Inner Navigation · Why We Get Lost and How We Find Our Way

Includes bibliographical references (p. 335-337) and index;Starting out. Strange happenings;Cognitive maps. Designing a workable spatial system -- An introduction to cognitive maps -- The mentally invisible stop sign -- Who turned the Madeleine around? -- Finding cars in parking lots -- A backwoodsman goes to town -- Distance estimates in cognitive maps -- Pictures from an expedition -- The life of trails -- The role of landmarks in cognitive maps -- Crossing a field -- When the dead reckoning system slips;Digging up old stories and analyzing them. Adari way-finding in the Sahara -- The cognitive sun compass -- The cognitive wind compass -- Returning directly to the starting point -- Singing in the fog -- A report from a salty place [the Runn of Cutch] -- Try to go straight, but don't try too hard -- Strategies for walking in a straight line -- An old story from a cool place [Bear Islands, north of Siberia] -- Aboriginal and underwater way-finding;Walking in circles when lost. The Skogsnuva fairy tale [from Sweden] -- Going in a circle on the prairie -- Going astray in the Canadian and Swedish forests -- How come we walk in circles?;Reversals of orientation. Forde's letter to the editor of Nature -- Strange morning awakenings -- When trains take off in the wrong direction -- Indoor misorientation -- Analyzing misorientations -- [Joseph] Peterson in a streetcar in Chicago -- Professor Peterson's misery in Minneapolis -- Tales of a cosmopolitan lady [Franziska Baumgarten] -- The topsy-turvy globe-trotter [A. Kirschmann] -- Causes of misorientation -- The San Francisco effect -- Crossing a ridge without getting to the other side -- Deterioration in our spatial system in old age -- Spatial memory slips causing reversals -- The role of gestalt in misorientations -- Do humans have a magnetic sense? -- Summing up and looking ahead;"Why are we so often disoriented when we come up from the subway? Do we really walk in circles when we lose our bearings in the wilderness? How - and why - do we get lost at all?" "In this book, Erik Jonsson, a Swedish-born engineer who has spent a lifetime exploring navigation over every terrain, from the crowded cities of Europe to the emptiness of the desert, gives readers extraordinary new insights into the human way-finding system." "Written for the nonscientist, Inner Navigation explains the array of physical and psychological cues the brain uses to situate us in space and build its "cognitive maps" - the subconscious maps it employs to organize landmarks. Humans, Jonsson explains, also possess an intuitive direction frame - an internal compass - that keeps these maps oriented (when it functions properly) and a dead-reckoning system that constantly updates our location on the map as we move through the world. Even the most cynical city-dweller will be amazed to learn how much of this innate sense we use every day as we travel across town or around the world."--BOOK JACKET

Starting out. Strange happenings

Cognitive maps. Designing a workable spatial system -- An introduction to cognitive maps -- The mentally invisible stop sign -- Who turned the Madeleine around? -- Finding cars in parking lots -- A backwoodsman goes to town -- Distance estimates in cognitive maps -- Pictures from an expedition -- The life of trails -- The role of landmarks in cognitive maps -- Crossing a field -- When the dead reckoning system slips

Digging up old stories and analyzing them. Adari way-finding in the Sahara -- The cognitive sun compass -- The cognitive wind compass -- Returning directly to the starting point -- Singing in the fog -- A report from a salty place [the Runn of Cutch] -- Try to go straight, but don't try too hard -- Strategies for walking in a straight line -- An old story from a cool place [Bear Islands, north of Siberia] -- Aboriginal and underwater way-finding

Walking in circles when lost. The Skogsnuva fairy tale [from Sweden] -- Going in a circle on the prairie -- Going astray in the Canadian and Swedish forests -- How come we walk in circles?

Reversals of orientation. Forde's letter to the editor of Nature -- Strange morning awakenings -- When trains take off in the wrong direction -- Indoor misorientation -- Analyzing misorientations -- [Joseph] Peterson in a streetcar in Chicago -- Professor Peterson's misery in Minneapolis -- Tales of a cosmopolitan lady [Franziska Baumgarten] -- The topsy-turvy globe-trotter [A. Kirschmann] -- Causes of misorientation -- The San Francisco effect -- Crossing a ridge without getting to the other side -- Deterioration in our spatial system in old age -- Spatial memory slips causing reversals -- The role of gestalt in misorientations -- Do humans have a magnetic sense? -- Summing up and looking ahead

"Why are we so often disoriented when we come up from the subway? Do we really walk in circles when we lose our bearings in the wilderness? How - and why - do we get lost at all?" "In this book, Erik Jonsson, a Swedish-born engineer who has spent a lifetime exploring navigation over every terrain, from the crowded cities of Europe to the emptiness of the desert, gives readers extraordinary new insights into the human way-finding system." "Written for the nonscientist, Inner Navigation explains the array of physical and psychological cues the brain uses to situate us in space and build its "cognitive maps" - the subconscious maps it employs to organize landmarks. Humans, Jonsson explains, also possess an intuitive direction frame - an internal compass - that keeps these maps oriented (when it functions properly) and a dead-reckoning system that constantly updates our location on the map as we move through the world. Even the most cynical city-dweller will be amazed to learn how much of this innate sense we use every day as we travel across town or around the world."--BOOK JACKET