. She cites some extremely interesting studies, mostly related to the hippocampus. Some of them I’ve heard about before, such as the ones relating to taxi drivers in London. Others were novel to me. I loved learning about the various theories around how our brains interpret and store memories, how this relates to our understanding of space and maybe things like musicality too. O’Connor is very skilled at presenting different, sometimes conflicting ideas, and keeping everything clear while also emphasizing what science is widely accepted and which theories are new or less-tested.
Maybe this is just a case of right place, right time, but I’m more receptive to the pitch now that we’re losing something as a result of our use of hi-tech tools. Back when Nicholas Carr first wrote about whether Google was making us stupid, I kind of vacillated. I acknowledged that Google was changing our brains, but I came down on the side that said knowing how to think, knowing how to ask the right questions, was far more important than memorizing things. Since then, my opinions have shifted. O’Connor’s writing and rhetoric found their way into those gaps in my open mind, and she makes a compelling case:
As a teacher of adult students trying to finish their high school diploma, I think a lot about these ideas. I teach math and English. With math in particular, students often come into my classroom with prejudices built up like layers of armour from years of math abuse within elementary and high school. And I’ve had to unlearn—am still unlearning—a lot about how I want to teach math; I’ve had to discover, re-discover, or “borrow” practices that ground knowledge in direct experience. It isn’t easy, yet it’s so much more rewarding. (I won’t pretend that I’m doing everything right, or better. I have a lot more work to do. But I am thinking about these things every single day.)
Awa is right, too: being on the land is medicine. I’m still not what I would describe as an outdoorsy person. I have no desire to go camping, hunting, tracking, etc. But one of my goals this summer is to go for more walks. I’ve already started to do this, to range further and further afield from my house, to wander and meander (I love that word) kilometres from home, and as O’Connor notes, to purposefully take stock of my surroundings. To be mindful of the world around me. It really is good, not just as exercise, but for the soul. The science backs up what O’Connor and innumerable anthropologists heard from the people they’ve interviewed over decades.
Wayfinding is nothing short of amazing in how it brings together so many deep and diverse perspectives on its topic. It respects and champions Indigenous peoples and their traditions, recognizing the lasting effects of colonialism as well as the resilience and skill of the people who are alive and transmitting this knowledge today. It references studies in neuroscience and animal biology to put our wayfinding skills in the context of the wider animal world. Most importantly, for me, O’Connor ruminates on why wayfinding is so important to us, and what we lose when we abdicate that responsibility to machines. If, like me, you are a massive technophile who spends too much time online, this book won’t turn you into a hiking maniac overnight—but it will expand your knowledge and your ways of thinking overnight. And that is the best possible gift a non-fiction book can give to me.
M.R. O’Connor is interested in how we get around. Specifically, she wants to know how humans—both as individuals and culturally—can navigate and explore without the aid of devices like maps and GPS. Her quest takes her on a journey around the world, from offices in American universities to the Arctic tundra to Polynesian islands. Along the way, she brings in a wealth and variety of sources, from the oral histories and knowledge of Inuit elders and hunters to the intricate MRI results of neuroscience research. How much of our navigation skills come from innate, physical abilities? How much are culturally-dependent? Like so much in science, this is a thorny, difficult-to-answer question. O’Connor communicates her findings with style and contagious curiosity.
My first inkling of how much I would come to appreciate and revel in Wayfinding came from reading O’Connor’s discussion of Inuit wayfinding. O’Connor weaves the practices of Indigenous peoples throughout the book, first discussing the Inuit, then Australian Aboriginals, and finally Pacific Islanders. While discussing the Inuit, she mentions residential schools—and not just in an offhand, let’s-acknowledge-this-part-of-the-history kind of way, oh no. What impresses me so much is the way O’Connor goes much deeper than that. She explains to her readers—many of whom, I’m going to guess, remain ignorant of residential schools and the depth of the damage they have done to Indigenous peoples—exactly why these schools were so abhorrent. She explicitly connects residential schools to the intergenerational trauma and loss of culture, including knowledge of traditional wayfinding.
This becomes a recurring pattern in Wayfinding. As O’Connor discusses Aboriginal peoples in Australia, or the peoples of the Pacific islands, she never misses a beat when it comes to acknowledging colonialism’s impact. At the same time, she also highlights how all of these cultures remain vital and alive—even if some are hanging on through a few particularly dedicated practitioners. She emphasizes the resilience of Indigenous peoples the world over, and shares their stories in their own words. Through her travels to these places, whether it’s the desert in Nunavut or the desert in the Australian Outback, O’Connor speaks to individuals who have been raised in these traditional ways and still practice them. She shares their perspectives on how being connected to the land is healthy. As Inuk Solomon Awa says:
Being out on the land lifts you up spiritually, emotionally, and physically. It gives you medication, or meditation, however you want to call it. I’ll never stop.
Although she does draw these spiritual connections between how people relate themselves to the land or ocean, O’Connor’s ethnography avoids exoticizing these cultures. Rather, O’Connor is careful to point out that in many cases, Indigenous cultures were practising science as much or more than Western navigators and explorers, for thousands of years. If anything, over-reliance on Western technology and cartography has dulled our awareness of how our surroundings provide natural cues:
it took just a couple of centuries for most scientists to forget that environmental cues can be just as accurate as maps and gadgets. This historical amnesia made non-European navigation practices seem that much more supernatural and mysterious.
As Awa says, “We have a hundred megapixels of memory, not one … because we were taught oral history. Our memory is way bigger.” I enjoy that analogy. Similarly, O’Connor points out the European obsession with maps and related navigational tools is inextricably tied up with the European penchant for imperialism and colonialism: you need to be able to map the territories you claim to own. This contrasts with how many Indigenous peoples view themselves as co-existing with the land and water and moving on/through it as part of their everyday reality.
What really cemented Wayfinding’s claim to being the best non-fiction book of 2019 so far is how O’Connor builds atop these anthropological journeys by diving into neuroscience and biology. Yes, she looks at our brains on wayfinding. She cites some extremely interesting studies, mostly related to the hippocampus. Some of them I’ve heard about before, such as the ones relating to taxi drivers in London. Others were novel to me. I loved learning about the various theories around how our brains interpret and store memories, how this relates to our understanding of space and maybe things like musicality too. O’Connor is very skilled at presenting different, sometimes conflicting ideas, and keeping everything clear while also emphasizing what science is widely accepted and which theories are new or less-tested.
Maybe this is just a case of right place, right time, but I’m more receptive to the pitch now that we’re losing something as a result of our use of hi-tech tools. Back when Nicholas Carr first wrote about whether Google was making us stupid, I kind of vacillated. I acknowledged that Google was changing our brains, but I came down on the side that said knowing how to think, knowing how to ask the right questions, was far more important than memorizing things. Since then, my opinions have shifted. O’Connor’s writing and rhetoric found their way into those gaps in my open mind, and she makes a compelling case:
Students today learn biology, chemistry, and geology—the result of hundreds of years of scientific discovery—but they atomize this knowledge rather than find a home for it within a larger conceptual framework, namely their own direct experience.
As a teacher of adult students trying to finish their high school diploma, I think a lot about these ideas. I teach math and English. With math in particular, students often come into my classroom with prejudices built up like layers of armour from years of math abuse within elementary and high school. And I’ve had to unlearn—am still unlearning—a lot about how I want to teach math; I’ve had to discover, re-discover, or “borrow” practices that ground knowledge in direct experience. It isn’t easy, yet it’s so much more rewarding. (I won’t pretend that I’m doing everything right, or better. I have a lot more work to do. But I am thinking about these things every single day.)
Awa is right, too: being on the land is medicine. I’m still not what I would describe as an outdoorsy person. I have no desire to go camping, hunting, tracking, etc. But one of my goals this summer is to go for more walks. I’ve already started to do this, to range further and further afield from my house, to wander and meander (I love that word) kilometres from home, and as O’Connor notes, to purposefully take stock of my surroundings. To be mindful of the world around me. It really is good, not just as exercise, but for the soul. The science backs up what O’Connor and innumerable anthropologists heard from the people they’ve interviewed over decades.
Wayfinding is nothing short of amazing in how it brings together so many deep and diverse perspectives on its topic. It respects and champions Indigenous peoples and their traditions, recognizing the lasting effects of colonialism as well as the resilience and skill of the people who are alive and transmitting this knowledge today. It references studies in neuroscience and animal biology to put our wayfinding skills in the context of the wider animal world. Most importantly, for me, O’Connor ruminates on why wayfinding is so important to us, and what we lose when we abdicate that responsibility to machines. If, like me, you are a massive technophile who spends too much time online, this book won’t turn you into a hiking maniac overnight—but it will expand your knowledge and your ways of thinking overnight. And that is the best possible gift a non-fiction book can give to me.
September 28, 2020
"Wisdom sits in places. It’s like water that never dries up. You need to drink water to stay alive, don’t you? Well, you also need to drink from places. You must remember everything about them."
