You Are Here: Why We Can Find Our Way to the Moon, but Get Lost in the Mall

Tom Vanderbilt writes on design, technology, science, and culture for many publications, including Wired, Slate, The London Review of Books, Gourmet, The Wall Street Journal, Men’s Vogue, Artforum, The Wilson Quarterly, Travel and Leisure, Rolling Stone, The New York Times Magazine, Cabinet, Metropolis, and Popular Science. He is the author of Survival City and The Sneaker Book. His most recent book is the New York Times bestseller Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us). Read his guest review of You Are Here: Why We Can Find Our Way to the Moon, but Get Lost in the Mall:

I was recently reading a New York Times account of a woman, an accomplished athlete, who after a surgery resulting in the removal of part of her right temporal lobe, lost the ability to remember, on her long runs, exactly where she had been. Gone too was the ability to read maps. Recalling where she had parked became an impossibility. A few weeks before, watching Werner Herzog’s documentary Encounters at the End of the World, I was struck by a scene in which a group of new arrivals at Antarctica’s McMurdo Station take a course in navigation during a white-out. These conditions were simulated by putting buckets on the researchers’ heads, and having them walk just a short distance from their starting point. The group veered wildly off course.

Finding our way in the world is something we tend to take for granted, and while most of us will never experience the extremes described above, the maps we generate in our heads may not always match up with the world that’s out there. For example, did you know that Seattle is farther north than Montreal, that Reno is farther west than Los Angeles, and that Chicago lines up with the west coast of South America? This is just one of the many revelatory episodes of dislocation presented by psychologist Colin Ellard in his book You Are Here. "Though most of us can find our way home every night," Ellard writes, "we often have little cartographic insight into how we got there." Ellard ranges with admirable width and breadth across the field of human and animal "spatial intelligence," from questions of how wasps can return to their nests using natural landmarks; to why we may not often know the true shortest distance between two points in a city; to how we inhabit and move through such spaces as homes, offices, or casinos; to how our navigation of online environments parallels its real-world equivalent. You Are Here provides a colorful, well-charted atlas of our subjective mental maps--visual stories that we tell ourselves--and an impassioned argument for finding our true place in the world we inhabit.--Tom Vanderbilt