Wayfinding: The Art and Science of How We Find and Lose Our Way – Michael Bond

At the heart of this book is a detailed account of the neuroscience of navigation. We have brain cells dedicated to locating our position on a grid, calculating our speed of travel and working out our position and orientation relative to boundaries and edges.

However this book points starkly makes the case that these are bad times for navigation. In two generations the ‘home range’ of primary-age children(the distance they travel on their own) has declined by some 90%. Meanwhile ever-increasing numbers of adults blithely outsource their navigational skills to apps.

But, as Michael Bond goes on to say, ‘we lose a great deal by relying on GPS. It turns the world into an abstract entity embedded in a digital device. In exchange for the absolute certainty of knowing where we are in space , we sacrifice our sense of place. When we navigate by GPS, we no longer need to notice contours and colours, to remember how many intersections we’ve crossed, to pay attention to the shape or character of the landscape or keep track of our progress through it. We can afford to be indifferent ,and our detachment makes us ignorant. Without a story to tell of our journey, we cease to be wayfinders.

Over the last decade, dozens of studies have shown that navigation apps and satnavs have a detrimental effect on spatial memory. When we follow their instructions, the world just seems to pass us by and we remember little about the places we visit. They don’t require us to imagine or plan a journey, or even to look up; by contrast, using a map obliges us to work out our position from what we see.’

‘Replacing a cognitive skill with technology is bound to affect the brain’, says the neuroscientist Giuseppe Iaria. The problem with the use of technology on such a scale is that we could be losing our way in a larger sense: we hardly remember the places we visit, partly because emotional memories need place-tags for us to be able to form and access them. We risk cognitive decline as well. Practiced navigators have an expanded hippocampus; the part of the brain crucial for the creation of autobiographical memories, such as memories of events and when they occurred. (We rely on landmarks to help us know which way we are facing. Cities without landmarks or with grid-layouts are disorientating. Hospitals with similar looking windowless corridors are notorious. When the Barbican complex in the City of London was finally completed it was known as a product of the Barbican School of Directional Architecture-the signs were the only way of finding your way around).

Ultimately ‘we are spacial beings’ and Wayfinding skilfully and at time movingly makes the case for how deeply that is true. If we do not know where we are, it seems, we cannot know who we are either.