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By Tia Ghose
LiveScience
In 1996, a ranger flying a helicopter over Death Valley, Calif., spotted a minivan in a wash near Anvil Canyon. That was ominous for several reasons: There was no road leading up to the spot, and the area wasn't passable without a four-wheel vehicle.
After investigating the vehicle, park rangers determined that four German tourists — a man, a woman, and their two sons, ages 4 and 11 — had last rented the minivan. But there was no trace of the family itself.
Their remains were not found for about 15 years, until Tom Mahood, a physicist-turned-adventurer, retraced their steps. As he recounts on his website, a series of reasonable mistakes, such as misreading the steepness of a canyon descent and being led astray by culturally confusing map landmarks, likely led to the decisions that ended in them separating, then dying in the scorching desert heat.
The story reveals how easy it is for people to become hopelessly lost in the wilderness. Humans get lost in part because we don't pay attention and have lost ancient ways of reading the environment to navigate. But humans' way-finding abilities are also less precise than the abilities of other animals.
While innate navigational ability differs, "just about everyone can get better," said Daniel Montello, a geographer and psychologist at the University of California Santa Barbara.
Ancient tools
Historically, not getting lost was a matter of life or death. One wrong turn could lead to a hyena's den or a nasty death from thirst. As a result, all indigenous cultures navigate in part by tracking the sun or the stars' positions in the sky relative to the fixed star Polaris, said Tristan Gooley, author of "The Natural Navigator" (The Experiment, 2012) and owner of naturalnavigator.com.
Those cues "are as good if not better than a compass in many situations," Gooley told LiveScience.
For instance, Polynesian seafarers track direction using ocean swells, the natural rise and fall of the water caused when a huge storm generates waves deep at sea. Because swells can linger for days, they can reliably be used to fine-tune direction, Gooley said. The Polynesians can track up to eight swells at a time, he said. [The 9 Craziest Ocean Voyages]
Both land and sea bear traces of long- and short-term directional cues. For instance, grass may wave in the direction of the winds on a given day, but a tree may lean toward the direction the winds blow over long periods of time, Gooley said.
Use it or lose it
Human mental-mapping stems in part from a brain region called the hippocampus, and studies suggest it can be strengthened with practice. For instance, one study found cab drivers in London have bigger and thicker hippocampi than the average person, said Colin Ellard, a psychologist at the University of Waterloo in Canada and author of the book "You Are Here" (Doubleday, 2009).
But the sense of direction may also wither with disuse. Small studies have found that using a GPS for just a few hours seems to impair people's navigational skills in the short term, Montello said. Many people get lost because they simply aren't paying attention, he added.
Animal sense
It's also true that the human sense of direction is simply less precise than that of many animals. For instance, migratory birds can use internal magnetic compasses or sonar maps to create incredibly detailed mental maps. And many animals' sense of direction is instinctual and is genetically hard-wired.
In addition, humans have faulty internal senses of direction. For instance, several studies have found that people walk in circles when blindfolded or disoriented (for instance, in an unfamiliar, heavily forested area), Ellard said. African desert ants, by contrast, can march in a straight line for miles. [Album: Stunning Photos of the World's Ants]
"They have this prodigious ability to keep track of where they are with respect to their initial starting point," Ellard told LiveScience. "They have a very accurate internal odometer."
But while animals' sense of direction is more precise, we have a much more flexible way-finding ability, Montello said. For instance, migrating animals travel thousands of miles but usually go to specific, pre-determined locations. But humans use landmarks, directional cues, a sense of how far they've traveled, as well as myriad other cues to go vastly more places, often with no prior knowledge.
"We travel much wider and farther than a lot of other animals," Montello said.
Tricks of the trade
A few simple techniques can help avoid getting lost.
"A common way that people get lost, is the environment looks different in a different direction," Montello said.
So when forging ahead on a long trek, it's helpful to look back and take a mental photograph to visualize the area from multiple orientations, Montello said.
Paying attention to visual landmarks and using dead reckoning — tracking of their speed and orientation, are also useful, he said.
Follow Tia Ghose on Twitter @tiaghose or LiveScience @livescience, Facebook and Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com.
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Leave a Comment:
i get lost all the time. . . .my natural GPS must be fried.
