Publishers Weekly
02/03/2020
Science writer Bond (The Power of Others) covers the subject of navigation in this fascinating study. Among other topics, he explains why people don’t get lost more often, how brains makes “cognitive maps,” and how an “understanding of the world around us affects our psychology and behavior.” The ability to navigate was essential to the survival of early humans, Bond notes: it allowed Homo sapiens to “cultivate extensive social networks” by traveling to other small groups. Bond offers lessons in brain physiology, explanations of how memories aid navigation, and an examination of the evidence that there’s a difference between men’s and women’s navigational skills. But it’s Bond’s real-life examples—reindeer herders in northwestern Siberia and the unsettling story of a skilled hiker lost on the Appalachian Trail, among others—that most illuminate his points. Readers will also encounter a grim look at what dementia and Alzheimer’s patients experience (“how distressing it must be to wake and recognize nothing”) and learn that scientists are still undecided if overreliance on GPS is related to cognitive decline. Adventure-loving readers will be richly rewarded. (May)
New Statesman
Fascinating…Makes a compelling case that our ancient abilities to get from A to B aren’t just a matter of geography…Bond is not only interested in how we find our way, but also in how we get lost and how it affects us.
Benedict Allen
A fascinating excursion into the very nature of exploration. Absorbing stuff, for armchair travelers and rough ’n’ tough adventurers alike.
Quarterly Review of Biology - Mark Shumelda
Bond invites us to ditch the GPS and follow him on a wayfinding adventure through evolutionary history, cultural anthropology, and cognitive neuroscience to discover why the ability to navigate is so critically important to the human condition.
Robin Knox-Johnston
In the modern world of road signs and GPS, it is easy to ignore our natural navigational instincts. I hope this book will inspire people to explore and experiment with those abilities, for if they do, they will be in for a wonderful surprise.
Tonstant Weader Reviews
A fascinating exploration of how we learn to find our way as children and how we may risk unlearning it from lack of use thanks to GPS or from the damage of Alzheimer’s Disease. Through that arc of life, Bond explores the different ways we think about finding our way and what parts of the brain are likely to be involved…Illuminating.
Choice
Highly engaging…Bond makes a compelling case for why the reader should become more interested not only in avoiding becoming lost, but also in enjoying the experience of getting lost!
Science - Lawrence Rosen
Bond guides readers through the neurological research and anecdotal tales that show how the brain supplies the equipment upon which our species has built its wayfinding skills…He concludes that, by setting aside our GPS devices, by redesigning parts of our cities and play areas, and sometimes just by letting ourselves get lost, we can indeed revivify our ability to find our way, to the benefit of our inner world no less than the outer one.
The Scotsman
One of the most fascinating books I have read for a long while…If you want to understand what rats can teach us about better-planned cities, why walking into a different room can help you find your car keys, or how your brain’s grid, border, and speed cells combine to give us a sense of direction, this book has all the answers.
Tristan Gooley
An important book that reminds us that navigation remains one of our most underappreciated arts.
Sunday Times
At the heart of this book is a detailed account of the neuroscience of navigation. It is fascinating…Ultimately, ‘we are spatial beings’ and [From Here to There] skillfully and at times movingly makes the case for how deeply that is true.
Maclean’s - Brian Bethune
[An] absorbing exploration of the intersection of neuroscience and geography.
Ridgeline Images
A thoroughly engaging book, essential reading for anyone who regularly spends time outdoors or wishes to better understand how our brains make sense of the spatial cues in the diverse environments which we pass through.
John Huth
A fascinating and engaging look at how we navigate, from the first humans to modern-day hikers zombified by overuse of GPS. Bond has collected in one place many of the important studies on wayfinding, with riveting anecdotes of real situations where life or death hangs in the balance.
The Spectator
An excellently researched popular science book which explains how people—including experienced travelers—get lost, and why some individuals have superior navigational skills than others.
New York Review of Books - Robert Macfarlane
The abilities that are cultivated in wayfinding—imagining things from different viewpoints, moving the mind backward and forward in time, seeing situations from other perspectives, weighing alternatives subtly against one another before making the best decisions, seeking information from others and giving it freely in return—might be the same abilities that contribute to a resilient, equitable community or polity. If this is wayfinding, then we need it now more than ever.
Inside Higher Ed - Scott McLemee
We are biologically hardwired to orient ourselves in space, but a lot can go wrong with the system—which is, in some ways, even more interesting…But Bond also warns of the potential to squander our evolutionarily endowed spatial awareness through pure neglect. An era of GPS and self-driving vehicles may be convenient but also profoundly forgettable.
Kirkus Reviews
2020-01-12
A scientifically rich look at how humans manage to get around in the world.
The ability of the human species to construct and file away mental maps of the world, writes former New Scientist senior editor Bond, allowed our highly social kind to find its way out of Africa, spread all over the world, and establish and maintain contacts and trade with faraway populations in a comparatively short amount of time. Those whose business it is to know many ways of getting around—taxi drivers, say, famously those negotiating the fabulously illogical plan of London—have more "gray matter" and better developed hypothalamuses than those who stay at home. On that note, adds the author, we are creating whole generations of geographically stunted children by not giving them room to roam and opportunities to get lost. "Free play," he writes, "makes us less likely to suffer from spatial anxiety and more proficient in wayfinding," and one of the crueler aspects of dementia disorders such as Alzheimer's disease is their way of robbing victims of their sense of where they are in the world. Bond consults psychologists, neuroscientists, geographers, and other specialists in building his narrative of our kind's devotion to "learning about the space around us and how we fit into it." M.R. O'Connor's standout 2019 book Wayfinding covers much of the same ground, but Bond offers a solid contribution that complements rather than competes with its predecessor. Of particular interest is Bond's look at gender differentiation in how people perceive the world. Men, he writes, are likelier to use cardinal directions and distances in describing a route; conversely, "ask a woman and you're more likely to get a rich description of the things you'll pass along the way."
Just the book for students of the human mind as well as geography and travel buffs.
