From Here to There: The Art and Science of Finding and Losing Our Way

by Michael Bond

Overview

A Wired Most Fascinating Book of the Year

A wise and insightful exploration of human navigation, what it means to be lost, and how we find our way.

How is it that we can walk unfamiliar streets while maintaining a sense of direction? Come up with shortcuts on the fly, in places we’ve never traveled? The answer is the complex mental map in our brains. This feature of our cognition is easily taken for granted, but it’s also critical to our species’ evolutionary success. In From Here to There, Michael Bond tells stories of the lost and found—Polynesian sailors, orienteering champions, early aviators—and surveys the science of human navigation.

Navigation skills are deeply embedded in our biology. The ability to find our way over large distances in prehistoric times gave Homo sapiens an advantage, allowing us to explore the farthest regions of the planet. Wayfinding also shaped vital cognitive functions outside the realm of navigation, including abstract thinking, imagination, and memory. Bond brings a reporter’s curiosity and nose for narrative to the latest research from psychologists, neuroscientists, animal behaviorists, and anthropologists. He also turns to the people who design and expertly maneuver the world we navigate: search-and-rescue volunteers, cartographers, ordnance mappers, urban planners, and more. The result is a global expedition that furthers our understanding of human orienting in the natural and built environments.

A beguiling mix of storytelling and science, From Here to There covers the full spectrum of human navigation and spatial understanding. In an age of GPS and Google Maps, Bond urges us to exercise our evolved navigation skills and reap the surprising cognitive rewards.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674244573
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	05/12/2020
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	685,550
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Michael Bond is a science writer and former Senior Editor at New Scientist. His work has appeared in Nature, Aeon, Discover, the New York Times, Foreign Policy, Financial Times, and elsewhere. His book The Power of Others: Peer Pressure, Groupthink, and How the People Around Us Shape Everything We Do won the British Psychology Society Science Book of the Year Award.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations ix

Introduction 1

1 The First Wayfinders 5

2 Right to Roam 21

3 Maps in the Mind 41

4 Thinking Space 73

5 From A to B and Back Again 95

6 You Go Your Way, I'll Go Mine 111

7 Natural Navigators 133

8 The Psychology of Lost 155

9 City Sense 183

10 Am I Here? 201

11 Epilogue: The End of the Road 217

Acknowledgements 227

Notes 229

Selected Bibliography 269

Index 271

Editorial Reviews

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)

Publishers Weekly

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!

Choice

A fascinating excursion into the very nature of exploration. Absorbing stuff, for armchair travelers and rough ’n’ tough adventurers alike.

Benedict Allen

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.

Robin Knox-Johnston

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.

Quarterly Review of Biology - Mark Shumelda

An important book that reminds us that navigation remains one of our most underappreciated arts.

Tristan Gooley

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.

New York Review of Books - Robert Macfarlane

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.

Science - Lawrence Rosen

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.

The Scotsman

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.

The Spectator

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.

Sunday Times

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.

John Huth

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.

New Statesman

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.

Kirkus 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.

Tonstant Weader Reviews

[An] absorbing exploration of the intersection of neuroscience and geography.

Maclean’s - Brian Bethune

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.

Ridgeline Images

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.

Inside Higher Ed - Scott McLemee