Hacker News Reader

Comment by crispinb | Hacker News Reader

Human navigation is cultural. Urban culture (for better or worse) tends to cut people off from physical reality. Spend a few days with a Cape York indigenous person and find out how amazingly good people can get at this.

John Huth's The Lost Art of Finding Our Way is a good read for anyone interested in improving their navigation skills.

View on HN

Urban culture . . . tends to cut people off from physical reality.

No, it simply puts them in a different physical environment. People who grow up in a city learn to navigate in a city. People who grow up in the bush learn to navigate in the bush. We adapt to the physical environment in which we find ourselves. Studies have shown that even pigeons follow roads to the extent that if they take a wrong turn, they will backtrack to a roundabout and follow a different road rather than cut "cross country." And why not? The roads are obvious physical landmarks; why wouldn't pigeons use them?

You are confusing culture and physical environment. People don't only spontaneously 'learn' about how to get around a space they happen to be dumped into. They are inculcated into a culture. There is a depth of accumulated knowledge and engagement with physical reality in rural cultures (especially, but not only, indigenous ones) that is largely absent from urban cultures. There are good reasons for this (relative differences in cultural longevity, role specialisation, population mobility, navigational complexity of environment etc).

For those who don't know: The natives of the Cape York area speak a language with no words for front, back, left, or right, they only have words for compass directions. Thus, speaking their language forces you to be aware of compass directions at all times.

See: https://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.htm...

This would solve an issue I have regularily. Sighted people tend to invert left/right almost more then 50% of the time when telling directions to a blind person, especially if they are not looking in the same direction. In fact, the error is so common that I actually gave up listening to directions from random strangers. The likelihood of them being wrong is so high that it actually is dangerous to listen to sighted people without double-checking if they actually can be right.

> front, back, left, or right, they only have words for compass directions.

I know it's not exactly the same thing by I remember my Eastern-European grandma almost never using the words "right" of "left", she was almost always using what I can roughly translate as "upwards" and "downwards", as in: "paganel, give me that pitchfork that is upwards from you" or "pass me the rake that is downwards from where you are".

My grandparents lived in a mountainous region, and as such one of their main tools for making sense of where things were was to position those things "higher" or "lower" compared to the position of the speaker.

Thanks for that link. Fascinating. I had no idea of that linguistic aspect. My comments were just based on having spent some time in Cape York (in the bush & on the water) a few years ago.

I wonder if they'd also be less ego-centric, given that they don't perceive the world in terms of their orientation?

How language shapes the way we think by Lera Boroditsky: https://youtu.be/RKK7wGAYP6k

I grew up on a southern coast where north was almost always with a slight upwards incline.

When I'm in a hilly place my automatic sense of direction gives me downhill = south, with about 25% accuracy

Reply on news.ycombinator.com