Sujata Gupta’s article called “Secrets of Human Navigation” in the January 2025 issue of ScienceNews describes some very interesting research on the subject. Apparently the question of how humans find their way has intrigued, and eluded, scientists for decades. Interestingly, it seems that “getting lost” is a problem usually associated with living in modern cities. City dwellers do pretty well at navigating in cities where the roads form rectangular grids and there are a lot of stationary markers (such as buildings, bridges, etc) – but these folks don’t do so well in locations without roads and clearly identifiable markers. The more a person spends “wandering in the outdoors” the better they are at navigation. Those that live in the wild country don’t even know what it means to be lost.
According to the article, “the Western fear of getting lost is incomprehensible to the Evenki (Northern Russia) hunters.” Valasco and Gleizer reported in a recent study, “When we asked an Evenki hunter what he would do if lost, he looked at us confused and said, ‘Well, I would just find my way.'” So much for getting lost for someone who navigates.
I have read that there are differences between the sexes when it comes to navigation techniques. Apparently, men tend to navigate by dead-reckoning, women tend to use known landmarks. Men travel long distances over unfamiliar territory while women tend to stay closer to home. Perhaps that is related to the “hunter” (men)/”gatherer”(women) sharing of survival skills. While this seems like a plausible distinction, I am unaware of any actual evidence of this distinction. Gupta suggested that people either navigate by following a specific route where they know which way to turn (using landmarks), or by gauging cardinal directions. City dwellers rely more on route strategies while people living in “the wild” rely more on spatial navigation.
I found this article to be fascinating because I often wondered how I navigated when I was an avid hiker/camper/explorer kind of individual. It seemed that I always just knew the way to camp, without needing to know the area or see maps. As a child I was allowed to wonder freely in the hills near my home. From the age of perhaps eight years old I wandered in the densely wooded hills without supervision or any knowledge of where I was going – I was just playing and exploring. My “territory” was quite hilly, and perhaps ten miles in diameter. While it was fairly constrained, it was certainly large enough to get lost in, but that never crossed my mind (and apparently didn’t cross my parent’s either) – although much of the terrain was new to me, I always knew “where” I was in the sense of always knowing where home was in terms of direction and distance. It felt like that was a “fixed” location that I could just naturally return to.
Another example of navigating without landmarks is when I ran a small fishing boat with my father. He owned an open hull sixteen foot “runabout” outboard boat. We would start out at dawn, heading out into the Pacific Ocean through thick fog until we were perhaps a few miles off of shore where we hoped the fish were. This part of the California is known for the dense morning fog, so we would often use the compass to find our way for the first mile or two until we were safely away from the shore. I drove and navigated, while my father fished from our very small commercial fishing boat.
My job was to follow a square pattern for a fixed period of time (e.g., thirty minutes – perhaps three miles) on a side until it was time to go home, and then take us back to the harbor. However, this was more difficult than it appeared because the fog eliminated visual clues of direction, and the almost complete lack of knowledge about currents and wind directions made it effectively impossible to know my location at any time. I could use the compass the generally drive toward the four quadrants, but didn’t actually know just how “square” my squares were, or where they were located. At some point my father would decide that fishing was done for the day, and I had to “navigate” back to the narrow harbor entrance – but after several hours there was no way to know which way to go except generally to the east (toward the continent). If I missed and ended up a mile or so north of the harbor we would end up in the breakers and crash on the beach. This stretch of beach was the site of many ship wrecks caused by this miscalculation. In the fog you can’t tell that you are moving into the back side of the breakers until they get so steep and forceful that they become a trap where you can’t get out of again.
As odd as it seems, I never felt “lost” or even concerned. I knew where the entrance to the harbor was, and I knew how to get there through the swells and choppy sea. I would just turn the boat to the correct direction until we could hear the whistle buoy welcoming our return. It all just seemed easy and natural – but I also recognized that I had no obvious way of accomplishing this feat. My father was so unconcerned that he acted as if “of course you know the way home.” There was never a question.
When I was about thirty-five years old I went to Maui in Hawaii for a vacation to visit my parents who were working there. I borrowed my father’s car to site see and discovered that my “direction finder” didn’t work there. For the first time in my life I had to depend upon a map to know which way to go. I had to go from known object to known object, like a blind man feeling his way along. It was slightly embarrassing, and almost scary to not know how to know which way to go.
I was never able to free-form navigate after that trip. I didn’t lose the “feeling” but as likely as not I would go in the exact opposite direction. The feeling is still so strong that I have a very difficult time not believing it. One morning I was driving my client to a meeting in San Jose, California. The morning was very foggy, dense fog far enough from the ground to be able to drive, but so dense that landmarks and street signs were invisible. It didn’t bother me, I knew where we were going and “felt” the directions – until we drove up on a slight hill where we could see I had gone east instead of west! Luckily GPS came into my life so I can get around in my car without being lost. Otherwise I am dependent upon known objects or maps.
About 15 years ago I took a trip to Australia to join an old college buddy on an extended driving “walkabout” bird census trip in the great deserts around Alice Springs. One day we were camping in some “wild country” mountains in the far “outback,” many miles from the nearest town or civilization. We found a small creek where there were a lot of rock carvings leading up a small waterway. We clambered up the creek from rock to rock to see the next petroglyph. By mid-day it was turning pretty hot, we had no lunch and decided it was time to back to camp – but couldn’t. We had managed to climb up a steep slope that was too dangerous to go back down. So we had little choice but to go the rest of the way to the top where we ended on a large treeless tableland. By this point we had lost all bearings of direction, the sun was directly overhead so of no use for discerning cardinal directions. We were well and good “lost” in the sense of not knowing where we were or which way to go to get back to camp. Every direction looked the same. So we decided to just walk, which was pretty stupid given that we were probably 100 miles from the next person and nobody knew we were there. We just walked for a couple of hours. We finally came to a bluff, which we managed to slip and slide down to a large waterway, figuring that that would eventually lead to a road where we might find help. At the bottom of the bluff we walked around a big bush and ran smack dab into our car!
The point of all of this is that I suspect human navigation is MUCH more complicated that simply knowing the cardinal directions or remembering paths or even noticing landmarks and known objects. I wonder if there might not be something in us that detects magnetic fields, or perhaps can detect polarized light like some birds and other animals. I wonder if there might not be things that we detect that we can “feel” but don’t really recognize as an obvious experience like those of sight, sound and touch. I don’t know what those things might be, but I do know that my experience of “knowing the way” was quite strong, and for 35 years it worked. Then it didn’t. That seems quite odd in itself. If it was just learned behavior to observe my surroundings, why would that all of a sudden vanish?
In any case, there are many mysteries to life such as the ability to navigate that while are probably open to scientific scrutiny, aren’t as obvious I they first appear to be. I keep my eyes open for research that hints of senses beyond those that we are so familiar to us.