The Art and Science of Finding and Losing Our Way
by Michael Bond
Most fascinating non-fiction book I've read in a long time. It's all about how the human brain learns to get places--with or without maps, in known and unknown terrains.. The sections on the search for a lost hiker on the Appalachian Trail and the ones on Alzheimer's disease patients are especially fascinating. And heart-wrenching.
For reasons we don't know, Alzheimer's patience are often driven to walk, and when they do walk, they often continue in a straight direction for many miles. It's as though there is something essential about moving and about going somewhere, purposefully, is deeply ingrained into the human psyche, and one of the last functions to be lost in a degenerating brain. Why? It's not known yet, but it could be one of the things that makes us human.
He even has a chapter on how we navigate through big cities and other featureless and over-featured mazes (think: hospitals) and on design strategies to make big cities (and hospitals) more navigable.
Very useful if you ever wanted to know (a) Do lost people really go in circles? (b) How did Eskimos and Polynesian sailors and other native people travel long distances without satellite navigation? (c) Is your GPS affecting your brain? And so much more.
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