I’ve just finished reading a fascinating interview in The Boston Globe with Colin Ellard, head psychologist at the Research Laboratory for Immersive Virtual Environments at Waterloo University in Ontario, Canada. The gist of the interview is that humans don’t have the connection with physical space that every other animal does because we have the cognitive ability to enable our minds to travel from the present location and time. Thus, we easily become disoriented. Of course, we also have the ability to create Google Maps and Garmin so we’re okay.
But Ellard advocates deliberately seeking to explore physical space in a way that doesn’t necessarily come naturally for us humans. Here’s some of the points I found interesting from the interview:
- humans are horrible at mentally representing curves. This is why we can often find our way around tightly built architectural environments but can’t find the way around the straights and curves of an entire urban area.
- because our grasp of where we are is weak in comparison with our overall intellect, we may be able to understand why we’re destroying the environment. If our minds aren’t in the here and now (and when are they?!) we can’t appreciate the consequences of our actions in a global context.
- improve your sense of direction by engaging in physical spaces in a playful, interactive way such as geocaching. The handheld and GPS coordinates annotate and contextualize the physical space we move through in such a way that it keeps our attention ‘here’ where it belongs.
- safely, but purposely, getting lost in an urban environment and using storytelling as a way to understand the present environment is another great way to re-engage with physical space.
I definitely recommend checking out the entire interview. It’ll give you a different look at ‘geospatial’ than you’d typically get here. Ellard has also recently written a book called Where Am I? Why We Can Find Our Way to the Moon but Get Lost in the Mall (In the United States, Where Am I? is changed to You Are Here).