Wayfinding

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  For Joaquín and Tareq

  There is no need to build a labyrinth when the entire universe is one.

  —JORGE LUIS BORGES

  PROLOGUE

  Wayfinding

  In the high plains east of Denver we rented a car and drove due south on Interstate 25 straight as an arrow toward the cities of Colorado Springs and Pueblo. I watched the landscape rush by at seventy miles per hour, while overhead cumulus clouds cast their shadows on the open country. Just past the New Mexico border we turned southwest and began to hug the Santa Fe National Forest through Cimarron, then drove due west into Eagle Nest and Angel Fire. That night we slept in a motel in Taos and I woke up with an idea to visit a local hot spring on the banks of the Rio Grande. I put the name of the spring in my phone’s navigation app and we drove out of town, following its directions, turning down a dirt road that led into a low-lying sagebrush vega. For the next while we turned onto one unmarked dirt road after another. I focused my attention on the phone’s directions until I realized that the track had ended and we could go no farther. We got out of the car and met the waft of dust and crumpled sage, then walked fifty yards ahead to the edge of a cliff. I leaned forward and saw the Rio Grande surging a hundred feet below.

  Somewhere nearby, I guessed, there must be a hot spring, and if only we had brought along some ropes and belay equipment or maybe a parachute we could have gotten to it with less risk to our lives. Though our predicament made me laugh, I started to wonder: what mathematical calculation based on an unknown, perhaps out-of-date map had come up with this murderous route? And why, I thought, had we naively trusted a disembodied algorithm and its satellite-radiated directions as it directed us toward a steep gorge? I had forgotten that my phone knew nothing of whether humans can fly, or the seasonal flow of the Rio Grande, that it had no actual experience because it had never been born, only programmed by someone who might never have set foot in New Mexico.

  The novelist Audrey Niffenegger has written that there are different ways to react to being lost. Panic is one. Another is to surrender and “allow the fact that you’ve misplaced yourself to change the way you experience the world.” We walked back to the car and sat on its warm hood. Severed from the umbilical cord of our GPS, we looked anew at the land. Before us lay a maze of brush stretching miles into the distance until it met the foot of the mountains, now cast in the purple shade of gathering thunderstorms. What was this place called? We didn’t know and we had no map. We took in our unexpected perch and watched two distinct storm fronts to the north and south. The tangled balls of energy and lightning picked up speed, blowing toward us like tumbleweeds across the plain. The first drops of rain hit the dirt, and we raced our way out of the high desert labyrinth to a paved road that would deliver us to the sanctuary of better-mapped places.

  * * *

  For a long time I kept returning to that feeling of disorientation in New Mexico. I was struck by the power of a device to influence the way I moved through the world, how it subsumed my attention, mediated my perception, and lulled me into something like passivity. The way I viewed the technology in my hand changed; I felt suspicious. I was twenty-six when the first smartphone equipped with navigation technology was released, old enough that I’d spent my adolescence and the start of my adulthood relying on experience, habit, exploration, paper maps, signage, word of mouth, and trial and error to find my way around. I bought a smartphone in graduate school to get around the streets of New York City’s outer boroughs as I hunted for stories and raced to cover breaking news as a newspaper reporter. Just a few decades before, the U.S. government had protected geolocation technology as a military secret. Now I had the power to know my latitude and longitude to within a hundred feet, velocity and direction to within a centimeter-per-second, and the time within a millionth of a second, giving me an imperious sense of mastery over my surroundings. Quickly—alarmingly quickly, in retrospect—my phone became the way I navigated, and I was not alone in my new dependence. 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. In the period between 2010 and 2014, the number of GPS devices doubled from 500 million units to 1.1 billion. Some market projections expect that number to grow to 7 billion by 2022, mostly by expanding the use of GPS outside Europe and North America. Soon there could be a GPS device for nearly every person on earth.

