Wayfinding Read online

  I like to try and imagine what this era of human travel was like—were our forebears constantly lost, inching hesitantly into unfamiliar places, ever fearful of the unknown, or were they like astronauts, each new generation pushing farther into the frontiers of topography and mind? Did we venture intentionally or drift through happenstance? Perhaps our cognitive powers gave us the tools to undertake these journeys, or maybe those long-range movements produced new strategies for navigation and then eventually the intellectual advances of culture and tradition that bound us in rich, emotional relationships to the places we called home. All of the aids we use today—roads, signage, maps, compasses, GPS—are nascent inventions in our species’ history. For the majority of our species’ existence, we traversed the earth using the landscape itself as a guide. And we seemed to have moved a lot.

  Whether this movement took place over many generations or within individual lifespans is a matter of ongoing debate. It is difficult to model human movement patterns over a very long time with incomplete archaeological and paleoanthropological evidence. But it is interesting to consider whether there could be a part of us that is programmed to seek out and be curious. The various etymological roots of the word seek give a glimpse into this behavior’s potential significance. In Sanskrit, the root sag means “to track down.” In Latin, sagire means “to perceive quickly or keenly,” and sagus “to predict” or “to be prophetic.” These are all skills that would have been intrinsic to our success as a species engaged in foraging, hunting, socializing, and successfully navigating.

  At the level of DNA, there is some evidence that a pattern of proteins in our genetic makeup expresses itself as an impulse to explore. In the late 1990s, Chuansheng Chen and several other researchers at the University of California, Irvine, started looking at dopamine receptor genes, especially an allele (a variant of a gene inherited from each parent, located on our chromosomes) called DRD4. Dopamine reception has been shown to influence exploratory behavior in animals as well as speed and vigor of locomotion. What the researchers wanted to know was if the presence of longer DRD4 alleles in individuals was caused by natural selection through migration. If so, people from migratory populations would have a higher proportion of long alleles than those from sedentary communities.

  They looked at data from 2,320 individuals and found that the length of this dopamine receptor gene correlated to the distance they’d migrated from Homo sapiens’ origins in Africa. These findings were controversial; dopamine correlates with characteristics other than just exploratory behavior. But they provided some provocative ideas about the intertwined forces of genes and human history. Jews who had migrated a longer distance eastward in the direction of Rome and Germany had a higher proportion of long alleles than those who went south to Ethiopia and Yemen. Bantu individuals in South Africa, who had migrated from Cameroon, showed a higher proportion too. The Sardinians, who live geographically closest to the origin of their language family, had zero long alleles. Pacific Islanders, whose ancestors undertook some of the greatest migration feats known to humanity, had higher proportions of long alleles than any other group of Asians. A later study by Luke Matthews and Paul Butler in 2011 focused on the same DRD4 allele showed an even broader genetic profile for what the researchers called novelty-seeking traits in humans, including genetic quirks that might have predisposed our ancestors for exploratory behaviors—novelty-seeking and risk-taking. (In contrast, biologists are discovering that chimpanzees’ tolerance for novel stress is so low that transfer to new environments and sanctuaries often leads to death.) Our rapid migration, Matthews and Butler hypothesize, selected for individuals who were less vulnerable to novel stressors and whose risk-taking capacity pushed them to explore.

  Similar forces of selection seem to apply beyond our species; nature sometimes chooses for the most fervent and driven seekers, producing animals propelled by impulses and longings and the biological hardware to undertake epic journeys. Consider monarch butterflies that fly south to central Mexico on stained-glass wings for the winter and then return twenty-five hundred miles north to feed and lay eggs on milkweed plants. In 2010 biologists discovered that female monarch butterflies who search farthest afield and most diligently for plants lay a higher amount of eggs. Tens of thousands of monarch butterfly life cycles have created organisms whose DNA seems infused with the compulsion to go farther. Monarch migrations cover so much distance that they eclipse a single lifespan. Butterflies that depart on the expedition die along the way and it’s their great-grandchildren who complete the journey. Biologists call this a one-way migration: individuals travel in one direction but the population as a whole completes a circle. How do these organisms’ grandchildren, who have never made the journey before, know where to go?

  The mystery isn’t limited to lepidoptera. Fifty different species of dragonflies fly along routes that are so distant, the insects die before the end of the journey and their descendants complete it. Aphids, maybe the world’s least-appreciated migrants, inhabit a host plant in the spring and summer before producing young that fly to a different plant to mate and produce eggs. When these new aphids hatch, they fly back to the original plant, their grandparents’ home, even though they have never been there before. Scientists strive to understand the assortment of mechanisms that gives these organisms such navigational certitude. Meanwhile, I envy their lack of existential wavering, the ability to always know where they belong and how to get there.