☸️ From WAYFINDING: The Science and Mystery of How Humans Navigate the World by M.R. O'Connor, 2019.
#ScienceSeptember
🚗🚙🚐 When I was 17, my family moved across the US, from the Southwest to the Mid-Atlantic. I had just gotten my driver's license a few months before, and my family of 5 caravaned across the country in 3 cars. I drove my beat-up tan Chevy S10 mini-truck from New Mexico all the way to Maryland, following my dad, tailed by my mom. We got separated more than once - I recall a particularly bad situation near Memphis where we were out of touch with each other for over 2 hours...
No GPS. No cell phones (but we did have walkie-talkies!), paper road atlases plotted out, and thousands of miles of roads ahead. Looking back, it seems so wild that we did that, and we arrived safely. And this wasn't even (that) long ago - the late 90s.
...But of course, this was the way things were - without roads even - for thousands of years of our human past!
A lot has changed since GPS has become a pocket device for nearly everyone on the planet. Natural navigation and orienteering skills are probably at the lowest point in human history. When was the last time you were lost?
🧭O'Connor's book is an absolutely fascinating blend of navigation, neuroscience, linguistics, behavioral psychology, and observational skills. She delves into animal navigation, and how humans appear to be the only animals who routinely get "lost".
She travels to Nunavut and to study Inuit navigation, Australia with Aboriginal peoples, the San in Namibia, as well as to the laboratories that are studying the brain and the way we memorize land/sea scapes, the way we orient and navigate.
☸️ From WAYFINDING: The Science and Mystery of How Humans Navigate the World by M.R. O'Connor, 2019.
#ScienceSeptember
🚗🚙🚐 When I was 17, my family moved across the US, from the Southwest to the Mid-Atlantic. I had just gotten my driver's license a few months before, and my family of 5 caravaned across the country in 3 cars. I drove my beat-up tan Chevy S10 mini-truck from New Mexico all the way to Maryland, following my dad, tailed by my mom. We got separated more than once - I recall a particularly bad situation near Memphis where we were out of touch with each other for over 2 hours...
No GPS. No cell phones (but we did have walkie-talkies!), paper road atlases plotted out, and thousands of miles of roads ahead. Looking back, it seems so wild that we did that, and we arrived safely. And this wasn't even (that) long ago - the late 90s.
...But of course, this was the way things were - without roads even - for thousands of years of our human past!
A lot has changed since GPS has become a pocket device for nearly everyone on the planet. Natural navigation and orienteering skills are probably at the lowest point in human history. When was the last time you were lost?
🧭O'Connor's book is an absolutely fascinating blend of navigation, neuroscience, linguistics, behavioral psychology, and observational skills. She delves into animal navigation, and how humans appear to be the only animals who routinely get "lost".
She travels to Nunavut and to study Inuit navigation, Australia with Aboriginal peoples, the San in Namibia, as well as to the laboratories that are studying the brain and the way we memorize land/sea scapes, the way we orient and navigate.
July 25, 2021
Absolutely loved this.
If I could have given the author constructive feedback I would have liked a tiny bit less on rat brains, and instead more on placemaking and urban planning (including at least a brief mention of the way Disney enables navigation through environmental design: getting your location information subconsciously, through the design of fences, and seats, and lighting.) Also O'Connor quotes Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail, but doesn't quote or discuss the section where Bryson's hiking partner Katz gets lost on the Appalachian trail in the Hundred Mile Wilderness, which is weird when he has a whole chapter on someone getting lost (and dying) while hiking the Appalachian Trail.
But still, a wonderful read I was very disappointed to finish.
If I could have given the author constructive feedback I would have liked a tiny bit less on rat brains, and instead more on placemaking and urban planning (including at least a brief mention of the way Disney enables navigation through environmental design: getting your location information subconsciously, through the design of fences, and seats, and lighting.) Also O'Connor quotes Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail, but doesn't quote or discuss the section where Bryson's hiking partner Katz gets lost on the Appalachian trail in the Hundred Mile Wilderness, which is weird when he has a whole chapter on someone getting lost (and dying) while hiking the Appalachian Trail.
But still, a wonderful read I was very disappointed to finish.
November 30, 2020
ETA (07/2020): I think I liked this book even more the second time around. It’s packed with so many brain-fizzing ideas that completely different things resonated than did in my first reading. For the weird liminal spaces so many of us find ourselves in during quarantine, Wayfinding has a lot to say about how humans locate ourselves in space, the embodied, relational nature of that knowledge, and about the value—for mind and for body—in paying deeper attention to our surroundings.
(05/2019)
When’s the last time you meandered through space—anywhere vaguely unknown to you—without that magical Marauder’s Map in your pocket? Can you remember being lost & not reaching for a phone-GPS?
🧭
The first time I set out for college (2000+ miles from home) I got a US road atlas & painstakingly highlighted my route through each state. I visited AAA for more detailed maps (remember TripTiks?). And I carried my mother’s hand-drawn directions to my first night’s stop: my grandparents’ farm off I-80, where the roads turn almost immediately to dirt. Today, preparation for that trip would be vastly different insofar as it wouldn’t exist beyond the tap of a few buttons. I’ve always wondered about the implications of that ease. Does the loss of a sense of adventure translate to different impacts on my physical brain, my memories?
🧭
This book is a deep dive into that & much more. The question of how technology is mediating & altering the way humans traverse & experience our landscapes launched journalist M.R. O’Connor’s journey to far-flung corners of the earth. In the Arctic, Australia, & Oceania, she learns from traditional navigators, taking side trips along the way into ethnoastronomy, neurology, literature, comparative biology, & climate change as she explores navigation systems that are rooted in the land, rather than disembodied from it. She synthesizes the work of practitioners & academic experts to understand how different systems develop, & how human movement differs in pattern & cognition from the navigational schema of other animals.
🧭
That this synthesis is successful is a testament to O’Connor’s talents as a writer. The narrative is fluid & readable, her clear-eyed transmittal of facts undergirded by a propulsive curiosity. She takes the reader on the journey with her, & this book should come with a Wanderlust Warning, bc if you’re given to itchy feet, it’ll get ‘em TWITCHING. A great pick-up for fans of #PeterMatthiessen, #RobertMacfarlane, & #Moana 😜
〰️
Thanks to @netgalley & @stmartinspress for the dARC! I preordered the physical book a few chapters in, & can’t recommend it enough if you want a read that’ll feed your brain & spark your imagination.
(05/2019)
When’s the last time you meandered through space—anywhere vaguely unknown to you—without that magical Marauder’s Map in your pocket? Can you remember being lost & not reaching for a phone-GPS?
🧭
The first time I set out for college (2000+ miles from home) I got a US road atlas & painstakingly highlighted my route through each state. I visited AAA for more detailed maps (remember TripTiks?). And I carried my mother’s hand-drawn directions to my first night’s stop: my grandparents’ farm off I-80, where the roads turn almost immediately to dirt. Today, preparation for that trip would be vastly different insofar as it wouldn’t exist beyond the tap of a few buttons. I’ve always wondered about the implications of that ease. Does the loss of a sense of adventure translate to different impacts on my physical brain, my memories?
🧭
This book is a deep dive into that & much more. The question of how technology is mediating & altering the way humans traverse & experience our landscapes launched journalist M.R. O’Connor’s journey to far-flung corners of the earth. In the Arctic, Australia, & Oceania, she learns from traditional navigators, taking side trips along the way into ethnoastronomy, neurology, literature, comparative biology, & climate change as she explores navigation systems that are rooted in the land, rather than disembodied from it. She synthesizes the work of practitioners & academic experts to understand how different systems develop, & how human movement differs in pattern & cognition from the navigational schema of other animals.
🧭
That this synthesis is successful is a testament to O’Connor’s talents as a writer. The narrative is fluid & readable, her clear-eyed transmittal of facts undergirded by a propulsive curiosity. She takes the reader on the journey with her, & this book should come with a Wanderlust Warning, bc if you’re given to itchy feet, it’ll get ‘em TWITCHING. A great pick-up for fans of #PeterMatthiessen, #RobertMacfarlane, & #Moana 😜
〰️
Thanks to @netgalley & @stmartinspress for the dARC! I preordered the physical book a few chapters in, & can’t recommend it enough if you want a read that’ll feed your brain & spark your imagination.
September 13, 2020
Wie navigieren sich unterschiedliche Völker durch die Länder? Gibt es Unterschiede zwischen Inuits, Aborigines und Menschen aus Ozeanien?
Dieses Buch erzählt sehr gekonnt die Wissenschaft hinter menschlicher Navigation, wo sie im Gehirn sitzt und wie wir die Fähigkeit durch GPS und externe Hilfsmittel verlernt haben.
Ich hatte eher gehofft, dass es ein Buch mit praktischen Tipps ist aber bin persönlich nicht enttäuscht, dass es eher wissenschaftlich ist weil das Buch sehr interessant ist.
Dieses Buch erzählt sehr gekonnt die Wissenschaft hinter menschlicher Navigation, wo sie im Gehirn sitzt und wie wir die Fähigkeit durch GPS und externe Hilfsmittel verlernt haben.