GPS is making the brain lazy. I am great at directions, and have traveled, hiked and trekked around the world in all kinds of cities and wilderness (sometimes alone). I rarely got lost, and usually found my way back after some adventurous exploration and creative calculation. But GPS has made so many of us lazy that we feel lost when we are in a parallel street to our own.
I still spend time cruising through neighborhoods without a purpose, when I first move, to observe, see and take a mental picture of my neighborhood and other neighborhoods nearby. People may find that strange, but it is a great way to learn, see and know your place.
Provincialism in our cities is a serious problem. Some young people don't know anything beyond three blocks around their homes, schools and colleges. It is making them aggressive wimps.
I will use the gps in a city. It drives my wife nuts but I like the road maps, just to "see" where we are.
If you want to hone your navigation skills, try the Sport of Orienteering. It's very fun! There are Orienteering meets all over the country that offer beginner courses for kids and families, as well as advanced courses to offer a mental and physical challenge to more experience map and compass users. I can't seem to post a link here, but google "Orienteering USA".
not teaching geography in our schools doesn't help much,,
the real people lost in this country is our idiot leaders,,,,
Can somebody tell me how to get back to the MSNBC home page?
Good one!
Stupid Germans.
What's so bad about getting lost?
Wow - that was really the smallest ratio of useful information to headline promise that I can remember. But I'll keep an eye out for those Polynesian ocean wave swells!
Where am I?
Getting lost does have some benefits. I got lost so many times in Baltimore, I can actually navigate fairly well in Baltimore now. I really hate getting lost. It usually brings on a major panic attack.
I've been hiking, backpacking, and mountaineering often in very remote areas and traveled all over the world my entire life. Never been lost. But I'm often shocked at how unaware, unprepared and lost people I come across can be. No sense of where they are or the distance to their destination or how far they have come. If it weren't for a well marked trail or road, they'd be wandering around aimlessly.
I've never owned a GPS. I live in the country where there are ridgetops, valleys, rivers, streams - all mostly gravel roads. I've driven these roads all around in a 100+ mile radius and know my way instinctively. Of course someone not from the area would get lost VERY easily...So let me recant a time when I was in an unfamiliar place: My friend and I had my boat/trailer on the back of the truck and we went to Northern MN for a vacation. We had no problem following a map to arrive at our cabin on the lake. We got the boat launched and truck emptied before it was totally dark - and then we had a couple drinks to relax to 'officially' begin our vacation! I suggested we take a little cruise on the lake and so we fired up the boat motor and as it was a full moon rising, it was really easy to see the shoreline and scattered islands. (The lake was Burntside Lake by Ely, MN and we were at the far northeast end) As we headed out, I noticed the moon rising to my forward left position over the trees. I immediately knew in my mind that when we got down a ways, I was going to intentionally mess with my friend's internal navigation and go around an island a couple times then head back, with the moon now over and behind my right shoulder. I joked, "Man, we're almost out of gas!! Which way back?" Then I noticed a fog was developing along the shorelines and within minutes it was a thick fog and my friend was convinced we needed to turn around and go the other way. With the moon still easily visible through the fog and over and behind my right shoulder, I insisted we were going the right direction. He was adamant that I wasn't. Then I played like the motor ran out of gas. LOL. With black bears and timber wolves known to be all around the lake, the idea of 'camping' without a tent or provisions was really starting to worry my friend. He suggested we 'oar the boat' back in the wrong direction. Then I amazingly got the motor started. Messing with the choke, I made it sputter and kept going where I knew was the right way - he was really starting to freak out - then we came around this last island and there was our dock with a mercury vapor light at the end that we could make out through the fog! I shouted "there it is!" And we made it back in one piece. Funny thing was, I *thought* I was joking about the gas. As it turned out, we WERE on fumes! So even while I thought I had everything under control, it was a darned good thing that I did have a good instinct for dead-reckoning navigation - even in a place I had never been before - at night - in fog - and was able to get us re-oriented and back to our starting point. Had I not taken the time to take a mental note of the moon, we very well could have been stuck on that lake overnight and that would've sucked, because with the fog - even in early June, it was rather cold!
Perhaps walking in circles when lost or when your destination is not seen/unknown is a built-in self preservation mode. Keeps you from wandering too far and makes finding you easier.