Analysis: When it comes to knowing where you are, multiple factors feed into your ability to know where things or places are located
This article is now available above as a Brainstorm podcast. You can subscribe to the Brainstorm podcast through Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
Navigating the world around us is fundamental to everyday life, knowing how to get from A to B. But while some of us seem to have no trouble finding our way around, others seem to get easily lost. The question is why. What accounts for differences in spatial navigation? Are we born with an innate ability when it comes to our sense of direction or is it something we learn? It could be a bit of both.
Where does our sense of direction actually come from?
Let's start by looking at the brain. One of the key brain areas involved with navigation is a region in our temporal lobes called the hippocampus (we have two temporal lobes, one on the left and one on the right). It's named hippocampus because it looked like a 'sea horse' to the early anatomists, explains Professor Seán Commins, a behavioural and cognitive neuroscientist in the Department of Psychology at Maynooth University. As an expert in spatial navigation, learning and memory, he knows a thing or two about the brain and how it helps us find our way around.
Along with its role in memory, the hippocampus is critically involved in navigation and spatial memory, meaning the ability to recall where things or places are located. "One of the key findings from the 1970s was the discovery that this brain region contains very specialised cells. These cells in the hippocampus become active in a particular location of space. They don't respond to other stimuli, just to location, and as such they were termed place cells," he says.
From the Royal Institute of Navigation, University of California Santa Barbara's Professor Mary Hegarty on what explains individual differences in sense of direction
Since this discovery, other specialised cells have been found in the hippocampus and the surrounding brain structures (including an area called the entorhinal cortex), says Commins. In addition to 'place cells', a further three types of navigation cells have been identified. "Some cells respond or 'fire' solely as a result of the direction of your head, and so are called 'head-direction cells'. Other cells respond to how close you are to a wall or boundary, called border cells, and an exciting discovery in 2005 was the discovery of cells called 'grid cells'. These cells fire in multiple areas of an arena and fire in a regular pattern (like a grid). It is possible that these cells might provide information about distance."
The discovery of these unique place and grid cells - an 'inner GPS' and positioning system - was significant enough to warrant the Nobel prize in 2014, awarded to John O'Keefe and Edvard and May-Britt Moser for their work. "All of this work was done in rats or mice. But, we too have what look like place and grid cells," says Commins. However, it’s obviously very difficult to record from single neurons in the human hippocampus, he adds.
That’s where imaging studies of (human) patients become useful when we want to understand how the brain deals with orientating itself in a space. "Patients with damage to their hippocampi have poor memories and get lost very easily. Indeed, one of the first structures to get damaged in Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the entorhinal cortex and hippocampus," he explains. "One of the first deficits seen with patients with AD is disorientation, getting lost and forgetting where things have been placed. This is a promising avenue for research, if we can get an idea of those that might be at risk of developing AD. In the lab we have developed tasks that try and tap into this aspect."
We need your consent to load this rte-player contentWe use rte-player to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity. Please review their details and accept them to load the content.Manage Preferences
From RTÉ Radio 1's Today with Claire Byrne, Blood tests could be used to detect Alzheimer's disease up to fifteen years before symptoms develop
So why, then, do some people have a poor sense of direction?
In terms of why some people have a good or poor sense of direction, there are a number of factors involved, Commins says. He points to a navigation game and citizen science project called Sea Hero Quest, developed by Hugo Spiers, a professor in University College London. "Over 4 million people worldwide have played this! This gives some fantastic data."
What that data shows, is that our navigational abilities decline with age (no surprise there, says Commins), and that males tend to outperform females. However, this depends on a number of factors, particularly how 'equal’ a society is. "For example, in Nordic countries there is limited gender difference on the task but we see larger gender difference in less equal societies. Also, richer countries tend to better at navigating compared to poor ones.
Read more: Why are some people always late?
"So, Nordic countries are very good navigators. Ireland is not too bad. I am currently looking at this Irish data in more detail. Also people living in more grid like cities (e.g. in the US) tend to be poorer at navigating than less ‘griddy’ cities (e.g. European ones). So although there are some genetic factors, there is a significantly large environmental aspect to how good we are at navigating. Though we do see large individual differences," he says.
So being good at finding your way around could have more to do with experience than with innate ability, or gender, even if your genes still matter. "It probably comes down to our exposure to travel, opportunities and the freedom to explore different locations, etc. As well as the reasons discussed above, many Nordic countries take orienteering and outdoor pursuits very seriously (from a young age) and this helps with navigational abilities."
The Hegarty Spatial Thinking Lab at University of California Santa Barbara has developed a Sense of Direction Scale, which you can use to test yourself. The score will be a number between 1 and 7, where 1 means a poor sense of direction and 7 means a good sense of direction.
Follow RTÉ Brainstorm on WhatsApp and Instagram for more stories and updates
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