Ich hatte eher gehofft, dass es ein Buch mit praktischen Tipps ist aber bin persönlich nicht enttäuscht, dass es eher wissenschaftlich ist weil das Buch sehr interessant ist.
August 21, 2019
“Wayfinding” is, quite possibly, one of the most unique books I have ever read. I cannot think of another book that presents such detailed scientific research alongside interview-driven “folk knowledge” as M.R. O’Connor does here. Both the science and the human-centric anecdotes are amazingly well researched and you can tell the author took care to meticulously check her facts in the writing of this work. For the scientific end of book, the author weaves in insights from countless interviews with leading anthropologists, evolutionary biologists, historians, neuroscientists, and psychologists, etc. And yet she also manages to give equal voice to modern-day individuals living in traditional Inuit, Aboriginal Australian, and Pacific Island cultures, which are the overall focus of the book.
This combination worked surprisingly well for me (most of the time), though there were definitely a few dry spells. I thoroughly liked over 2/3 of the book, particularly the sections devoted to traditional navigation techniques of the Far North and South Pacific. Having read several other books about the Arctic, I expected to enjoy learning more about the Inuits of Baffin Island. The portion about traditional navigational culture in Oceania, however, was entirely new information to me.
As O’Connor writes: “For hundreds of years the outside world has been fascinated by how people inhabited the South Pacific, a twenty-five-million-square-mile area of ocean dotted with thousands of small islands. How did humans possibly find their way to these small pinpricks of land scattered across a vast and bewildering ocean three times the size of Europe?” (p. 226)
I honestly had never thought of this before, but it really is fascinating that humans were not only able to find and settle such a remote corner of the world, but also to develop thriving cultures, interconnected by hundreds of miles of open ocean. I will definitely be looking for another book on this topic and thank the author for piquing my curiosity!
Compared to the coverage of traditional navigation in the Arctic and Oceania, I found the third of the book devoted to “Dreaming” routes of Aboriginal Australians less compelling and honestly, rather confusing.
Despite reading over 80 pages of well-researched information about this unique culture, I never came away with a clear sense of what exactly the “Dreaming” is (was?) and what greater purpose it serves within Aboriginal culture. My (very rudimentary, and likely incorrect) takeaway is that Aboriginal people view the land as a living, breathing tapestry of folklore and historical events, one which connects the past with the present and informs the future.
But beyond that, I was never able to wrap my head around key parts of the “Dreaming”, specifically:
- Why Aboriginal people embark on such arduous long-distance journeys
- How esoteric markers of “Dreaming” routes are identified, or even whether these markers are tangible/intangible
- The method by which “Dreaming” narratives are passed down within and between Aboriginal cultures
- How Aboriginal groups are aware of detailed “Dreaming” routes and associated knowledge hundreds of miles outside of their home area
In a way this section of the book raised more questions than answers for me, but perhaps that is the whole point. As O’Connor mentions:
“The Dreaming is not easy for non-Aboriginal people to conceptually grasp. Explanations in English often sound oxymoronic (it is in the past but has no end, for instance), or like the romantic imaginings of New Age primitivists.” (p. 138)
One last thought: the author’s background sounded fairly interesting and I wish she had integrated it more into the narrative. She really pulled me in with her vivid description of her earliest childhood memories on the the New Hampshire farm where she lived for a few years. I also found the description of her experience getting lost down dirt roads in the middle of the New Mexico desert quite fascinating. I understand why she chose to keep a low profile, as it likely would have detracted from the significance of the cultures she is profiling, but I found the personal content to be some of the more interesting moments in the book.
While I would rate "Wayfinding" 3.5 stars if I had the option, I am going with a 3 star rating as a good third of the book was an effort to get through.
This combination worked surprisingly well for me (most of the time), though there were definitely a few dry spells. I thoroughly liked over 2/3 of the book, particularly the sections devoted to traditional navigation techniques of the Far North and South Pacific. Having read several other books about the Arctic, I expected to enjoy learning more about the Inuits of Baffin Island. The portion about traditional navigational culture in Oceania, however, was entirely new information to me.
As O’Connor writes: “For hundreds of years the outside world has been fascinated by how people inhabited the South Pacific, a twenty-five-million-square-mile area of ocean dotted with thousands of small islands. How did humans possibly find their way to these small pinpricks of land scattered across a vast and bewildering ocean three times the size of Europe?” (p. 226)
I honestly had never thought of this before, but it really is fascinating that humans were not only able to find and settle such a remote corner of the world, but also to develop thriving cultures, interconnected by hundreds of miles of open ocean. I will definitely be looking for another book on this topic and thank the author for piquing my curiosity!
Compared to the coverage of traditional navigation in the Arctic and Oceania, I found the third of the book devoted to “Dreaming” routes of Aboriginal Australians less compelling and honestly, rather confusing.
Despite reading over 80 pages of well-researched information about this unique culture, I never came away with a clear sense of what exactly the “Dreaming” is (was?) and what greater purpose it serves within Aboriginal culture. My (very rudimentary, and likely incorrect) takeaway is that Aboriginal people view the land as a living, breathing tapestry of folklore and historical events, one which connects the past with the present and informs the future.
But beyond that, I was never able to wrap my head around key parts of the “Dreaming”, specifically:
- Why Aboriginal people embark on such arduous long-distance journeys
- How esoteric markers of “Dreaming” routes are identified, or even whether these markers are tangible/intangible
- The method by which “Dreaming” narratives are passed down within and between Aboriginal cultures
- How Aboriginal groups are aware of detailed “Dreaming” routes and associated knowledge hundreds of miles outside of their home area
In a way this section of the book raised more questions than answers for me, but perhaps that is the whole point. As O’Connor mentions:
“The Dreaming is not easy for non-Aboriginal people to conceptually grasp. Explanations in English often sound oxymoronic (it is in the past but has no end, for instance), or like the romantic imaginings of New Age primitivists.” (p. 138)
One last thought: the author’s background sounded fairly interesting and I wish she had integrated it more into the narrative. She really pulled me in with her vivid description of her earliest childhood memories on the the New Hampshire farm where she lived for a few years. I also found the description of her experience getting lost down dirt roads in the middle of the New Mexico desert quite fascinating. I understand why she chose to keep a low profile, as it likely would have detracted from the significance of the cultures she is profiling, but I found the personal content to be some of the more interesting moments in the book.
While I would rate "Wayfinding" 3.5 stars if I had the option, I am going with a 3 star rating as a good third of the book was an effort to get through.
April 25, 2019
At one point or another, each of us has likely gotten lost. And as twenty-first-century technophiles, we have likely used a global positioning system to get ourselves un-lost. But before GPS and even before paper maps and compasses, our ancestors spread out across the world and learned to navigate vast swathes of seemingly featureless landscapes. How did they do it, and how do their descendants still do it? How does learning to navigate affect our brains? Did the ability to learn to navigate and then tell stories about it aid in humanity’s evolution?
In her new book, Wayfinding: The Science and Mystery of How Humans Navigate the World, journalist M.R. O’Connor investigates these questions, blending the stories of Inuits of Nunavut in northern Canada, Aboriginal Australians, and Pacific Islanders with current neurological studies of the hippocampus, a region of the brain that is vital to developing spatial skills and memory.
After an incident where a GPS device led O’Connor to a desolate spot in the desert and the realization that, after buying a GPS-enabled smartphone in 2008, she had stopped relying on her own brain to figure out where she was, O’Connor set out to investigate the story and science of navigation. This led her all over the world, from the Canadian Arctic to the Australian Outback, and to the islands of the Pacific Ocean, where native peoples have been finding their way home across hundreds of square miles of open territory with a precision that baffled European explorers. What gave people like the Inuit, Aboriginal Australians, and Pacific Islanders such incredible abilities? Language and story. The Inuits’ many terms for snow describe formations of ice and snow that aid in orienteering. That is, if the snow is shaped thusly, the wind is from the north. In the outback, the Aborigines’ navigational stories are part of the Dreamtime, a religious and historical ideology nearly impossible for outsiders to define, but provides the Aborigines with a cultural memory dating back thousands of years and a network of paths and sites through thousands of square miles of desert.
“In some places I found individuals and organizations who consider the revival and practice of traditional navigation to be a matter of self-determination and cultural survival. By talking with some of them, I hoped to better understand the value and significance of these practices in the era of hypermobility, to perhaps even experience what the writer Robyn Davidson deems to be real travel: ‘to see the world, for even an instand, with another’s eyes’.”
O’Connor also delves into the navigational techniques of Pacific Islanders, who traveled across the Pacific ocean and settled on small islands hundreds of miles apart. Despite a Western belief that the Islanders found these places by accident, the Islanders know better, and have insisted upon it for years: their ancestors read the tides and ocean currents like a map, and used the stars to guide them across the watery expanses to the islands they knew were there without having seen them before.
