Photo by D. Sillman
(Click on the following link to listen to an audio version of this blog … Getting Lost
The times that Deborah and I have been lost on hikes, while not too very numerous, are times that are very vividly etched in my memory! There is some type of primal reaction, an instinctive intensity that rushes over you when you realized that you are out in the middle of an unknown area with no clear idea of where home (or your car) or help of any kind might be!
I remember being lost up in the Adirondacks while on a backpacking trip with some old graduate school friends. We were hiking up around Mt. Marcy and were enjoying a beautiful, sunny, early May day after post-holing our way across the lingering snow fields higher up on the mountain. Walking was easy and talking was even easier. All of sudden we realized that we were on a trail that had no blazes. We consulted our maps and could not make any sense of the terrain around us and the topographic detail of the map! We also realized that we didn’t have a compass and so were guessing at directions. There was nothing to do but follow the trail back.
We hiked a good two or three miles back along the trail getting more and more anxious about where we were and where we were going to end up. Finally, we found a turn blaze that we had missed and were back on our trail and back on our map.
The feeling you get when you re-find your trail, when you see your blazes again is incomparably wonderful! Almost worth the anxiety that led up to it!
Photo by D. Sillman
When Deborah and I hiked the Baker Trail back in 2010 we also lost the trail a couple of times. One time we were able to use our maps and compass (I always carry a compass now!) to bushwhack across a field and forest stand to regain the trail. Another time we ended up wandering around on an active strip mine for several hours (because the trail blazes we were trying to find only faced one way and could not be seen when approaching the trail from an off-trail direction!). Another time, we crossed a trail section that was being redesigned and the familiar yellow, Baker Trail blazes were not yet placed. (we wandered around for quite a while until, with great joy, we found a fresh, rectangle of bright yellow paint on an old black cherry tree!).
The more often you hike, it seems, the more often you are going to get lost! Just being out in a complex system of trails leads to more and more opportunities to lose your sense of direction. Also, the more your mind is on something other than the path you are taking (via daydreaming and all sorts of conversation) the more likely you are to miss a turn or a blaze and end up in uncharted terrain.
Streets and roads also frequently pose difficulties in getting to place to place. I still don’t know, for example, how to get to Plum High School near Pittsburgh. I drove there many times to watch my good friend Javier’s soccer team play, but I always found the school by randomly driving the curving roads of Plum and Penn Hills, by watching for the distant, night time glow of the lights of the soccer field, and by stopping frequently to ask people for directions! I had the same experience back in high school trying to navigate the streets of Houston. My friends would have to tell me step by step, turn by turn how to get to a place I knew and where I had been many times before. There are other cities, though, other places that I have lived, where my mental map was solid and where navigation from place to place was never a problem!
Lower Manhattan, Church Street. Photo by v. desjardins. Wikimedia Commons
So, some people seem to get lost more frequently than others and some places seem to be particularly befuddling for certain people. This navigation breakdown is unrelated to intelligence or experience or ability to stay focused on tasks at hand. There are some of us who go for a walk in the woods and instantly lose all sense of direction, and there are others who step out onto a city street and immediately become so disoriented and confused that they can’t find a nearby store or café that have visited multiple times before. There are also people like me who have brain freezes for certain places but are able to navigate other places with ease! This past spring there was a paper in Nature (March 30, 2022) that may explain some of these observations.
A team of cognitive scientists from University of Leon, University College London, University of Munster, Northumbria University, Bournemouth University, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and Norwich Medical School explored performance data from a video game in which 397,162 players from 38 different countries searched for “goal-objects” in increasingly complex, virtual simulations. Data on each player’s age, gender, occupation, background, childhood home etc. were correlated to the efficiency of their performance in the virtual search game.
Map created by Open Street Map. Wikimedia Commons
In particular, game players who grew up in “low entropy” (i.e. highly organized) landscapes (like cities laid out on a right-angle grid system (say, New York or Chicago) had poor navigational skills when they tried to negotiate the increasingly complex landscapes of the upper levels of the game. Many of these people also reported that they had trouble navigating “high entropy” street grids like those of old European cities such as London, Prague or Barcelona. They also had trouble navigating rural landscapes which often
Barcelona. Photo by K.Sebastian. Flickr
lacked straight pathways or regular, ordinal directional cues. Conversely, game players who grew up in one of these older, non-grid-layout cities or in rural environments displayed very efficient navigational skills even in the extremely complex virtual world of the game.
The researchers inferred, then, that the influence of childhood exposure to “landscape maps” of differing complexities is a major factor in the relative successes of these players in the game. They speculated that these childhood exposures generate a fundamental, brain navigation program which individuals then continue to use throughout their lives.
The paper did note that a person’s navigational skills can be modified at any age, but that the early childhood experience and exposure to landscapes of varying entropic natures remains the key feature that establishes a person’s navigational abilities. They also mentioned that disorientation (and getting lost) is often the key presenting sign of a patient with dementia! They propose that the game they used in this study (or some suitable modification of it) could possibly be used as a screening test for potential dementia patients!
Photo by USFWS. Public Domain
In his book, Arctic Dreams, Barry Lopez talked about Innuits (although he called “Eskimos”) who could navigate the seemingly featureless expanses of arctic ice and snow and unerringly find their way to distant hunting spots and, eventually, return back to their homes. These arctic landscapes are ultimate expressions of unstructured, high entropy systems. Lopez related the navigational abilities of these Innuits to deep influences of the land on their knowledge and imagination. Maybe he was sensing the same brain patterns that the team of cognitive scientists were describing in their game players. Lopez also described the bewilderment of many of the ice-dwelling people when they were transported to a city that had a low entropy grid of streets. As Lopez put it:
“How do people imagine the landscapes they find themselves in? How does the land shape the imaginations of the people who dwell in it? How does desire itself, the desire to comprehend, shape knowledge?”