I hate to be prescriptivist, but the OED doesn’t have an entry for “ded reckoning”, not even as an irregular variant of “dead reckoning”. If you do a Google Ngram check for “ded reckoning,dead reckoning”, “ded reckoning” is basically a flat line along the X-axis of the chart. Relative, to “dead reckoning”, “ded reckoning” almost never appears in print.
And, it turns it, this question has been authoritatively answered.
They’re not missing a life skill, they’re missing an ability that some people have and others don’t. You’re doing the equivalent of complaining that a color blind person ought to learn to see color.
I know where north is when I’m home. I know where north is when I can see one of the Finger Lakes, because I know they run north and south. I have no idea where north is in a strange place on a cloudy day.
I can, however, tell my left from my right (which some people can’t.) And I can read road maps. I orient myself pretty well from maps – but not in a fashion that involves north and south, really. It’s more just a sense of where things are relative to each other. I prefer paper maps, because you can see a larger area and still see the street names. GPS instructions don’t orient me at all; I feel totally lost if that’s all I’ve got, as if I were in a void in which some voice occasionally told me to move left or right.
What do you do when the road labled I-something North is actually heading east, west, or even south on a particular stretch of road? This happens fairly often.
– loop roads labeled N, S, E, or W I find very confusing. The road’s going in a circle.
I’ve read about that also. Maybe it is trainable to some extent – but I suspect they’ve got their equivalent of our person who can’t tell left from right.
It’s also possible that they generally live/travel in well known areas in which they can tell where north is the same way I can tell it when I’m home – I know where north is relative to the features of the land.
I know at least one town where directions are often given as “uphill” and “downhill”.
I grew up near the East coast – though nowhere near sight of the ocean – and went on a long trip, some of it out West. I discovered that the back of my head thought that “east” and “towards the nearest ocean” were the same direction; and was mightily confused when the visible ocean was on the west.
Well, to be fair, it was Pittsburgh.
Pittsburgh is a city laid out around a whole batch of rivers. Rivers are not interested in human ideas of directions.
I also have a lot of trouble with right and left.
I’m good with maps, though. And i love Google maps, but i zoom out a lot to see the shape of things.
Yeah, I know. It’s also very hilly. To be blunt, they have some strange intersections. Interesting city though.
Me too. Zero sense of direction and left/right confusion. I get lost in my neighborhood.
Santa Barbara is on the California coast but the ocean is directly South and the mountains to the North. The 101 North/South as it runs through town goes West/East. It confuses the hell out of people.
I’ve memorized how to get to places in town. I can’t innately get anywhere. If I’ve been to a place a hundred times but haven’t been in several months, I need to look it up. It’s a not insignificant handicap. Easily accessible GPS is a godsend.
When I zoom out, even moderately, the names of all the smaller streets disappear. Since I’m probably trying to orient myself in order to find someplace on one of those smaller streets, often via a route involving other smaller streets, this is not helpful.
I start with a broad view, to get an idea of what i want to do. Then i zoom in to see the names of smaller roads i need names of. I have no sense of direction, but i have a good visual memory, and can hold the big picture in my head while looking up the details.
I love love love map software.
I like printed maps, too, but I’m general, i find the software easier to use. No complicated folding and unfolding, and being picked up by the wind.
You’re probably underselling yourself on having no sense of direction. Most people I know seem to have difficulty orienting themselves by the sun. Or at least when the subject has come up in practice, I’ve been somewhat surprised at how many people are unable to generally figure out which way is North-ish (or wherever) by the sun.
I’d rank myself as pretty aware of cardinal directions most of the time outdoors, and not so much indoors. And when I have to think of cardinal directions indoors, I mentally take myself outside of the building to orient myself. I’m also one of those people whose GPS maps have to be with a fixed north at the top of the screen, instead of the map rotating to always have the direction you’re going at the top, like 99% of the people I know have. I swear, every time someone sees my GPS and that the top of the screen is always north, they get confused. I would have thought this was somewhat common, given the comments above, but man or woman or other, they all seem to prefer “up” to be “straight ahead” rather than “north.”
I can navigate despite having no sense of direction. I can’t tell right from left. When i leave an doctors office i don’t know which way i entered. If i need to go straight, but i need to take an elevator or a staircase, i sometimes hold my arm pointing the direction i want to go, so I’ll know which way to go when i get to my floor. I’m really pretty direction-impaired.