Without being preachy about it, O’Connor makes is clear that Western explorers from the 1400s through the present day have given native peoples short shrift when it comes to navigation, and tells of how governments have enforced their own notions of proper behavior, education, and diet upon a people and place not suited to any of these. It is only recently that these people have been able to reclaim their heritage and their ancient skills- hopefully not too late to bring them back from the brink of extinction.
And, far from being a mystical sense of the world, O’Connor argues that the earliest human navigators were the first scientists. They noticed traces and tracks left by animals and weather, built hypotheses around those traces, and then proved their ideas right or wrong. By putting their ideas to the test, ancient humans used the scientific method to figure out how to move safely through the world and shared that knowledge with others.
“The human mind seems built to encode topographical information in the form of stories. In this way, we created repositories of chared memories in some places and developed deep, emotional attachments to them. We called those places home.”
But don’t think that Wayfinding is all about navigating without a compass. O’Connor also talks to neuroscientists about their research on the hippocampus and how it affects our growth and daily lives. And how our increasing reliance on technology to do our remembering and navigating for us can cause problems we didn’t expect. A damaged hippocampus causes us to live in a dream world where we cannot remember our own pasts or imagine our futures; a shrunken hippocampus could lead to depression or Alzheimer’s.
And yet, as GPS devices and smartphones grow in popularity and capability, we continue to outsource our thinking, becoming more passive as we let the technology determine where we go and how we get there.
The best works of nonfiction tell stories as gripping as the best works of fiction while simultaneously expanding our knowledge of the world. By skillfully blending individual and cultural stories from around the world with recent scientific developments, O’Connor describes the crimes of Western colonialism, the long-ignored wisdom of native peoples, and why it is important for us to look up from our screens and pay attention to the natural world. We are far more capable than our devices would have us believe, and in this gem of a book, O’Connor shows us what we can do if we put our minds to it.
In her new book, Wayfinding: The Science and Mystery of How Humans Navigate the World, journalist M.R. O’Connor investigates these questions, blending the stories of Inuits of Nunavut in northern Canada, Aboriginal Australians, and Pacific Islanders with current neurological studies of the hippocampus, a region of the brain that is vital to developing spatial skills and memory.
After an incident where a GPS device led O’Connor to a desolate spot in the desert and the realization that, after buying a GPS-enabled smartphone in 2008, she had stopped relying on her own brain to figure out where she was, O’Connor set out to investigate the story and science of navigation. This led her all over the world, from the Canadian Arctic to the Australian Outback, and to the islands of the Pacific Ocean, where native peoples have been finding their way home across hundreds of square miles of open territory with a precision that baffled European explorers. What gave people like the Inuit, Aboriginal Australians, and Pacific Islanders such incredible abilities? Language and story. The Inuits’ many terms for snow describe formations of ice and snow that aid in orienteering. That is, if the snow is shaped thusly, the wind is from the north. In the outback, the Aborigines’ navigational stories are part of the Dreamtime, a religious and historical ideology nearly impossible for outsiders to define, but provides the Aborigines with a cultural memory dating back thousands of years and a network of paths and sites through thousands of square miles of desert.
“In some places I found individuals and organizations who consider the revival and practice of traditional navigation to be a matter of self-determination and cultural survival. By talking with some of them, I hoped to better understand the value and significance of these practices in the era of hypermobility, to perhaps even experience what the writer Robyn Davidson deems to be real travel: ‘to see the world, for even an instand, with another’s eyes’.”
O’Connor also delves into the navigational techniques of Pacific Islanders, who traveled across the Pacific ocean and settled on small islands hundreds of miles apart. Despite a Western belief that the Islanders found these places by accident, the Islanders know better, and have insisted upon it for years: their ancestors read the tides and ocean currents like a map, and used the stars to guide them across the watery expanses to the islands they knew were there without having seen them before.
Without being preachy about it, O’Connor makes is clear that Western explorers from the 1400s through the present day have given native peoples short shrift when it comes to navigation, and tells of how governments have enforced their own notions of proper behavior, education, and diet upon a people and place not suited to any of these. It is only recently that these people have been able to reclaim their heritage and their ancient skills- hopefully not too late to bring them back from the brink of extinction.
And, far from being a mystical sense of the world, O’Connor argues that the earliest human navigators were the first scientists. They noticed traces and tracks left by animals and weather, built hypotheses around those traces, and then proved their ideas right or wrong. By putting their ideas to the test, ancient humans used the scientific method to figure out how to move safely through the world and shared that knowledge with others.
“The human mind seems built to encode topographical information in the form of stories. In this way, we created repositories of chared memories in some places and developed deep, emotional attachments to them. We called those places home.”
But don’t think that Wayfinding is all about navigating without a compass. O’Connor also talks to neuroscientists about their research on the hippocampus and how it affects our growth and daily lives. And how our increasing reliance on technology to do our remembering and navigating for us can cause problems we didn’t expect. A damaged hippocampus causes us to live in a dream world where we cannot remember our own pasts or imagine our futures; a shrunken hippocampus could lead to depression or Alzheimer’s.
And yet, as GPS devices and smartphones grow in popularity and capability, we continue to outsource our thinking, becoming more passive as we let the technology determine where we go and how we get there.
The best works of nonfiction tell stories as gripping as the best works of fiction while simultaneously expanding our knowledge of the world. By skillfully blending individual and cultural stories from around the world with recent scientific developments, O’Connor describes the crimes of Western colonialism, the long-ignored wisdom of native peoples, and why it is important for us to look up from our screens and pay attention to the natural world. We are far more capable than our devices would have us believe, and in this gem of a book, O’Connor shows us what we can do if we put our minds to it.
September 9, 2020
I was fascinated by this account of how humans find their way through the world - how we literally make our way through space, find new places, and are able to return to places we’ve been. O’Connor explores all the current neuroscience and evolutionary science behind ‘wayfinding’ as well as exploring the ways that different cultures navigate. She also explores how various cultures conceptualise space in completely different ways- linguistically, spiritually, and practically.
To do this, O’Connor interviews scientists, anthropologists, sociologists, as well as a host of master navigators from around the world - including Inuit, First Nations Australians, and Pacific Islanders. She provides a rich account that focuses largely on the way that many traditional navigation practices have been lost as a direct result of colonisation.
On the flip side, this is still a book by a white writer - and while this doesn’t change her personal politics (which always prioritise first person accounts from cultures other than her own) - it’s still reflective of the systemic imbalance which determines who gets to speak, and about what. And so this book will especially/primarily useful for white audiences in emphasising the idea that Eurocentric ideas about navigation and space are in no way universal - or even necessarily best for our planet, or our brain health.
It was super duper thoroughly researched (with extensive bibliography and index) - I’m even using some of the evolutionary science in my PhD! I loved this dense, concise and precise style, but it means you can’t rush through it.
To do this, O’Connor interviews scientists, anthropologists, sociologists, as well as a host of master navigators from around the world - including Inuit, First Nations Australians, and Pacific Islanders. She provides a rich account that focuses largely on the way that many traditional navigation practices have been lost as a direct result of colonisation.
On the flip side, this is still a book by a white writer - and while this doesn’t change her personal politics (which always prioritise first person accounts from cultures other than her own) - it’s still reflective of the systemic imbalance which determines who gets to speak, and about what. And so this book will especially/primarily useful for white audiences in emphasising the idea that Eurocentric ideas about navigation and space are in no way universal - or even necessarily best for our planet, or our brain health.
It was super duper thoroughly researched (with extensive bibliography and index) - I’m even using some of the evolutionary science in my PhD! I loved this dense, concise and precise style, but it means you can’t rush through it.
Read
June 9, 2023It is fitting that a book called 'Wayfinding' has helped to provide some direction to a period of my life characterised by a sense of easy-going aimlessness.
Taking an unplanned interruption to the Masters I was studying for has left me without a clear academic focus for the time being - a slightly irregular state of a affairs for me, personally. This has left a vacuum that I've had to fill by finding new subjects to sink my teeth into and sate my curiosity for ideas. Because life can sometimes take some unexpectedly silly and, in my case, surprisingly maritime-based turns, I now work in a boat museum, and hence the topics I've been occupying myself with have mostly been boaty ones.
The National Maritime Museum's very own Pacific Encounters gallery, I think, does justice to the vast history of the vast ocean it is dedicated to. It does an impressive job of sensitively capturing the complexity of a diverse and troubled history, a task that the well-intentioned curators sometimes struggle with, having to work with a fusty collection inherited from a jingoistic age. I am an enthusiastic advocate of this gallery. I mean, I've spent more time stood in it talking to people about its contents than literally anyone else - I feel pretty confident in making that assertion - so I should be, really. I've greatly enjoyed learning about this ocean, its people, and their history.
