Inner Navigation
Why We Get Lost in the World and How We Find Our Way
-
- $15.99
-
- $15.99
Publisher Description
A FASCINATING INVESTIGATION OF HOW WE NAVIGATE THE PHYSICAL WORLD, INNER NAVIGATION IS A LIVELY, ENGAGING ACCOUNT OF SUBCONSCIOUS MAPMAKING.
Why are we so often disoriented when we come up from the subway?
Do we really walk in circles when we lose our bearings in the wilderness?
How -- and why -- do we get lost at all?
In this surprising, stimulating book, Erik Jonsson, a Swedish-born engineer who has spent a lifetime exploring navigation over every terrain, from the crowded cities of Europe to the emptiness of the desert, gives readers extraordinary new insights into the human way-finding system.
Written for the nonscientist, Inner Navigation explains the astonishing array of physical and psychological cues the brain uses to situate us in space and build its "cognitive maps" -- the subconscious maps it employs to organize landmarks. Humans, Jonsson explains, also possess an intuitive direction frame -- an internal compass -- that keeps these maps oriented (when it functions properly) and a dead-reckoning system that constantly updates our location on the map as we move through the world. Even the most cynical city-dweller will be amazed to learn how much of this innate sense we use every day as we travel across town or around the world.
Both a scientific and a human story, Inner Navigation contains a rich assortment of real-life insights and examples of the navigational challenges we all face, no matter where or how we live. It's a book that is as provocative to ponder as it is delightful to lose yourself in. Don't worry: Erik Jonsson will help you find your bearings.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
On a trip to Cologne Belgium in 1948, Jonsson left the train station before dawn and headed toward the Rhine. Jonsson was sure he was heading west, and even though he saw the sun rising over the river ahead of him, he continued to be "turned around" for days, thinking that west was east and vice versa. Similar tales of mis- and disorientation make up much of this chatty book. With dozens of examples, the author shows how we create cognitive maps a mental sense of how to navigate an area based on landmarks and explains why such maps can work only if we have both a good sense of direction ("direction frame") and sense of location ("dead reckoning system"). If either of these is faulty, he argues, then so is our cognitive map, and we'll remain misoriented no matter what we do. Like Jonsson watching the sunrise in the "west," we'll privilege our illusory maps over what we absolutely know is true. The book plays the same few notes again and again, flirting dangerously with tedium. Fortunately, many of Jonsson's stories are intriguing, especially those involving Saharan and arctic guides. That Jonsson's ideas are based solely on anecdotal evidence is bothersome, but he defends them convincingly, and one hopes that future experiments will bear them out.