Colin Ellard

Losing our bearings isn’t just a Boston thing. It’s a weakness particular to human beings - and, paradoxically, is rooted in some of our cognitive strengths, according to Canadian psychologist Colin Ellard. In an upcoming book, Ellard notes that when it comes to sense of direction, humans are out-navigated by everything from ants to bats to hamsters. And even when we think we know where we are, he writes, we’re often just one wrong turn from “the brink of spatial collapse.”

But not for nothing. As a species, he argues in “You are Here: Why We Can Find Our Way to the Moon but Get Lost in the Mall” (Doubleday, July 2009), we’ve made a sort of Faustian cognitive bargain, sacrificing a deep connection with physical space in exchange for a more diffused existence where our minds can travel freely away from the here and now. This uniquely human capability has encouraged - and is magnified by - the trappings of a modern, technophilic society, such as rapid transit, cellphones, and the Internet.

At his Research Laboratory for Immersive Virtual Environments at Ontario’s Waterloo University, Ellard is looking for ways to create built environments, from homes to city blocks, that better suit our freewheeling minds.

And he has some other ideas for bringing us back down to earth. Ellard thinks part of the solution is a creative re-purposing of the very technology that has lulled us into this constant state of almost-lost. He also argues for reviving age-old navigation mnemonics that most of us long ago abandoned for Google Maps.

We recently reached Ellard by phone to ask where we are, where we need to be, and how to get there from here.

Ideas: What happened to us?

Ellard: The fact that we can so easily imagine ourselves in a time and place other than where we are suggests that we have very powerful cognitive resources that other animals don’t have, but a consequence is that we don’t practice our innate navigation capabilities and we get easily disoriented. We get away with it by drawing elaborate maps and building tremendously supportive environments where the most serious consequence of getting lost is that we need to ask for directions. For animals, the consequence of getting lost could be death.

Ideas: Finding your way around a hospital or driving through Boston could make you wonder about these “tremendously supportive environments.” What gives?

Ellard: There hasn’t been enough connection between psychology and the practice of architecture or urban planning {hellip} the same principles that work at the level of a building should apply to urban scale. But there are other aspects to how people find their way in a city. For instance, Boston doesn’t have much of a grid, and one of the things humans don’t do terribly well in mental representations of spaces is deal with curves. We tend to straighten them. That’s fine for drawing sketch maps or giving directions, but in terms of reliably finding your way in a city like Boston, possessing that kind of fine scale, that sense of geometry, would be very important.

Ideas: If our detachment from physical space has enabled so much progress, what’s the downside besides getting turned around every so often?

Ellard: As a species, we can understand quantum mechanics, write poetry, and decode DNA, but we have this blind spot for taking care of our environment. I think there may be a connection between that and our shaky grasp of where we are. If we don’t think of ourselves as embedded in a here and now, that may make it difficult for us to connect our actions with global consequences. We don’t think of ourselves as being in the same place as stories of environmental devastation and melting ice caps, because space is so fractured for us.

Ideas: Do you have any sense-of-direction tips?

Ellard: We should try to re-engage with space in a playful way. The rap on GPS is that we focus on the display so much that we become even more oblivious to the outside world. But if you engage with that technology in creative ways, you can actually turn it to your advantage. A perfect example is geocaching, which is a scavenger hunt using GPS coordinates. I started geocaching with my kids about three years ago. It gets them outside and exploring places, and they use the technology to become more aware of where they are. On long car drives, I pass a GPS into the back seat, and immediately the kids start to engage with the space they’re traveling through, because they now have this great source of annotation about the world outside the backseat of the car.

There’s also an argument for getting lost as recreation.

Ideas: You’re saying, get lost on purpose?

Ellard: Yes, with a major, major emphasis on safety. This is not something to do in true wilderness. But in a small, manageable piece of space like an urban park, it’s a marvelous thing to do for all kinds of reasons. Because we have this primal fear of getting lost, we try really hard not to let it happen. But it’s great to bring yourself back to that realization of what it means to really know where you are, and to think about tricks you can use to focus on the here and now, some of which are thousands of years old, such as using stories to help find your way and connect yourself to a landscape.

I’ve practiced this with my children in a nearby urban forest. It’s small, maybe 10 acres, but it’s densely wooded with an absolute labyrinth of trails and lots of changes in elevation. You’re never in any danger, but you can kind of lose your bearings. And there was a big stump in the forest that we turned into alpha landmark for our kids by calling it the “thinking spot.” On our walks, everybody would sit on the stump and think about something that we could talk about later as we walked. Or, a couple of tree trunks rubbing against each other at a particular spot would sound kind of like a strange bird, and so there would be a bit of story telling about that. Once you’ve done that a few times, the location is burned into your memory.

Chris Berdik is the senior writer for Bostonia, the alumni magazine of Boston University.