We’ve all experienced it: some people could be blindfolded, shoved in the trunk of a car and tossed out on the side of a dirt road in the woods and have no problem whatsoever finding their way home, while the rest of us could get lost on the way to the bathroom in our own house.
Some people just have no sense of direction whatsoever. Words like “north, south, east, and west” may as well be a foreign language to them. But why is this? Despite the convenient explanations we’re often given, the answer might actually come down to how we grew up.
That thing where you walk the wrong way even while staring directly at Google Maps probably has a few different origins, according to science, including a genetic component (but not a gender-based one, by the way, which we’ll get to in a moment). Some people are just more prone to be animal-like “supernavigators” — people who just sort of instinctively know how to find their way.
But a growing body of research says that upbringing likely plays a far larger role in whether we have a good sense of direction or not. To figure this out, scientists used a perhaps unlikely tool: Video games.
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Studies have shown that growing up in a rural environment tends to bolster the spatial relations skills crucial to navigating and having a good sense of direction. Researchers believe this is likely due to the relative simplicity of urban street networks. When you can navigate by simply memorizing an evenly spaced street grid, your brain isn’t really learning as much about the environment.
And the landmarks of our environments are how our brains naturally learn to navigate. This is true even in cities, in fact, despite those street grids doing most of the heavy navigational lifting. A friend of mine in New York, for example, frequently got confused right after 9/11 with the World Trade Center no longer anchoring, which way was “downtown.” And when I first moved from Los Angeles to Chicago, I constantly made wrong turns because the big body of water was now to the East instead of the West.
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These findings were further borne out by a 2019 study at University College London and the University of East Anglia in the U.K., which used a video game called Sea Hero Quest to test subjects for both their spatial skills and how they relate to conditions like dementia and Alzheimer’s.
The game involved players finding an Alzheimer’s patient’s lost memories by first finding them on a map and then navigating to them. Scandinavians scored higher on the game than the hundreds of other nationalities in the study, which researchers believe is due to the high amount of outdoor play built into Nordic education systems. Once again, time spent engaging with surroundings seemed to yield better navigation skills.
This likely won’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s ever experienced firsthand the hackneyed old jokes about how men refuse to stop and ask directions when they’re lost. Our dads tended to always have to concede that Mom’s reading of the map was probably the better route, right?
Accordingly, the idea that men are naturally better navigators than women isn’t supported by the science uncovered by the Sea Hero Quest study either. The study examined 4.3 million people in 195 different countries, yielding a diverse array of subjects.
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The study found that overall, men did tend to perform better at spatial navigation than women, but the difference is almost certainly cultural. Men were substantially better than women only in countries with huge inequities in education and travel between the sexes. In egalitarian countries, the discrepancy was negligible or non-existent.
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If you’re of a certain age, you’ve probably noticed that young people who’ve never known a world without GPS often can’t navigate themselves around their own neighborhood without it. A colleague of mine was shocked to realize her daughter could not tell her how to get to the grocery store down the street they’d been going to her entire life, for example.
Given that the science on direction shows our navigation skills decline with age, no matter how good they are, it’s a bit bracing to think how this reliance on GPS may play out for younger generations as they age. And while the science on this isn’t yet conclusive, the way navigation works in our brains suggests the link is likely strong.
Taxi drivers, for instance, have been found to have much larger hippocampus brain regions, the part responsible for spatial reasoning and coordination, because of their constant navigation and interaction with their surroundings as they solve a million spatial riddles each day.
Taxi drivers have also been found to develop and die of Alzheimer’s and dementia much less than other professions, which makes sense: Not only are spatial navigation skills often the first to go when someone develops these conditions, but bolstering these skills has been shown to be protective against them.
GPS robs us of opportunities to both develop and reinforce these skills. As University of Arizona cognitive neuroscientist Arne Ekstrom put it to iNews“if you’re using (Google Maps) to follow a line, follow a command, you’re not learning about the environment.”
Putting down the GPS and instead “paying attention to landmarks, to how streets and routes connect,” Dr. Ekstrom said, allows our brains to exercise these abilities, and studies have shown the brain can build them very quickly if given the chance.
Nobody needs to go back to the dark ages of having to walk into a gas station hoping the guy behind the counter knows how to get you where you’re going. But once again, looking up from our phones to the world around us just might be the answer to not only a better sense of direction, but a healthier brain overall.
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John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.
