Tristan Gooley has got me lost in the middle of London – which, I’ll admit, isn’t a terribly huge achievement. I’m routinely lost in the middle of London. My journeys tend to consist of a hard stare at a map app, 50 paces in the wrong direction and then a kind of abject sustained fumble until I arrive at wherever I’m supposed to be 10 minutes after I’m supposed to be there. And that’s me with Google Maps. Without Google Maps, I’m 80% sure I would have given up and moved into a ditch some years ago.

However, this time is different. Gooley, often known as the Natural Navigator, has got me lost on purpose. He’s covered my eyes and led me by the arm through the backstreets of central London, taking time to spin me around every now and again for maximum disorientation. And now, right in the middle of nowhere, he’s asked me to take him to one specific Oxford Street branch of Wasabi.

“Remember what I said,” he tells me. I look up. The sun is directly in front of me, throwing all manner of shadows in my direction. It’s lunchtime, so that means I must be facing south. The clouds, too, are lazily drifting from west to east, just as they were last time my eyes were open. I tentatively make my way towards the sun and, miraculously, I find myself on Oxford Street. Then I follow the clouds eastwards and, bingo, I’ve got to where I need to be.

Weirder still, it wasn’t even that hard. This is the message of Gooley’s new book Wild Signs and Star Paths. It’s a beautifully written almanac of tricks and tips that we’ve lost along the way, with the intention of helping us regain what he calls the “sixth sense”: our innate ability to scan the landscape and anticipate what might happen next.

“There are potentially 11m pieces of information hitting our brain every second,” he tells me as we cross London, “but our brain filters out 99.9% of it.” Simply by being more attuned to this information, Gooley can spot things that have managed to pass the rest of us by. For instance, had I got lost on the way to Wasabi, I could have looked up for the nearest satellite dish. Why? Because satellite dishes overwhelmingly point southeast. Notice this once and you’ll never be able to unsee rows and rows of satellite dishes, all quietly informing you of your place in the world.

Can you spot our heroes?: Tristan Gooley and Stuart Heritage take the scenic route. Photograph: Pal Hansen/The Observer

Gooley’s motto is “Nothing is random.” He’s parsed the world in minuscule detail and located the pattern holding it all together. He’s part Spider-Man and part Neo from The Matrix, albeit much more affable and with a niftier taste in hats. He argues that he’s just managed to hone abilities we all latently possess. “My tuppence-worth is, I think, humanity consistently makes progress and then throws the baby out with the bathwater,” he says. “We had thousands of years of wanting to get from A to B in the most expedient way possible. But now we can get between places incredibly efficiently, and people have realised that they go from A to B to C to D to E to F to G to retirement to death, without actually noticing what they’re doing at those points at all.”

If nothing else, his ideology is an antidote to that. It’s reminiscent of mindfulness in that sense; by slowing down and concentrating on every tiny sensation that the present offers you – the feeling of wind on your face, little noises you’d otherwise tune out – you can start to uncover new layers of understanding. However, there is a caveat. “I never made the argument that this way of thinking of the world is expedient,” he says. “There are very few situations where natural navigation is the fastest option.”

Walking around London with Tristan Gooley is a copper-bottomed reinforcement of this notion. Every few paces he’ll halt to enthuse about some aspect of the landscape that has somehow passed the modern masses by. In Seven Dials he stops me to point at a tree, marvelling at what he calls “the tick” – the shape caused by its subtle lean southwards. In Soho Square he takes me through a blow-by-blow deconstruction of a holly tree, showing how the lower leaves are spikier than those higher up, and that its north-facing leaves are slightly but significantly larger than those to the south. He simultaneously explains the enormous difference in meaning between one and two pigeons taking off from a lawn at the same time. It’s mind-blowing stuff – granule by granule he’s constructed an intricate jigsaw puzzle of information that perpetually lets him know where he is and what’s going on – but if you need to get somewhere sharpish, it probably isn’t for you.

