Ok everyone, I have a question. It’s the first full week of work after New Year so I’m sure you all want to ease in gently, and will be grateful for a little diversion.
I was in the car last week with A, as usual he was driving and I was feeding small biscuits to the baby at regular intervals like a dog you are trying to make sit. “Do you recognize the route now” he said, “do you think you could drive it without getting lost?”. “Yes” I said, “and, maybe”. “What do you mean ‘maybe’? We’ve driven it 10 times together”. “Well” I said “when I am driving I head towards things I recognize, but sometimes I get somewhere where I recognize two things, and I don’t know which one to head towards (eeny, meeny, miny, moe)”. “What?!?” (he was aghast) “You’re not serious. I don’t believe you”. But it’s true. It’s not that I don’t have the skill or ability to read maps, or that I don’t understand the concept of north, south, east and west, it’s just that when I am driving, I don’t naturally utilize those skills and concepts. I remember a series of landmarks and when I need to repeat that route, I re-trace my journey past these landmarks, following them like Hansel’s breadcrumbs.
“Maybe it is the difference between the male and female brain” said A, sounding unconvinced. I don’t know, it could be. Or it could just be the difference between him and me. I want to emphasise that it is not that I can’t navigate using a mental compass, it is just not my default state.
So guys and gals, what do you do? Do you picture your journey like a map, ever aware of your direction relative to magnetic north? Or, do you use landmarks as your guide, making your way to your destination in a stepwise manner? Is this really a male versus female thing? Of course it is possible, even likely, that people use a combination of the two approaches. However it’s my hunch that people fundamentally adopt one or other approach. I could be wrong. I’d like to know.
thenextexperiment 
I can’t recall the source, but I have definitely read that women navigate with landmarks while men are more likely to use directions/distance measurements. And I too “turn left at the McDonalds” instead of “after three miles.” Theory proven.
this is my specialist subject; I am incapable of using either approach and my anxiety about getting lost shuts down my capacity to observe where I am or how I got there. Buses or personal chauffeur. Is that a gender-specific strategy?
It’s also an age thing, I think. I used to use both strategies and was excellent at finding my way . . . not any more. Memory is a key factor I think and it depends on what sort of memory strategies you use (spatial or pictorial?) . . or don’t
Rebecca, I think you might enjoy this article: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
It’s more on language than directions, but it’s second part is totally relevant to the question you’re asking here. Few passages from the article:
“Guugu Yimithirr (a remote Australian aboriginal tribe) does not use words like “left” or “right,” “in front of” or “behind,” to describe the position of objects. Whenever we would use the egocentric system, the Guugu Yimithirr rely on cardinal directions. If they want you to move over on the car seat to make room, they’ll say “move a bit to the east.” To tell you where exactly they left something in your house, they’ll say, “I left it on the southern edge of the western table.” Or they would warn you to “look out for that big ant just north of your foot.” Even when shown a film on television, they gave descriptions of it based on the orientation of the screen. If the television was facing north, and a man on the screen was approaching, they said that he was “coming northward.”
When these peculiarities of Guugu Yimithirr were uncovered, they inspired a large-scale research project into the language of space. And as it happens, Guugu Yimithirr is not a freak occurrence; languages that rely primarily on geographical coordinates are scattered around the world, from Polynesia to Mexico, from Namibia to Bali. For us, it might seem the height of absurdity for a dance teacher to say, “Now raise your north hand and move your south leg eastward.” But the joke would be lost on some: the Canadian-American musicologist Colin McPhee, who spent several years on Bali in the 1930s, recalls a young boy who showed great talent for dancing. As there was no instructor in the child’s village, McPhee arranged for him to stay with a teacher in a different village. But when he came to check on the boy’s progress after a few days, he found the boy dejected and the teacher exasperated. It was impossible to teach the boy anything, because he simply did not understand any of the instructions. When told to take “three steps east” or “bend southwest,” he didn’t know what to do. The boy would not have had the least trouble with these directions in his own village, but because the landscape in the new village was entirely unfamiliar, he became disoriented and confused. Why didn’t the teacher use different instructions? He would probably have replied that saying “take three steps forward” or “bend backward” would be the height of absurdity.
So different languages certainly make us speak about space in very different ways. But does this necessarily mean that we have to think about space differently? By now red lights should be flashing, because even if a language doesn’t have a word for “behind,” this doesn’t necessarily mean that its speakers wouldn’t be able to understand this concept. Instead, we should look for the possible consequences of what geographic languages oblige their speakers to convey. In particular, we should be on the lookout for what habits of mind might develop because of the necessity of specifying geographic directions all the time.
In order to speak a language like Guugu Yimithirr, you need to know where the cardinal directions are at each and every moment of your waking life. You need to have a compass in your mind that operates all the time, day and night, without lunch breaks or weekends off, since otherwise you would not be able to impart the most basic information or understand what people around you are saying. Indeed, speakers of geographic languages seem to have an almost-superhuman sense of orientation. Regardless of visibility conditions, regardless of whether they are in thick forest or on an open plain, whether outside or indoors or even in caves, whether stationary or moving, they have a spot-on sense of direction. They don’t look at the sun and pause for a moment of calculation before they say, “There’s an ant just north of your foot.” They simply feel where north, south, west and east are, just as people with perfect pitch feel what each note is without having to calculate intervals. There is a wealth of stories about what to us may seem like incredible feats of orientation but for speakers of geographic languages are just a matter of course. One report relates how a speaker of Tzeltal from southern Mexico was blindfolded and spun around more than 20 times in a darkened house. Still blindfolded and dizzy, he pointed without hesitation at the geographic directions. ”
As for me, I’m much better with directions than my husband, I can find any place back after being there only once, I have absolutely no trouble orienting myself in new places (even e.g. in the forest), and I can always tell you where the home/car is. I don’t have to think about it, and I don’t need to try to remember the way. I simply know it.
But then many people say I have male brain… 🙂
Warm greetings to the whole family!