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  Where biology has failed humans in preventing us from becoming lost, we have substituted culture. We invented systems of knowledge for organizing environmental information to orient ourselves and cultural mechanisms to transmit this knowledge to the next generation. Often, difficult monotonous landscapes in flux—deserts, seas, ice—resulted in extremely intricate systems, the mastery of which could require years of inculcation and experience. In such formidable environments, survival depended on utilizing perception, observation, and memory. Sun, sky, stars, wind, trees, tides, sea swells, mountains, valleys, snow, ice, anthills, sand, and animals are all navigational cues when interpreted in context. As the aviator Harold Gatty believed, “With nature as your guide, you need never be lost.”

  Not far into my research it dawned on me that despite having traveled around the world, my experiences navigating it were miserly compared to what is humanly possible. From one culture to the next, we grow up absorbing different mental models, traditions, and practices. We undergo an education of attention, as psychologist James Gibson described. These cultural contingencies of navigation intrigued me. In childhood we are exposed to languages, landscapes, technologies, and socioeconomic processes that affect how we think and see. Some of us are born into completely oral cultures, while others start learning an alphabet as toddlers. Some of us are taught how to read the earth or water to find north and south, while others learn how to navigate mazelike city streets by taking sequences of left and right turns.

  In recent decades, anthropologists and psycholinguists have taken note of an astonishing range of human navigation systems and begun chronicling them. Urban Europeans, Arctic hunters, seafaring canoe sailors, desert nomads—each use unique practices and skills to orient and know where they are. There is diversity even at local scales: among neighboring regions, islands, and communities. The Russian anthropologist Andrei Golovnev has found that the Nenets, an indigenous reindeer-herding community in northwest Siberia, navigate very differently from their neighbors, the Khanty. As Golovnev explains, “For Nenets, navigating is like watching oneself from the sky as a moving dot on the map whereas the Khanty recognizes a tree and follows this direction, then he notices a hill and goes toward this point, remembering every detail of his hunting ground.” These different strategies infuse other practices: Nenets will fix a broken engine by sitting in front of it and imagining the steps to fix it before starting. A Khanty person starts unscrewing nuts right away, because their hands remember every aspect of the engine. Two different ways of nav
igating are arguably different ways of interacting with the world.

  What if even the experience of being lost is culturally contingent? What if GPS is a gadget that addresses a specific set of cultural conditions: a severance of the individual from direct experience and generational knowledge of place? To be sure, GPS can and is used toward wildly diverse and oftentimes creative or life-saving ends. The international Confluence Project, for instance, aims to photograph every single intersection of latitude and longitude in the world, and members use GPS to locate them. Syrian refugees depend on GPS to flee from war and travel across the Mediterranean to Europe. Many use GPS to extend their reach and explore places to which they might never otherwise go. Navigation devices make vast reserves of distributed knowledge available to us in an instant. But, crucially, they never require us to possess information in our own memory in the way that successful navigators have been required to do till now.

  Years after being led astray in New Mexico, I realized how alien getting lost is to some and how unnecessary a tool like GPS is to them. In northern Australia I met a Jawoyn elder in her eighties, Margaret Katherine, whose childhood was spent walking on her family’s traditional country near the Mann River. At one point I asked what she did when she became lost in the bush. She laughed. She took my notebook and illustrated how the termite hills always pointed north-south, how the stars showed the way at night, and how all of the rocks, trees, gorges, and escarpments were created by her ancestors who traveled the world in the Dreamtime. Their journeys and landmarks were recorded in songs that she learned and memorized throughout her life. In this place, which struck me as unmarked and bewildering wilderness, it would be nearly impossible to become disoriented because everywhere was home.

  Later on, Ken MacRury, a historian of the Inuit dog and an accomplished dogsledder, described similar levels of deep familiarity with place among the Inuit. In his decades of traveling with hunters in the Canadian Arctic, he noted, “They wouldn’t get lost. And the dogs never get lost, never. Fifteen or twenty years ago, the old Inuit couldn’t believe when people started getting lost. They couldn’t believe it was possible.”

  The anthropologist Thomas Widlok explained to me that people tend to generalize navigation from the Western perspective, which is largely about individuals trying to chart and map unknown territory. In his years traveling with the San people of the Kalahari, he rarely if ever witnessed them not knowing where they were. “You drive out on the weekend to Yellowstone Park and then have to find your way in this alien place that you consider wilderness. We Westerners find it very difficult not to transpose or project this perspective of, ‘let’s conquer the world,’ as if this was a human universal,” he said. “Trying to chart an area that you don’t know yet is actually a very specific historical situation. It’s a skill that is useful for imperialists wanting to create colonies. GPS is also a very useful tool for going into unknown spaces.” The fascination with exploring unknown places is a “different mind-set from those in Australia, the San, or the Arctic,” Widlok continued. “They do not aspire to colonize the world and occupy places they’ve never visited. They are mobile but they are mobile in a restricted sense, they stay within a more or less defined cosmos. They are not going into unchartered territory. They are doing something quite different.”

