How I lost my sense of direction and found it again thanks to Rand McNally
I was the one who never got lost.
Growing up in Prince George’s County, Maryland, in the 1970s – sledding at Fort Washington when it still snowed in the winter, exploring the cemetery hidden behind a hedge at the corner of Livingston Road and Chalfont – I built an internal map of my world that meant I could ride my bike to the pool or to school without getting lost, that meant I could tell my navigationally challenged older sister where to turn when driving me to a friend’s house. I knew the landmarks, the stoplights, even if I didn’t know the name of every street, and I spent hours exploring the woods that lead down to the creek behind our house.
Almost fifty years later driving south down Piscataway Highway (a.k.a. Route 210, a.k.a. Indian Head Highway) to visit my father who had recently moved to Charles County, my inner compass failed me. That internal map of my youth had limits, it turns out. Like early ocean-going navigators who venture past a certain point, I had fallen off the edge of my known world. Was it age (I turned sixty this year) or was there something else afoot?
When my dad gave me his new address, I plugged it into a navigation app and followed the blue line from Virginia where I live, across the Potomac River, and then down Piscataway Highway. Past Sunnnybrook Tavern, past the sign for St. John’s Episcopal Church at Broad Creek (I kissed a boy for the first time sitting on a log beside that creek), past the intersection at Old Fort Road and the turnoff to my neighborhood (we moved away the summer I turned thirteen). My inner compass began to malfunction just south of the traffic light in Accokeek.
Scientists studying fruit flies have identified compass neurons that help the insects build a spatial map of their world. Shine a light from a fixed location in an otherwise dark space and the fly orients itself to that light and navigates based on that position. Add a second virtual sun 180 degrees opposite the first, and the fly becomes confused about which light to use for guidance.
I used a navigation app to get me to my dad’s new home, but after the first few visits, I knew the turns and landmarks well enough to get me there without it. Despite my growing familiarity with the route, when I stayed there, it was as if my internal magnetic poles had shifted. Where I thought the sun should rise it set, where I was sure it should set, it rose. I was as confused as a fruit fly with two suns. An arm-chair therapist might tell me that the disorientation is due to my inner child trying to come to terms with my dad’s relocation, but I don’t buy that.
I blamed the app.
Scientists researching the use of global positioning systems (GPS) via navigation apps have found that people with a “greater lifetime GPS experience have worse spatial memory during self-guided navigation.”
Not only that, but the study also revealed that an increasing reliance on navigation apps can eat away at an individual’s ability to navigate by memory. I was right; my reliance on that blue line to get me where I needed to go was killing my sense of direction.
On cross-country family trips when I was a kid, I begged to be allowed to hold the map. They were the accordion folded kind – one for the Eastern United States, one for the Western United States – prone to tearing at the creases. I traced the interstates, added up the miles between the exits to see how far we had to go, matched the symbols on the map marking points of interest and physical features to the landscape unfurling on either side of the interstate. It turns out I was honing my sense of direction all that time.
Psychologists studying navigational ability have found that some people are better at it than others, but their research suggests that the difference has more to do with experience than genetics. People who spend more time exploring their environment, building mental maps based on landmarks, and reading and remembering printed or mental maps have a better sense of direction.
In the novel Leave the World Behind by Ruman Alam, both internet and cell networks have gone dark and one of the characters ventures out into the countryside to find help and supplies. He thinks he knows the way back to town but the further he drives the more lost he becomes, and when he consults the GPS app on his phone…nothing. I am far from a survivalist but something about that scene made my scalp tingle. It hints at a permanent dislocation, like the temporary vertigo I felt when my app lost connectivity driving through the Texas Hill Country on a dark and stormy night. All the nav screen showed was a blue dot in a sea of gray.
If the road maps I studied as a kid gave rise to my sense of direction once, maybe a physical map could right the sense of dislocation I felt when I drove off the edge of my internal map into Charles County. I needed a paper map, one that didn’t require a cell tower or an internet connection.
The map I bought is a large format Rand McNally Road Atlas that includes the United States, Canada, and Mexico. The state of Maryland takes up a two-page spread, with inset boxes for Baltimore, Annapolis, and a few other cities. I found Route 210 and traced it south from the Beltway. Just past Piscataway Creek – the creek I’d explored as a kid and one of the edges of my known world – the highway takes a pronounced bend. It did not run north-south anymore the way it had in my memory map; a swell of land pulled the highway west to meet the curve of the Potomac River at Indian Head.
Studying the atlas has helped recalibrate my cardinal compass. Finding my destination on the atlas, tracing the route that would take me there, and matching it to the intersections and landmarks I pass along the way has expanded the boundaries of my internal map. Now when I close my eyes and think about the farm in Charles County where my dad lives, I can see how the house is set on the rise of the land, its front door facing south. It makes sense now, where the sun sets and where it rises. I needed the digital and the physical, two suns to regain my sense of direction.
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- Fisher, Y.E., Lu, J., D’Alessandro, I. et al. Sensorimotor experience remaps visual input to a heading-direction network. Nature 576, 121–125 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1772-4
- Dahmani, L., Bohbot, V. Habitual use of GPS negatively impacts special memory during self-guided navigation. Sci Rep 10, 6310 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-62877-0
- Holmes, B. Why do some people always get lost? Knowable Magazine, April, 10 2024. https://doi.org/ 10.1146/knowable-041024-1