So this book was simply the latest straddling topics connected to Pacific peoples and their pasts that I'd dived into for the purpose of research. I'd already read Matt K. Matsuda's great, comprehensive history 'Pacific Worlds', as well as Vanessa Collingridge's account of the voyages undertaken by Captain James Cook, which an elderly lady gave to me as a present. Of late, I've had my curiosity particularly aroused by the techniques and traditions by which people have historically navigated this seemingly boundless ocean that has comprised the totality of their known universe. A bit of cursory Googling led me to 'Wayfinding', which also includes detailed accounts of modes of navigating proper to the indigenous peoples of the Arctic and Australia. It did not disappoint.
I couldn't have imagined how this book would connect together surprising, different ideas - different, but all things I find myself insatiably interested in, connected mesmerisingly coherently despite hitherto seeming almost unbridgeably disparate. Basically, I wasn't expecting my delve into the world of indigenous practices of wayfinding to come with such a healthy dollop of fascinating theories from the worlds of linguistic and cognitive science!
(unfinished)
Taking an unplanned interruption to the Masters I was studying for has left me without a clear academic focus for the time being - a slightly irregular state of a affairs for me, personally. This has left a vacuum that I've had to fill by finding new subjects to sink my teeth into and sate my curiosity for ideas. Because life can sometimes take some unexpectedly silly and, in my case, surprisingly maritime-based turns, I now work in a boat museum, and hence the topics I've been occupying myself with have mostly been boaty ones.
The National Maritime Museum's very own Pacific Encounters gallery, I think, does justice to the vast history of the vast ocean it is dedicated to. It does an impressive job of sensitively capturing the complexity of a diverse and troubled history, a task that the well-intentioned curators sometimes struggle with, having to work with a fusty collection inherited from a jingoistic age. I am an enthusiastic advocate of this gallery. I mean, I've spent more time stood in it talking to people about its contents than literally anyone else - I feel pretty confident in making that assertion - so I should be, really. I've greatly enjoyed learning about this ocean, its people, and their history.
So this book was simply the latest straddling topics connected to Pacific peoples and their pasts that I'd dived into for the purpose of research. I'd already read Matt K. Matsuda's great, comprehensive history 'Pacific Worlds', as well as Vanessa Collingridge's account of the voyages undertaken by Captain James Cook, which an elderly lady gave to me as a present. Of late, I've had my curiosity particularly aroused by the techniques and traditions by which people have historically navigated this seemingly boundless ocean that has comprised the totality of their known universe. A bit of cursory Googling led me to 'Wayfinding', which also includes detailed accounts of modes of navigating proper to the indigenous peoples of the Arctic and Australia. It did not disappoint.
I couldn't have imagined how this book would connect together surprising, different ideas - different, but all things I find myself insatiably interested in, connected mesmerisingly coherently despite hitherto seeming almost unbridgeably disparate. Basically, I wasn't expecting my delve into the world of indigenous practices of wayfinding to come with such a healthy dollop of fascinating theories from the worlds of linguistic and cognitive science!
(unfinished)
May 2, 2025
An ultimately beautiful reflection on how humanity has found its way and a rejection of a modern world that is certainly lost.
February 3, 2024
I love this book, I love this planet, I love people and I love all the creatures and the landscapes that allow us to create the stories and journeys we experience:''''''') i wish it was a bit shorter but probably one of the best non-fiction works I've had the joy of reading!
Jan 25, 2024: Adding my favorite quote ever here:
“How do these geese know when to fly to the sun? Who tells them the seasons? How do we, humans, know when it is time to move on? As with the migrant birds, so surely with us, there is a voice within, if only we would listen to it, that tells us so certainly when to go forth into the unknown.”
Feb 2, 2024: I keep coming back to this book. I keep coming back to how much it means to be a person and how to interact with our planet and what that means. I love this book and how it has affected that view point? I really don't know what else to say.
Jan 25, 2024: Adding my favorite quote ever here:
“How do these geese know when to fly to the sun? Who tells them the seasons? How do we, humans, know when it is time to move on? As with the migrant birds, so surely with us, there is a voice within, if only we would listen to it, that tells us so certainly when to go forth into the unknown.”
Feb 2, 2024: I keep coming back to this book. I keep coming back to how much it means to be a person and how to interact with our planet and what that means. I love this book and how it has affected that view point? I really don't know what else to say.
August 9, 2020
If I had read just the first third (or maybe even half) of this book it would have gotten a much higher rating, but there was entirely too much of the same thing over and over and I’m so over it.
May 4, 2020
This is a wonderful new book about one of my favorite things to think about.
August 19, 2022
Речь в книге идёт о humans не в контексте белой европейской цивилизации, а тех, кто до сих пор использует для навигации не GPS, но звезды, волны и ветер: о народах севера, Австралии и Океании.
Это захватывающее и неожиданно очень романтичное исследование, за которым стоит большой труд – весь материал для книги Маура собирала лично. Это грустное чтение – о мире, который мы (да, мы, как европейская цивилизация) потеряли. Мир сказаний и традиций, мир сложнейших песен и подробнейших ментальных карт.
Знать имена тысяч звёзд, преодолевать сотни километров по морю, ориентируясь на рисунок и ритм волн, выживать в ледяной пустыне, точно зная, где дом, потому что ветер дует с нужной стороны – в мире до сих пор есть люди, которые умеют это делать и стараются передавать свой навык и дальше. Хочется верить, что знание их не умрет, хотя и не станет доступным для моего понимания.
Стараюсь пореже смотреть в телефон, составляя маршрут.
«
Я наблюдала за тем, как в амфитеатр вошли около пятидесяти студентов, и Хут начал занятие. «До сих пор мы говорили о навигации в ее разных обличьях, — сказал он. — Навигационное счисление, звезды, солнце, использование компаса. Теперь поговорим о погоде. Кто-нибудь заметил направление ветра, прежде чем войти в здание?»
Никто не поднял руку.
«Откуда дует ветер? Кто-то заметил?»
«С юго-востока?» — неуверенно предположил юноша.
«Почему вы так думаете?» — спросил Хут.
«Потому что он, кажется, дул мне в спину».
«Ветер северо-западный, — сказал Хут. — В этом районе потоки воздуха между домами могут менять направление, и поэтому направление ветра лучше всего определять по движению облаков». Хут принялся писать на доске, рассказывая о механизме образования облаков, плотности воздуха, ветре и географии. Если вы думаете, что для лекционной аудитории Гарварда и для физика, специализирующегося на изучении элементарных частиц, это слишком просто, вы не одиноки, — я думала точно так же. Тем не менее я не смогла ответить на вопрос Хута о ветре. Я заметила, что в кампусе дует ветер, но не обратила внимания на его направление, причем это произошло не только сегодня — у меня вообще не было такой привычки. Мой метод наблюдения за погодой был таким же, как у большинства людей: я могла выглянуть в окно, чтобы решить, понадобится ли мне свитер, а за прогнозом погоды обращалась к телефону или компьютеру. Я считала эти прогнозы точными, но что касается интерпретации данных о погоде, их мне с таким же успехом могли предоставить Зевс или Гера. Это пример того, что антрополог Чарльз Фрейк называет «магическим мышлением». В качестве примера он приводит разницу в том, как средневековые и современные моряки понимают приливы. Современное западное общество знает о приливах намного больше, но теория этого явления, основанная на сложной математике, недоступна пониманию отдельного штурмана. «Сегодня морякам вообще незачем знать теорию приливов. Они просто каждый раз сверяются с таблицей приливов и отливов. Им не нужно рассматривать это явление как систему, — пишет Фрейк. — Поэтому к “магическому мышлению” в отношении приливов склонен именно современный грамотный моряк, а не средневековый».
Это захватывающее и неожиданно очень романтичное исследование, за которым стоит большой труд – весь материал для книги Маура собирала лично. Это грустное чтение – о мире, который мы (да, мы, как европейская цивилизация) потеряли. Мир сказаний и традиций, мир сложнейших песен и подробнейших ментальных карт.
Знать имена тысяч звёзд, преодолевать сотни километров по морю, ориентируясь на рисунок и ритм волн, выживать в ледяной пустыне, точно зная, где дом, потому что ветер дует с нужной стороны – в мире до сих пор есть люди, которые умеют это делать и стараются передавать свой навык и дальше. Хочется верить, что знание их не умрет, хотя и не станет доступным для моего понимания.
Стараюсь пореже смотреть в телефон, составляя маршрут.
«
Я наблюдала за тем, как в амфитеатр вошли около пятидесяти студентов, и Хут начал занятие. «До сих пор мы говорили о навигации в ее разных обличьях, — сказал он. — Навигационное счисление, звезды, солнце, использование компаса. Теперь поговорим о погоде. Кто-нибудь заметил направление ветра, прежде чем войти в здание?»
Никто не поднял руку.
«Откуда дует ветер? Кто-то заметил?»
«С юго-востока?» — неуверенно предположил юноша.
«Почему вы так думаете?» — спросил Хут.
«Потому что он, кажется, дул мне в спину».