“Navigation was the only thing that held my interest for more than a couple of years,” Gooley explains over tea in a Covent Garden café midway through our jaunt. As he gained more experience, it led him to bigger goals. He’s led expeditions around the world, travelling to far-flung corners to study the methods of the Tuareg, Bedouin and Dayak. He is also the only living person to have both flown solo and sailed single-handed across the Atlantic, a feat that helped remind him of his mortality. “You know you’re at the edge of sensible endeavours when more than half the people you’ve talked to have died,” he says. “I went to seven people for advice on the aviation part and, by the time I took off, three of them were dead in light aircraft crashes.” He pauses. “I think a fourth died subsequently.”

But it wasn’t until that escapade was over that Gooley felt the bite of natural navigation. “It was really weird,” he says. “I’d have this major experience of climbing into a boat and sailing through gales and all sorts of challenges, and then a week later I’d be trying to cross a tiny patch of English woodland – maybe only one mile or so – and going: ‘Actually, this is more like how I felt when I was 10.’”

Breaking cover: Stuart Heritage and Tristan Gooley stalking squirrels. Photograph: The Observer

Wild Signs and Star Paths is rammed with Gooley’s knowledge. There’s “the tick”, but there’s also “the celebration” (the burst of wildflowers on a forest floor that tells you where light falls) and “the shear” (the tilt of a cloud that indicates wind direction) and “the invisible handrail” (the use of a prominent landscape feature to help you retain your bearings). In one chapter Gooley suggests he can pinpoint the location of a bonfire, even years after it went out, based on foliage alone.

The book makes much of the differentiation between what he calls fast and slow thinking – basically between instinct and analysis. The more you painstakingly study the sky for navigational pointers, he says, the more the brain will learn to automate the process. It’s the same difference between sounding out a series of letters on a page and seeing a fully formed word.

Eventually Tristan and I reach Regent’s Park, and it’s suddenly as if he’s been plugged into the mainframe. In the middle of an entirely unrelated conversation he stops dead in his tracks and slaps me on the arm.

“Did you hear that?” he whispers. I do not hear anything, but say yes anyway. “That’s the cacophony!” he hisses, pointing to a bush full of birds making what I’d assumed were normal bird noises. “Those were alarm calls, between wrens and tits! There’s something in there the birds aren’t happy with.” Gingerly, we make our way over to investigate, but Tristan stops dead again, even more excited than before. He’s seen a squirrel standing on its hind legs. “Look at it go!” he whispers. “We’ve got a cacophony, the birds aren’t happy and the squirrels have picked up. It’s unlikely they would have gone on hyper-alert because of us.”

This has now become a mystery that demands resolution, and fortunately one presents itself. A breeze blows through a row of trees, and Gooley has his answer. “Trees picking up, lot of different cloud types, some shear there,” he notes, running through his process aloud for me. “I think this must be a weather warning. There’s the sixth-sense feel. There was something going on that the birds weren’t happy with, and I could sense it without thinking.”

Had we been in the jungle, this intuitiveness could have saved our lives. The birds might have spotted a jaguar, for instance, and their cries would have served as our cue to leave before we became dinner. But we weren’t in the jungle. We were in the middle of Regent’s Park, and the birds were just being vague about inclement weather.

“Is this sixth-sense stuff even all that applicable here?” I asked myself. On the way home from the station, I’m caught in an unexpected downpour. Fine, the birds had a point and natural navigation has plenty of real-world uses. Long story short, I now trust Tristan Gooley with my life.

How to navigate in a city

Look for satellite dishes. They all point towards the equator. In London, that is roughly south-southeast.

Find an ‘invisible handrail’ and use it to remember your bearings. In the countryside, this might be a river. In a city, it could be a main road.

Look at a tree. Do the branches point a certain way? That’s probably south. Are the leaves on those branches smaller than the leaves on the opposite side? That’s definitely south.

Use the sun. It rises in the east, sets in the west and moves through the southern sky, giving you a very basic compass.

Need to get home? Head against the flow of people at the start of the day or with the flow at the end and you are pretty much guaranteed to find a station.

Wild Signs and Star Paths: The Keys to Our Lost Sixth Sense by Tristan Gooley is published on 17 May by Sceptre at £20