  I set out to talk with individuals who practice this “something quite different.” Many of these unique practices have been lost to time or severed through cultural assimilation, oppression, and the extinction of languages. Modernity can engulf local ways of being, redefine borders or create new ones, and circumscribe movement or open up entirely different routes. The gas-powered engine, the speed of machines along fixed routes, cartography, GPS, and settlement have all changed how people navigate, whether in the American Midwest or the South Pacific. 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 instant, with another’s eyes.”

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  There is no single term that can encompass all the different processes and systems of human navigation. There are ongoing and contentious disagreements in anthropology, neuroscience, and psychology about the processes involved in what we do and how we do it, debates that I explore throughout this book. Yet I think there is one word that comes close: wayfinding. In the simplest terms, wayfinding is the use and organization of sensory information from the environment to guide us. The geographer Reginald Golledge defined it as “the ability to determine a route, learn it, and retrace or reverse it from memory through the acquisition of environmental knowledge.” In the deepest sense, it is a concept that offers a new way of thinking about our connection to the world.

  Four hundred years ago, the French philosopher René Descartes strove to explain human perception and started with the theory that our souls can only be in direct contact with our brains and not the universe outside our heads. Perception, according to Descartes’s model, is a mechanistic process, and the outside is imagined in our minds because it is an image created by a physiological process. This is the basis of Cartesian dualism, the idea that consciousness is nonphysical and the mind and body are fundamentally separate. It was centuries before the scientific dogma that perception is the result of mental operations was challenged.

  Born in 1904, the American psychologist James Gibson was fascinated by visual perception but frustrated by the assumption that there is a dualistic distinction between physical and mental environments. Through his studies of automobile drivers and airplane pilots, Gibson came to the conclusion that perception and behavior are a single biological phenomenon, and both humans and animals directly perceive their environment in an act of knowing or being in contact with it. We are not minds stuck in bodies but organisms that are part of our environment. Gibson called his theory ecological psychology and it led to a new understanding of navigation.

  Gibson described the process of navigation as detecting the layout of the environment from a moving point of observation. When a person moves from one place to another, there is an optic flow of what he called transitions, a continuum of connected sequences in what we see that could be a turn in the road or the crest of a hill. These transitions connect vistas that open our view. Transitions and vistas are what provide us with the information we need for controlling locomotion and navigation. “We are told that vision depends on the eye, which is connected to the brain,” he wrote in The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. “I shall suggest that natural vision depends on the eyes in the head on a body supported by the ground, the brain being only the central organ of a complete visual system. When no constraints are put on the visual system, we look around, walk up to something interesting and move around it so as to see it from all sides, and go from one vista to another. That is natural vision.” Later in life, Gibson rejected the idea of a cognitive map in the brain, instead adopting the term wayfinding to describe spatial navigation. There was no separation between mind and environment, between perceiving and knowing; wayfinding was a way that we directly perceive and involves the real-time coupling of perception and movement. He dedicated his book The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems to “all persons who want to look for themselves.”

  Today, a handful of anthropologists and psychologists have adopted Gibson’s ecological psychology model of navigation, describing wayfinding as a little-understood aspect of our everyday embodied existence in space. Because it is how we access the world and build consensus about reality, it is especially meaningful today when our attention is continually seduced downward to our devices and inward to our individualness. Wayfinding, I now think, is an activity capable of engaging with and attending to places and nourishing relationships and attachments to them.r />
  At a time of social change and ecological disruption, the possibility of this reengagement with our surroundings seems incredibly important. There may also be more pragmatic concerns. Just as the field of neuroscience is revealing the complicated, beautiful influence of the hippocampus on human life, it is also revealing what might happen when we indiscriminately adopt a technology that allows us to dim activity in this part of our brains by using it to give us turn-by-turn directions. A growing body of research combining insights into spatial cognition, memory, and aging points at the significant neurological effects of not flexing the hippocampus: it can decrease in volume over time and adversely affect how we solve spatial problems. In a series of studies in 2010, a group of researchers at Montreal’s McGill University, for instance, reported that exercising spatial memory and orientation in everyday life increases hippocampal gray matter, whereas underuse of its functions in older adults may contribute to cognitive impairment. Atrophy in the hippocampus is strongly associated with myriad problems, including Alzheimer’s disease, PTSD, depression, and dementia. (One of the researchers, Véronique Bohbot, told the Boston Globe that she no longer uses satellite-navigation devices to tell her where to go.) Could GPS’s turn-by-turn function have a subtle and potentially insidious impact on our well-being over the long term? While there has been no study testing such a direct relationship, the scientific literature so far indicates a possibility that a total reliance on GPS technology could over time put us at higher risk for neurodegenerative disease.

  Meanwhile, scientists who study childhood development increasingly see the ability to explore, play independently, and self-locomote as essential aspects of cognitive maturation, potentially spurring the vigor of memory and theory of mind. Yet children’s freedom of movement, from Japan to Australia to Europe to America, is increasingly circumscribed by risk avoidance and a lack of access to the outdoors. For the smartphone generation, getting anywhere without relying on GPS is becoming as dissonant with everyday life as writing by hand or reaching for an encyclopedia to find a fact.