«Ветер северо-западный, — сказал Хут. — В этом районе потоки воздуха между домами могут менять направление, и поэтому направление ветра лучше всего определять по движению облаков». Хут принялся писать на доске, рассказывая о механизме образования облаков, плотности воздуха, ветре и географии. Если вы думаете, что для лекционной аудитории Гарварда и для физика, специализирующегося на изучении элементарных частиц, это слишком просто, вы не одиноки, — я думала точно так же. Тем не менее я не смогла ответить на вопрос Хута о ветре. Я заметила, что в кампусе дует ветер, но не обратила внимания на его направление, причем это произошло не только сегодня — у меня вообще не было такой привычки. Мой метод наблюдения за погодой был таким же, как у большинства людей: я могла выглянуть в окно, чтобы решить, понадобится ли мне свитер, а за прогнозом погоды обращалась к телефону или компьютеру. Я считала эти прогнозы точными, но что касается интерпретации данных о погоде, их мне с таким же успехом могли предоставить Зевс или Гера. Это пример того, что антрополог Чарльз Фрейк называет «магическим мышлением». В качестве примера он приводит разницу в том, как средневековые и современные моряки понимают приливы. Современное западное общество знает о приливах намного больше, но теория этого явления, основанная на сложной математике, недоступна пониманию отдельного штурмана. «Сегодня морякам вообще незачем знать теорию приливов. Они просто каждый раз сверяются с таблицей приливов и отливов. Им не нужно рассматривать это явление как систему, — пишет Фрейк. — Поэтому к “магическому мышлению” в отношении приливов склонен именно современный грамотный моряк, а не средневековый».
March 18, 2025
What I thought would be a book about how GPS has ruined our innate sense of direction was worlds beyond that. While discussions of the technology that have enabled our modern world are abound, more importantly, M.R. O’Connor has taken us on a journey in exploring what travel and movement really mean. By examining in detail the cultures that dwell on the fringes of our globe, such as the Nunavut in the arctic and the natives in Polynesia, this book argues that what makes us human is our connection with the land—our memories of it, our storytelling about it. Navigation requires a familiarity of space that most of us have lost and continue to lose. As sea-level rise and climate change prepare to change these lifeways and all of our lives forever, O’Connor’s documentation of these cultures is not only important, but it also allows us to ponder the question of what it means to be without a home, one that must continue to adapt and move.
In the book’s final chapter, O’Connor discusses the future of technology, primarily that of Elon Musk—both the Tesla and the Hyperloop. These technologies and ideologies create a disconnectedness from our real lives that is at odds with the world O’Connor spent the rest of the book revealing to us. His world is one devoid of story, one that does not seek to love the earth, but to be sheltered away from it as we get from point A to point B. The beauty of exploration is to connect with it, to watch it unfurl slowly in front of you, to experience topophilia (the love of earth). In 2025, the discussion of Musk and his ideas, and all the contrasts to them, means so much more than it did in 2019. How might we find our way now? I believe this book might have the beginning of an answer.
In the book’s final chapter, O’Connor discusses the future of technology, primarily that of Elon Musk—both the Tesla and the Hyperloop. These technologies and ideologies create a disconnectedness from our real lives that is at odds with the world O’Connor spent the rest of the book revealing to us. His world is one devoid of story, one that does not seek to love the earth, but to be sheltered away from it as we get from point A to point B. The beauty of exploration is to connect with it, to watch it unfurl slowly in front of you, to experience topophilia (the love of earth). In 2025, the discussion of Musk and his ideas, and all the contrasts to them, means so much more than it did in 2019. How might we find our way now? I believe this book might have the beginning of an answer.
xx-dnf-skim-reference
February 27, 2025Impulse at library. I read prologue, then epilogue, and realized I'm not target audience. I already know the theme, as I've been exploring the world in different scales and by different means as well as at different rates, for over a half century. And atm I, personally, am not all that interest in the wisdom of pre-tech societies, sorry.
Honestly, though I have to disagree with one statement. At least on a personal level. "Out of the stream of information generated by our movement we create origins, sequences, paths, routes, and destinations that make up narratives with starting points, middles, and arrivals. It's this ability to organize and remember our journeys that gives us the ability to find our way back." Um, am I the only person who needs to plan ahead to find the route back? Unless it's super easy, I can't go there and just know how to reverse the route home. Am I weird?
February 2025
Honestly, though I have to disagree with one statement. At least on a personal level. "Out of the stream of information generated by our movement we create origins, sequences, paths, routes, and destinations that make up narratives with starting points, middles, and arrivals. It's this ability to organize and remember our journeys that gives us the ability to find our way back." Um, am I the only person who needs to plan ahead to find the route back? Unless it's super easy, I can't go there and just know how to reverse the route home. Am I weird?
February 2025
June 19, 2019
I'd thought this book might be similar to John Edward Huth's
The Lost Art of Finding Our Way
. O'Connor does interview Huth and they do talk about some of the same groups, but her approach is a bit different.
O'Connor uses the experiences of Inuit, Aboriginal and Polynesian cultures to illustrate different aspects of scientific inquiry into how human's approach getting around in the world. For the Inuit, this involves intense knowledge of what to our eyes might seem a barren environment, using patterns in the snow and ice to determine wind and travel directions. For the long-distance sailors of Oceania, it's their ability to read waves and currents and their relationships to stars. And for the the Aboriginal people, it's the stories and songs attached to various pathways handed down from the Dreaming.
Each of these are described in the context of experiments created to figure out how we know about the world around us and how we travel through it. Much of it involves the hippocampus, which turns out to be quite malleable. But like many parts of our bodies, it can wither with disuse -- a point O'Connor makes in discussing how modern navigation technology is removing us from our environment.
The final chapter is filled with tips from the various experts she's interviewed on being more mindful about our environment and becoming attuned to our surroundings and the ways we make our way through them. It was thoughtful way to end the book.
Strangely, for a book about finding one's way in the world, there aren't any illustrations or maps in this book. Oh -- maybe that's the point...
O'Connor uses the experiences of Inuit, Aboriginal and Polynesian cultures to illustrate different aspects of scientific inquiry into how human's approach getting around in the world. For the Inuit, this involves intense knowledge of what to our eyes might seem a barren environment, using patterns in the snow and ice to determine wind and travel directions. For the long-distance sailors of Oceania, it's their ability to read waves and currents and their relationships to stars. And for the the Aboriginal people, it's the stories and songs attached to various pathways handed down from the Dreaming.
Each of these are described in the context of experiments created to figure out how we know about the world around us and how we travel through it. Much of it involves the hippocampus, which turns out to be quite malleable. But like many parts of our bodies, it can wither with disuse -- a point O'Connor makes in discussing how modern navigation technology is removing us from our environment.
The final chapter is filled with tips from the various experts she's interviewed on being more mindful about our environment and becoming attuned to our surroundings and the ways we make our way through them. It was thoughtful way to end the book.
Strangely, for a book about finding one's way in the world, there aren't any illustrations or maps in this book. Oh -- maybe that's the point...
January 28, 2020
At times, Wayfinding is a heady and thick text that forced me to stop and think; other times it swept me up and I found myself rolling through pages with ease. Rarely do I find a book that I can imagine myself reading again (and certainly not WHILE I am reading it the first time), but there is a lot that could be re-covered in this one.
As a parent of a young child, I see opportunities to raise a strong and capable wayfinder - it's easy to see how my own upbringing and transition to adulthood has followed along a vastly changed world. To be sure, there are some frightening thoughts in O'Connor's research, and I'm afraid for many that technology and it's inherent disconnect with the wild around us will win out for many. I hope there's enough people who DO want to flex that hippocampal grey matter to keep their Wayfinding abilities strong.
Many years ago now, when I was an impressionable youth, a mentor said "Life is a series of stories; you might as well have some good ones." They were right in ways this book helps bring even more in focus.
As a parent of a young child, I see opportunities to raise a strong and capable wayfinder - it's easy to see how my own upbringing and transition to adulthood has followed along a vastly changed world. To be sure, there are some frightening thoughts in O'Connor's research, and I'm afraid for many that technology and it's inherent disconnect with the wild around us will win out for many. I hope there's enough people who DO want to flex that hippocampal grey matter to keep their Wayfinding abilities strong.
Many years ago now, when I was an impressionable youth, a mentor said "Life is a series of stories; you might as well have some good ones." They were right in ways this book helps bring even more in focus.
April 14, 2024
3.5
Interesting background on how navigating land and oceans has been done historically using 3 regions/societies of the world. Some takeaways that are potentially implementable, otherwise more so a narrative how others have found their way backed up by research and first hand conversation.
Interesting background on how navigating land and oceans has been done historically using 3 regions/societies of the world. Some takeaways that are potentially implementable, otherwise more so a narrative how others have found their way backed up by research and first hand conversation.
July 25, 2023
Solid, informative, sometimes dry but most times fascinating. This led me to conclude that I need to put my phone down and navigate with my hippocampus using landmarks more often. I found particularly interesting the topics of Polynesians and Inuits.