  Personal satellite navigation devices are the apotheosis of a dazzling era in human travel, an era of hypermobility. Most people have the ability to go where they want when they want, covering distances unimaginable to our ancestors at speeds that would have seemed proof of time travel just a hundred years ago. What was once an expedition is now a vacation. A voyage is now a jaunt. When the Venetian Marco Polo set off to the East in 1271, it took him four years to reach Xanadu and the empire of Kublai Khan in present-day China. He wouldn’t see his homeland again for nearly two decades. In 1325 Ibn Battuta, one of the medieval ages’ greatest explorers, set out for Mecca but ended up traveling as far west as Mali and as far east as China. It took him twenty-nine years. Technology has changed the very concept of a journey, a word that comes from the Latin for “diurnal,” meaning a day’s time. In Roman times the farthest one could travel in a journey was thirty or forty miles by horse. Since the start of the jet age in the 1950s, anybody who can pay the price of a ticket and possesses a passport can undertake what was considered a once-in-a-lifetime trip—what previously meant risking disaster, starvation, or death—in a day. There is joy in this freedom. Our reach is miraculous; our access unprecedented. But it’s worth considering what, if anything, has been lost in the shrinking of space and time. The explorer Gertrude Emerson Sen, who founded the Society of Woman Geographers in 1925, questioned fifty years later whether her fellows’ “travels today to the Arctic or the Antarctic or any other remote area, when you can fly there in a few hours, can be quite as fascinating as ours were in the olden days, when we travelled by slow freighters or camel, or on horseback or on foot.”

  Truly, the speed of change in how we relate to space and time has been scorching. We have turned roads into superhighways, flying into mass airline travel, locomotives into bullet trains; our cars may soon be self-driving. Marshall McLuhan believed that “after three thousand years of explosion, by means of fragmentary and mechanical technologies, the Western world is imploding. During the mechanical ages we had extended our bodies in space. Today, after more than a century of electronic technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned.”

  We’ve had other eras of seismic change in how our species travels the earth. Our shift from mobile hunter-gatherer bands to sedentary communities and eventually states, what is known as the Neolithic Revolution some ten thousand years ago, has been described by Yale political scientist James Sc
ott as a process of de-skilling. At every step, he writes in Against the Grain, the skills necessary for survival “represent[ed] a substantial narrowing of focus and a simplification of tasks.” If this seems too bleak a view of human civilization, he argues that at the very least our shift to sedentary livelihoods led to significant contractions: of our species’ attention to practical knowledge of the natural world, of our diet, of ritual life, and of space itself. (The ancient Chinese, according to Scott, described nomadic people who registered with the state as having “entered the map.”) During this period, our need to venture for hunting and resources likely shrank. Some trails and paths became roads connecting permanent settlements and greatly relieved the need to rely on memory and environmental landmarks to travel. As the scholar Alfredo Ardila writes, “For thousands of years, human survival depended on the correct interpretation of spatial signals, memory of places, calculation of distances, and so forth, and the human brain must have become adapted precisely to handle this kind of spatial information.” Until recently, the vast majority of humans traveled without material maps.

  Cheap and accurate GPS devices arrived in phones en masse just a decade ago, and already the era of paper maps and the challenge of orienting ourselves in space feels ancient. GPS seems indispensable, a psychic salve for getting lost or wasting time. Many of us embrace the device for even the shortest jaunts to ensure the fastest, most efficient route. In the Boston Globe, a journalist recounted a recent family road trip without GPS. Their adventures included using a telephone pole’s shadow to tell west from east and identifying Polaris; it was a holiday exploring “the old ways.” For those of us who remember the time before GPS, this lurch into a new normal feels abrupt, and the implications niggle at us. Weren’t the old days … yesterday?

  The pace of technological change sometimes makes it difficult to recognize the questions we should be asking. But in New Mexico I glimpsed a question: What happens when we outsource navigation to a gadget? Even the previous generation of navigation tools—the compass, chronometer, sextant, radio, radar—required us to give attention to our surroundings.

  The pursuit of an answer led me into unexpected territory. What exactly is it that humans are doing when we navigate? How and why do we do it differently from birds, bees, and whales? How has the speed and convenience of technology changed how we move through the world and how we see our place in it? By drawing on research and insights from diverse fields of study—from movement ecology and psychology to paleoarchaeology, from linguistics and artificial intelligence to anthropology—I discovered a remarkable story about the origins of human navigation and how it influenced our evolution as a species. And I sought out individuals in three places—the Arctic, Australia, and the South Pacific—who practice what is sometimes called traditional or natural navigation, traveling great distances using environmental cues largely without the use of any maps, instruments, or gadgetry. For someone like me, who grew up surrounded by maps, this sort of navigation is a revelation, another way of looking at the world and thinking about space, time, memory, and travel.

  * * *

  We are a species of primate that shed our reliance on the biological hardware and genetic programming that tells animals where they are and need to go. Instead, we developed cognitive abilities built on perception and attention, giving us the freedom to go anywhere. For us, navigation is not pure intuition, but process. When we move through space, we perceive the environment and direct our attention to its characteristics, collecting information or, as some would describe it, building internal representations or maps of space that are “placed” in our memory. 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. More so, we mold the discoveries we make along the way into insights and knowledge that guide and orient us in our next explorations.

