Directions by Linda Stowe
When I was a kid, I was surprised by how many of my classmates did not know their directions. Most of them knew their left hand from their right, but when they were asked anything about compass directions they were easily confused. I wondered how they could not know that?
It wasn’t until years later that I understood why compass directions came so easily to me. If was part of the way our family communicated, so I learned my directions early on. Grandpa might ask me to fetch the big hammer hanging on the notch on the north side of the tool shed. Or my mom might tell me I could park my bike on the west side of the house. Directions were part of navigating my childhood. We learn so much without even realizing it.
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Polly here.
As a child, I understood directions. We lived on East Bruce Avenue. There was a West Bruce on the other side of Main Street On the west side. But I’m not sure I ever grasped the full concept pointed out so clearly by the North-South-East-West Rooster on the barn. Wait. We didn’t have a barn. Or one of those weather-vane roosters. Yet, even at this late stage of life, I feel like I am directionally challenged. I struggle to point in the right direction when asked, “Which way is south?” Which makes me wonder. I wonder if being “directionally challenged” is a real “thing.”
As it turns out, there have been a lot of studies on this very topic.
One article I found said this:
“Our sense of direction is derived from a complex network of interactions between our genes, senses, brain, and environment. Even emotions can play a role. In fact, our sense of direction isn’t really a sense at all because it involves multiple senses.”
And then it said this:
“New research has shown that people with weaker signals in the entorhinal cortex struggle with navigating a virtual environment. Other studies have found that people with a better sense of direction have larger frontal and temporal lobes of the brain.”
To add to all of this brain-size business, it seems that our reliance on GPS and smartphones may be decreasing the ability to use our internal maps. People who regularly used GPS had less activity in their hippocampus compared to those who did not use GPS.
So that makes me imagine that the “directional ability” portion of my brain probably looks a lot like a “Where’s Waldo?” poster.
If I can’t tell north from south, I hope, at least, that I’ll be able to tell which way is up.
Direction by Linda Stowe