November 20, 2020
This book was an impulse borrow from my local library, and I'm delighted that I picked it up. O'Connor superbly describes both the science and the lived experience of human navigation in the contexts of modern technologies as well as indigenous communities striving to retain their ancestral knowledge and wayfinding practices. The way O'Connor establishes relationships with "master navigators" in three distinct topographical environments– the Arctic tundra, the Australian outback, and the South Pacific– brings to life a rich variety of connections with the living ecosystem we all inhabit and navigate each day. Her call to greater attention to our connectedness with our physical environment, the evolution of cognitive pathways based on this relationship, and the enduring ancient wisdom that could renew humanity and the planet as the climate change crisis worsens, all make Wayfinding an intriguing and thoroughly enjoyable book.
July 5, 2022
The author opened up the topic of wayfinding in a way that sustained my interest throughout the book. She weaves together personal experiences with various cultures (Intuit, Aborinal Australians, Oceania people) along with research from neuroscientists, psychologists, and academics to form an argument that wayfinding is much more than just a Cartesian map in your head, it's more like following the melody of music and stems from a sense of topophilia about the land.
July 13, 2020
This book was sooo boring. I literally fell asleep after 10 pages and several more times as I read it.
The entire book is about going to different parts of the world and seeing how indigenous people pass on the skills of wayfinding. Wayfinding is basically being able to find where you want to get and back by learning to read the land, wind, stars, etc. The use stories, songs, and treks to pass these skills on to their children. It's part of their life and culture.
In many cultures, these skills do not exist because we don't need to take these kinds of journeys to hunt or be nomads. We also have maps to help us find our way. We can just use GPS and turn off our mind.
Using our minds to wayfind can help increase the size or our hippocampus. There are thoughts that a healthy hippocampus can help ward off Alzheimer's disease.
Bottom line if you don't practice is a skill you won't be able to do it.
The entire book is about going to different parts of the world and seeing how indigenous people pass on the skills of wayfinding. Wayfinding is basically being able to find where you want to get and back by learning to read the land, wind, stars, etc. The use stories, songs, and treks to pass these skills on to their children. It's part of their life and culture.
In many cultures, these skills do not exist because we don't need to take these kinds of journeys to hunt or be nomads. We also have maps to help us find our way. We can just use GPS and turn off our mind.
Using our minds to wayfind can help increase the size or our hippocampus. There are thoughts that a healthy hippocampus can help ward off Alzheimer's disease.
Bottom line if you don't practice is a skill you won't be able to do it.
April 5, 2021
“In 2008, the year I got a smartphone, just 8 percent of American mobile phone owners used a navigation application to access maps and find their way; by 2014, 81 percent of owners were using them.”
How did we find our way before Safari and Google Maps and Waze? “Wayfinding” explores the question of how people in the past navigated tundra and forest and praire — and rarely lost their way.
“Fifteen or twenty years ago, the old Inuit couldn’t believe when people started getting lost. They couldn’t believe it.”
The author digs deep.
“At the heart of successful human navigation is a capacity to record the past, attend to the present, and imagine the future—a goal or place that we would like to reach. In this way, navigation involves not only literal travel through space but also mental travel through time, what some call autonoetic consciousness.”
And so we wind our way through wayfinding, “the use and organization of sensory information from the environment to guide us.”
How did we find our way before Safari and Google Maps and Waze? “Wayfinding” explores the question of how people in the past navigated tundra and forest and praire — and rarely lost their way.
“Fifteen or twenty years ago, the old Inuit couldn’t believe when people started getting lost. They couldn’t believe it.”
The author digs deep.
“At the heart of successful human navigation is a capacity to record the past, attend to the present, and imagine the future—a goal or place that we would like to reach. In this way, navigation involves not only literal travel through space but also mental travel through time, what some call autonoetic consciousness.”
And so we wind our way through wayfinding, “the use and organization of sensory information from the environment to guide us.”
August 6, 2020
I really wanted to love this book but I couldn't persevere past halfway. Some very interesting insights into human and animal behaviours but I fundamentally disagreed with the broad brush premises such as only highly intelligent, diligent and non-neurotic people can be a good navigators. If this book was a trail it veered off and came to a dead end for me.
Read
September 24, 2024One of the most interesting books I have ever read
March 5, 2021
The author describes the methods that humans use for finding their way in the physical world and explores the neurological basis for these abilities.
She discusses Innuits, Bushmen, Aborigines and Polynesian seafarers. Traditional Innuit travelers can simply see more details of the environment than others. In a white wasteland of unvarying snow, they see minute changes in the shadows of the small wave like structures in the snow caused by the wind. These abilities are lost on the younger generations with their GPS’s. Aborigines have Dreamtime tracts that are mixtures of origin stories and descriptions of walking routes in the tribe’s territory that not only describe physical locations but also track the stars. An astronomer can name 100 or so stars, some experienced aboriginals can name thousands. Boys memorize these songs in precise detail and can use them to travel long distances that they have never actually seen before. The songs begin and end at the limits of the tribe’s traditional boundaries. These songs, passed down for at least 7,000 and perhaps 13,000 years, have been used successfully in modern Australian courts to support tribes’ ancestral claims to land that the British claimed was Tierra Nova, unclaimed land. The age of some of these stories is evidenced in that they describe features that are now buried off shore beneath the sea. Traditional Polynesian navigators were sensitive to the slight variations in waves intersecting at different angles. The best navigators were able to simply lie in the bottom of a canoe and feel the subtle rocking of the waves.
It seems that the ability to navigate is stored in the hippocampus which is very large in traditional wayfinders and in London taxi drivers who have to memorize every street in the city. The hippocampus is also involved in memory and cognition and researchers believe that early wayfinding (wandering around exploring) is essential in proper brain development. It seems that physical exercise also builds the hippocampus.
Getting lost seems to be a uniquely human problem. The 4-ounce Artic tern travels the 40K mile route from Greenland to Antarctica and back each year. Leatherback turtles travel 10K miles from California to Indonesia and back to the same beaches where they were born. Honeybees (and ants) are able to calculate shortcuts an ability which puzzled Aristotle. Humpback whales travel thousands of miles in a straight line varying only by a single degree. Blindfolded humans will walk in a 66ft diameter circle when they think they are walking straight. When grazing horses, cattle and deer align themselves in a N-S direction except when under power lines which disrupt the magnetic field.
Neuroscience has found that certain cells in rats hippocampi seem to be “place cells” that fire in response to a location as though a rat has a map of an area in his head. Other studies show that episodic memories are stored along with this map as well as music and navigation of social relationships.
There is a question of whether the map in the brain is map or a sequence of steps. There is evidence that the hippocampus may hold the map function of the brain and the nearby caudate nucleus the step-by-step sequential directional clues. Children rely on hippocampal special strategies 85 % of the time while adults over 60 us it ½ as much. Stress, depression, insomnia and alcohol abuse shrunk hippocampi.
There are some languages, e.g., that of the Guugu Yimithirr speakers of Australia, that do not have words for right, left or back. All things are described in terms of cardinal directions, e.g., “to the east of the rock.” To tell someone to turn off a camping stove: “Turn the knob west.” A British scientist went on a long trek with a group of these men and made 160 measurements of their indications of the directions of far-off places even 100 miles away and compared these to map and compass readings. They were never more than 13.5 degrees off. Nothing like this could be obtained in European populations. This is called an absolute frame of reference. English uses a relative frame of reference. Interestingly a child using an absolute frame of reference language can use it buy age 3.5 and perfectly by 8 while those using a relative frame can only master it by age 12.
Misc:
-Aborigines burned the landscape frequently. They burned in different areas, with different heats and durations to determine what plants would grow where.
-Alexander Graham Bell predicted that one day we would be able to see the person that we were talking to on the phone.
-Panic means to have “the voice of Pan in your ear.”
-“Nostalgia” is coined from “return” and “pain” in Greek. Fitting.
-noosphere
: the sphere of human consciousness and mental activity especially in regard to its influence on the biosphere and in relation to evolution
She discusses Innuits, Bushmen, Aborigines and Polynesian seafarers. Traditional Innuit travelers can simply see more details of the environment than others. In a white wasteland of unvarying snow, they see minute changes in the shadows of the small wave like structures in the snow caused by the wind. These abilities are lost on the younger generations with their GPS’s. Aborigines have Dreamtime tracts that are mixtures of origin stories and descriptions of walking routes in the tribe’s territory that not only describe physical locations but also track the stars. An astronomer can name 100 or so stars, some experienced aboriginals can name thousands. Boys memorize these songs in precise detail and can use them to travel long distances that they have never actually seen before. The songs begin and end at the limits of the tribe’s traditional boundaries. These songs, passed down for at least 7,000 and perhaps 13,000 years, have been used successfully in modern Australian courts to support tribes’ ancestral claims to land that the British claimed was Tierra Nova, unclaimed land. The age of some of these stories is evidenced in that they describe features that are now buried off shore beneath the sea. Traditional Polynesian navigators were sensitive to the slight variations in waves intersecting at different angles. The best navigators were able to simply lie in the bottom of a canoe and feel the subtle rocking of the waves.