I do, however, have a good visual memory and can often hold a map on my head.
I don’t even have a visual memory. I have aphantasia. It’s a real struggle.
I can’t see the big picture map in my head while looking up the names of roads. But I can see them both at once on a paper map.
You not only have to be able to see the sun; you need to adjust for both time of day and time of year. Much of the year here the sun’s not going to be only east and west, it’s also going to be south, sometimes considerably south. Hills or tall buildings or even trees can interfere with telling where it is. Around noon in midsummer it’s no help at all (and around noon in midwinter it’s helping by telling you where south is, while most people only think to look for east and west.) And around here it’s often cloudy.
So yeah, on a clear day, in a location where I can see most of the sky, during daylight, not between around 10A and 2P, and given that I know the time of year and time of day, I can more or less find north by the sun. It’s just that that combination doesn’t happen all that often.
I apparently do too, though I only heard of it fairly recently.
At least, I think I do. I can imagine a red apple; but the imagination is nothing whatsoever like seeing one. It’s more a matter of knowing what I’d be seeing if I were seeing one; but there’s no actual picture. I’ve never been able to figure out what people who say they’re actually seeing things in their mind mean by it – they obviously don’t mean the exact same thing as seeing things that are physically in their field of vision, or they wouldn’t be able to tell what’s actually there from what they’re imagining. But they describe it as being the same thing.
But yeah, I can’t see the map when I’m not looking at it. But I can use a map to feed my sense of where things are relative to each other, which is what I call being oriented – but that isn’t visual, and also isn’t oriented to cardinal directions. It’s more proprioceptive – place x is that way from me, and place y is that other way from me, and place z is over there, and they are in a similar sense this/that way from each other. If I also know where north is in that location, I can overlay that knowledge and incorporate it; but the knowledge doesn’t rely on knowing where north is, and works fine without it.
I can’t see the map. I can’t see anything. There are levels of aphantasia though.
I was once driving out in the country and got lost. Nothing to be seen for miles, no house, farm, gas station. I navigated by the sun as my ancestors did, as it was lowering in the western sky. Pulled over, did some mental calculations, and decided to head north as much as possible and reach civilization before it got dark (and I would be totally screwed). Found a little back road and followed it to a little hamlet I recognized, hooray, I was finally closer to home!
Between 10 and 2 (standard time) the sun is roughly south up here in the northern hemisphere, in the temperate zones. It only gets overhead in the tropics.
On a clear night i can find the north star, too, but i didn’t think I’ve ever used that in navigation.
But you need exactly the right map. I can use Google maps to look at the train system in Europe and get a sense of my choices for talking a train from Florence to Gottingen. I can use it to check where my friend lives in Indiana and get a sense of my options for driving from the Indianapolis airport to his home. I can do this RIGHT NOW, without needing to research sources for maps and find a suitable one and then obtain it.
I can’t even imagine what you are describing.
It makes perfect sense to me because that’s sort of what I experience but not as much. I know that doesn’t make things more clear to you.
I feel like we’ve had this conversation before on the board. To me “seeing” in my mind is nothing like actually seeing. It’s an abstract process I can’t quite describe. Like I can “visualize” things fine and keep them in my head to a certain point (with numbers I have to “refresh” often. A chessboard I can keep track of for about ten moves at most, but it’s not something I’ve practiced.) I don’t think most people literally “see” what they’re imagining in any way. At least nobody I’ve talked to about this does.
That’s the way it is for me. I think some artists are very good at mental visualization, or at least better at it than I am. If we’re talking about regular patterns I’m fine, though similar to what you say it’s not like seeing the thing but I can use the what-ever-it-is in my mind to describe it or even reproduce it physically.
Yeah, paper and online maps are better for different things. It’s not a matter of one of them being better than the other for everything.
It’s fascinating how differently different peoples’ minds work.
I had assumed, almost all my life, that seeing something in one’s “mind’s eye” was a metaphor. And then recently I discovered people saying that no, they’re actually seeing what they’re imagining – and, further, that it’s those of us who can’t who are unusual.
I’m sure there was, as @pulykamell said, at least one thread about this on this board before.
It’s worth checking out just to see the second post.