INNER NAVIGATION

Swedish-born engineer Jonsson looks at the methods we use to move around our world.

All people develop mental maps of their home area using landmarks and rough solar calculations. For Jonsson, these cognitive maps are as instinctive to human beings as they are to most animals. He gives many examples of shrewd movement in difficult conditions. In the desert, people successfully track by using the wind or wind-grooved earth as directional aids. Eskimos canoe safely in the fog, measuring distances by echoes off ice formations. Traversers of rough land make quick nondeliberative adjustments to follow a nearly straight line. In a strange environment, humans and animals will travel in a circle, fulfilling a need to return home. Any disorientation causes anxiety: Jonsson, who now lives in San Diego, was distracted on a walk home, wandered a block out of place, and was very discomforted until he reoriented himself. Two San Diego residents who sensed salt water only to their west at home, felt anxiety in San Francisco where the ocean smell comes from the north and east as well. American students studying Egypt have trouble with the Upper Nile being in the South. Fatigue and age cause disorientation; at 80, Jonsson feels his cognitive map slipping. The strongest dislocations occur when people enter a new city as passengers from an unexpected direction at night. Jonsson, traveling by train from Belgium to Cologne, thought he was entering from the west, but the train had looped around slowly and entered from the east. With his cognitive map reversed, his stay in Cologne was anxious and confused. A Mr. Kirschmann developed two orientations to the world. Around home, he had the directions properly set, but on the road the world was spatially reversed due to dislocation on a childhood trip.

Amiable, informal, and informative. (Illustrations throughout)