It seems that the ability to navigate is stored in the hippocampus which is very large in traditional wayfinders and in London taxi drivers who have to memorize every street in the city. The hippocampus is also involved in memory and cognition and researchers believe that early wayfinding (wandering around exploring) is essential in proper brain development. It seems that physical exercise also builds the hippocampus.
Getting lost seems to be a uniquely human problem. The 4-ounce Artic tern travels the 40K mile route from Greenland to Antarctica and back each year. Leatherback turtles travel 10K miles from California to Indonesia and back to the same beaches where they were born. Honeybees (and ants) are able to calculate shortcuts an ability which puzzled Aristotle. Humpback whales travel thousands of miles in a straight line varying only by a single degree. Blindfolded humans will walk in a 66ft diameter circle when they think they are walking straight. When grazing horses, cattle and deer align themselves in a N-S direction except when under power lines which disrupt the magnetic field.
Neuroscience has found that certain cells in rats hippocampi seem to be “place cells” that fire in response to a location as though a rat has a map of an area in his head. Other studies show that episodic memories are stored along with this map as well as music and navigation of social relationships.
There is a question of whether the map in the brain is map or a sequence of steps. There is evidence that the hippocampus may hold the map function of the brain and the nearby caudate nucleus the step-by-step sequential directional clues. Children rely on hippocampal special strategies 85 % of the time while adults over 60 us it ½ as much. Stress, depression, insomnia and alcohol abuse shrunk hippocampi.
There are some languages, e.g., that of the Guugu Yimithirr speakers of Australia, that do not have words for right, left or back. All things are described in terms of cardinal directions, e.g., “to the east of the rock.” To tell someone to turn off a camping stove: “Turn the knob west.” A British scientist went on a long trek with a group of these men and made 160 measurements of their indications of the directions of far-off places even 100 miles away and compared these to map and compass readings. They were never more than 13.5 degrees off. Nothing like this could be obtained in European populations. This is called an absolute frame of reference. English uses a relative frame of reference. Interestingly a child using an absolute frame of reference language can use it buy age 3.5 and perfectly by 8 while those using a relative frame can only master it by age 12.
Misc:
-Aborigines burned the landscape frequently. They burned in different areas, with different heats and durations to determine what plants would grow where.
-Alexander Graham Bell predicted that one day we would be able to see the person that we were talking to on the phone.
-Panic means to have “the voice of Pan in your ear.”
-“Nostalgia” is coined from “return” and “pain” in Greek. Fitting.
-noosphere
: the sphere of human consciousness and mental activity especially in regard to its influence on the biosphere and in relation to evolution
August 7, 2019
I haven't finished this book yet and it may be a bit before I do, But I am enjoying it very much! I read an article in the paper about the hippocampus and the gps devices recently which intrigued me, too. My friends and I used to love to get lost when we traveled, even around town and also in the woods near our homes. We weren't going anywhere and felt we had all day to get un-lost, or that we would discover cool new places. It was entertaining! I read horror stories about gps devices leading to peoples deaths. It wasn't a consideration when I purchased one back in 2007 for a direction challenged family member. I love maps and discovering new places, and passed that love onto my daughter and countless children I have worked with over the years.
The chapters on how the Inuits and early explorers found their ways around their world were fascinating. I never really gave them too much thought, but they must have felt much like us children setting out to explore our woods and fields. Naturally, there would be wrong turns, but lessons would be learned and new places remembered! A sense of real adventure is a prerequisite to exploring any place new. Sad to think, our grandkids gps will get them (hopefully) from New York to California, but with no idea of where those are and no awareness of anything in between! And no memory of how to go back to any neat places they discover.
Sad to imagine how it will affect our memories, too. The info on how the hippocampus works and causes early childhood amnesia was interesting. Research is ongoing on the hippocampus and dementia in seniors, and as I am soon to be entering that zone, I find it most interesting. I either haven't gotten that far in the book, or have passed over it. But if it's in here, I'll read it. The book is well researched and entertaining. It's a whole new area for me to think about! Kudos to M.R. O'Connor for bring it to our attention!
I received a Kindle arc from Netgalley in exchange for a fair review.
The chapters on how the Inuits and early explorers found their ways around their world were fascinating. I never really gave them too much thought, but they must have felt much like us children setting out to explore our woods and fields. Naturally, there would be wrong turns, but lessons would be learned and new places remembered! A sense of real adventure is a prerequisite to exploring any place new. Sad to think, our grandkids gps will get them (hopefully) from New York to California, but with no idea of where those are and no awareness of anything in between! And no memory of how to go back to any neat places they discover.
Sad to imagine how it will affect our memories, too. The info on how the hippocampus works and causes early childhood amnesia was interesting. Research is ongoing on the hippocampus and dementia in seniors, and as I am soon to be entering that zone, I find it most interesting. I either haven't gotten that far in the book, or have passed over it. But if it's in here, I'll read it. The book is well researched and entertaining. It's a whole new area for me to think about! Kudos to M.R. O'Connor for bring it to our attention!
I received a Kindle arc from Netgalley in exchange for a fair review.
July 3, 2021
Subtitle is How Humans Navigate the World. Movement, space, language.
What is the best approach to dealing with the world we move in, the way we find our way to a place and back to again. How the mind works. good writing and good subject and good info.
Wayfinding . . . wagfinding is the use and organization of sensory information from the environment to guide us. p. 16
memoryscape (e.g. place where, like arctic white environment, or Australian deserts, of Pacific ocean
vastness where bits of memory let you go mindfully from location to location. p 46
[sadly, we now] outsource memory [to phones or computers, etc.] rather than our own memory. p. 51
passerine birds . . . use their toes to perch. . . (more than half the birds] p 73
. . . Nadel/O'Keefe space is one of the most important forces shaping the human mind. p. 167
place learning [remembering where something is or how to get there] . . . allocentric (nongeocentric) . . . place cells [in hippocampus] p. 169
caudate nucleus [part of brain not hippocampus] . . . where hippocampus is involved in spatial learning . . . relationship between landmarks and caudate nucleus . . . a structure that builds habits. . . turn left, go one mile, take right fork in road, etc. p. 262
. . . chronic stress, untreated depression(sic)insomnia, and alcohol abuse can all shrink hippocampal volume. p. 265
It seems to me now that our range of motion without the crutches of technology has actually shrunk, and our intimacy with the places we go may have dimmed. p. 280
We all seem to find it extraordinarily difficult to step outside the onslaught, to create the distance and perspective between us and our devices that might allow us to question what cultural or cognitive price is being paid in return for convenience. p 283 !!!!!
topophilia the sense of attachment and love for place. p. 296 !!!!!!
nostalgia from return and pain. p. 303
What is the best approach to dealing with the world we move in, the way we find our way to a place and back to again. How the mind works. good writing and good subject and good info.
Wayfinding . . . wagfinding is the use and organization of sensory information from the environment to guide us. p. 16
memoryscape (e.g. place where, like arctic white environment, or Australian deserts, of Pacific ocean
vastness where bits of memory let you go mindfully from location to location. p 46
[sadly, we now] outsource memory [to phones or computers, etc.] rather than our own memory. p. 51
passerine birds . . . use their toes to perch. . . (more than half the birds] p 73
. . . Nadel/O'Keefe space is one of the most important forces shaping the human mind. p. 167
place learning [remembering where something is or how to get there] . . . allocentric (nongeocentric) . . . place cells [in hippocampus] p. 169
caudate nucleus [part of brain not hippocampus] . . . where hippocampus is involved in spatial learning . . . relationship between landmarks and caudate nucleus . . . a structure that builds habits. . . turn left, go one mile, take right fork in road, etc. p. 262
. . . chronic stress, untreated depression(sic)insomnia, and alcohol abuse can all shrink hippocampal volume. p. 265
It seems to me now that our range of motion without the crutches of technology has actually shrunk, and our intimacy with the places we go may have dimmed. p. 280
We all seem to find it extraordinarily difficult to step outside the onslaught, to create the distance and perspective between us and our devices that might allow us to question what cultural or cognitive price is being paid in return for convenience. p 283 !!!!!
topophilia the sense of attachment and love for place. p. 296 !!!!!!
nostalgia from return and pain. p. 303
April 24, 2021
I thought this was a very interesting book. Wayfinding is considered the ability to navigate your way without use of technologies. The book starts off with an interesting discussion of the brain regions involved with these processes and unpacks the experiences of the author as she learns about the wayfinding skills that peoples in the Arctic, Australia and Oceania employ in finding their way through what appears to us to be nothing but unremarkable land- and sea-scapes. I was fascinated by the idea that we have an absolute and relative way to consider space and that this consideration of space may have to do with the way we construct narratives that guide us through the spatial world, but also more abstract worlds of myth and storytelling. The final chapters of the book look at how using less technology could allow us to flex our navigating skills without reliance on GPSs and technologies by noticing more of the hints around us everyday. However, there was a sense that this might be useful in the parts of the world which are not built up with roads and other people around every corner - not so much in cities or suburbia. Overall, an enjoyable read.
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