Getting lost (Image: Heads Of State)

THE journey seemed simple enough, on the map anyway. Allison Fine left her home to drive to Vermont, just a few hours north on a major highway. She had studied the route and had a GPS gadget to help her. Nevertheless, she soon had absolutely no idea where she was.

“I don’t know what happened,” she says, “but I pulled over in tears, called my husband and said, ‘find me on Google Maps and talk me to Vermont’.” This he did, staying on the line for more than an hour.

Fine is an extreme case, but the feeling of getting hopelessly lost is something that most of us can relate to. In fact, along with our flair for language and our unparalleled intelligence, less-than-stellar navigational skills are among the things that can be considered uniquely human. While the vast majority of animals have no trouble finding their way around, most people, when stripped of maps or signs, are notoriously bad at it. A handful are so terrible at orienting themselves, even in places they know well, that they rarely leave the house alone (see “Lost in space”). “I try to study maps,” says Fine. “But when I get out into the real world, it just looks completely different.”

Until recently, little was known about how the human inner compass works. This is partly because “sense of direction” is not one neatly defined ability. Instead, it is made up of many different skills, such as awareness and memory of your surroundings, sensing your speed and direction changes over time, and tracking the location of …