  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. Noetic comes from the ancient Greek noéō meaning “I perceive” or “I understand,” and the term autonoetic is now used to describe our ability to mentally represent ourselves as autonomous agents in time, giving us the capacity for self-reflectivity and self-knowing.

  What cerebral anatomy makes this magic of consciousness possible?

  Several regions of the brain are involved in spatial memory, including the parietal and frontal lobes. But neuroscientists have found that the principal place in the human brain responsible for navigation, orientation, and mapping is the hippocampus, a region of gray matter in our temporal lobe with a distinct ram horn–shaped curvature. If the firecracker-like firing of the hippocampus’s different cells is stopped, humans lose the ability to find their way or recognize places they have been. People who have undergone trauma to or even removal of the hippocampus describe their waking experience as a kind of dream state in which their memories of locations and the events that take place at those locations disappear and every place and every experience is ever new. They lose their episodic memory, the ability to recall events of the past, and their capacity to formulate new memories essential for constructing a sense of self.

  The hippocampus is critical for recording the what, where, and when of long-term memory in mammals. While there is debate over whether episodic memory is unique to humans or exists in other organisms, as far as we know, we are the only animals that can recall the events of our life and organize them into sequences to build identities. For our species alone, the hippocampus is the locus of autobiography, the narrative of the life we have lived till now. It is also the engine of our imagination: without it, people struggle to project themselves into the future, make predictions, or envision goals.

  The hippocampus has sometimes been described as the human GPS, but this metaphor is reductive compared to what this remarkable, plastic part of our minds accomplishes. While a GPS identifies fixed positions or coordinates in space that never change, neuroscientists think what the hippocampus does is unique to us as individuals—it builds representations of places based on our point of view, experiences, memories, goals, and desires. It provides the infrastructure for our selfhood.

  And the hippocampus is exuberant. The neuroscientist Matt Wilson has found that when rats fall asleep after running through a maze at his laboratory at MIT, the neurons involved in their internal spatial mapping system continue to burst with activity. By watching the pattern of their firing, Wilson can tell which part of the maze the rat is dreaming about. The animal’s hippocampus is replaying the experience of moving through space. Wilson thinks sleep is likely a time when the hippocampus consolidates memories and seeks out rules and patterns of experience. “The idea is that during sleep you try to make sense of things you already learned,” said Wilson. “You go into a vast database of experience and try to figure out new connections and then build a model to explain new experiences. Wisdom is the rules, based on experience, that allows us to make good decisions in novel situations in the future.”

  Why did nature so thoroughly intertwine spatial navigation and memory in humans? Which came first? The mysterious evolutionary story of the hippocampus hints at how we as a species differentiated from our nonhuman primate ancestors, and how that may have shaped our intelligence. The neuroscientist Eleanor Maguire has described navigation as a basic cross-species behavior because “the hippocampus is a phylogenetically old part of the brain, with an intrinsic circuitry that may have evolved to deal with navigation.” But the late neuroscientist Howard Eichenbaum thought it was unlikely that navigation was the primary function of the hippocampus. After decades of designing maze studies on rats, he thought memory had always been the hip
pocampus’s principal interest. “If navigation was the primary purpose, that would mean the chicken knew how to cross the road, but it didn’t know why it was going there,” he said. “I find it hard to believe that memory wasn’t an adaptive feature that didn’t come up earlier. For the chicken it’s more like: there’s good stuff across the road and now I need to get there.” Eichenbaum described this neural circuit as a sort of magnificent grand organizer of the human brain, capable of mapping and sequencing multidimensional aspects of our experience in addition to space, from time itself to social relationships to music.

  Research now shows that the volume of our individual hippocampus can be influenced by experience, and the size of this circuit has changed over time in our species as a whole. And while as far as we know the changes to our hippocampi created by our experiences are not passed down to our descendants, we do pass down genes that contribute to hippocampal volume; studies have shown that hippocampal volume is 60 percent heritable from parents to offspring. Nicole Barger at the University of California, San Diego, has found that the human hippocampus is 50 percent larger than would be predicted for an ape with the same size brain as us. Why is ours so much larger than that of other closely related apes? What selective pressures influenced the evolution of our hominin ancestors’ hippocampi?

  Maybe it has something to do with our ancient excursions. Humans are the only species to have inhabited every geographic niche; our distribution is remarkable compared to other life forms. What we don’t know is what came first: did we travel far because we had big hippocampi, or did we get big hippocampi because we needed to travel far? What is for sure is that some fifty thousand years ago we fanned out from Africa. By twenty thousand years ago, our species had spread to Asia and Europe. By twelve thousand years ago, we had colonized the globe.