Everyone has cognitive maps of places they are familiar with. Their cities, their neighborhoods, their schools, their office buildings, their malls, homes, Disneyland, etc.
Do all your cognitive maps have a “due north” on them and are they accurate?
Mine for the most part are accurate however there’s a couple that are screwed up and I will probably never be able to fix. Due to the fact that while I was there exploring and building the cognitive map I was wrong about which direction north was.
Baltimore’s inner harbor is one for me. On my first visit there I drove up from DC and in my mind thought I was going north on 95 while it actually started heading east. When I took a left onto 395 I thought I was heading west. And by the time I got off downtown north was south, and south was north. So now permanently in my mind things are screwy. I have it aligned so things like the aquarium are on the south side of the harbor and Rash Field is on the north side. While it doesn’t affect getting around since everything is in it’s correct place, things outside of it are way off. For instance taking a boat out of the harbor would put me into some odd ocean to the west???
Chicago. I’ve only been there once, but it was hard to wrap my head around which way was north. I’ve never had that problem in any other city I’ve visited.
North/South is okay, but I have trouble with East/West. I was brought up in New York, so the ocean was East. Now I live in California, where the ocean is West. I often have to stop and think about it.
If you live in the highly populated part of Colorado (Ft. Collins to Pueblo) on the Eastern edge of the Rockies, West is your go-to cardinal point. You figure everything else out from there.
After you’ve been here a while, even on the rare occasions where you can’t see the mountains, you still know where they are. You can “feel” them.
Not all my maps have a north, as such. Some of them are sort of polar maps around a central hub, where all coordinates are relative to a central location. Instead of “north”, they have “home base is thattaway”, mostly based on landmarks. I can usually project compass points onto them if I have to, but not always.
The maps that do have a north are all at least reasonably accurate.
No, and they don’t really need it. My mental map of Las Vegas, for example, references everything by where it is to The Strip or Downtown. My mental map of Disneyland is centered on either the castle or the main gates. I don’t reference cardinal direction - I reference clockwise or counter-clockwise from the main gates.
Yes, there was a place I used to work at where there was a highway that ran along the edge of the property. I knew the highway in general ran east and west so I tended to think of the part I could see as running east and west.
But it wasn’t. The highway had to make a detour between a river and my workplace so the part I could see actually ran north and south before resuming its true direction. I knew this intellectually but it never sank into my subconscious sense of direction. So I always though of things on the highway side of my workplace as being the north side even though it was actually the west side.
Mostly I think in directions now that I’ve lived in a city with a relatively standard grid system for years. However I can’t seem to wrap my head around cardinal directions in my hometown. The town is small enough where I know where everything is and it’s easier to orient oneself by one’s relation to specific mountain ranges than by direction as the streets are at odd angles sometimes.
Last night I was giving someone advice (via text) on how to walk from the Fox Theater in Atlanta to the nearest subway stop. It’s one block west, that’s it, super easy.
So I sent her this : “Go out the front door of the theater, walk to the nearest corner, then go one block west”
She replied “How the hell do I know which way is west?”
This was at about 730PM. I replied “Walk towards the sun” :smack:
okay, this should be over, right? No shit, her reply was “How was I supposed to know where the sun is setting today?”
Vegas is another mental map that I have screwed up.
I have it in my mind that the strip runs east-west with downtown on the west end.
I think this has to do with the first visit there where we were flying in from the midwest and landed at McCarran parallel to the strip. Never crossed my mind that the plane had tuned and we were approaching from the south. Felt like the plane was heading west and made it’s landing heading west.
Cognitive maps – that would be nice. I’ve mentioned before that I am extremely spatially challenged. Not only do I not have a nice directional map in my head, I don’t even have right-left coordinates. In the city of San Francisco, if I can see landmarks that indicate the direction of the Bay or the Pacific Ocean, I can then deduce North or other compass directions. But it’s an exercise, not something that is already present in my head. I find things either by memorizing a pre-set route, or by wandering around until something looks familiar. Don’t ask me to read a map, either – I can’t translate it into the real world at all.
I’m pretty darn good at nav and all that. But like an inverse **Voyager **above, I grew up in LA on the beach and later worked on the East coast at the beach. Now a couple decades later I live on the East coast at the beach.
Ocean = East is still a bit unnatural.
The other major nav challenge in my life was when I first moved to Panama City, Panama. Getting the correct orientations of the two oceans and the canal was simple, despite them being a fount of trick questions on Trivial Pursuit.
But something about driving around in that city was very difficult. I’d be driving along on some new-to-me road, confident I knew about where I was and what direction I was going. Then suddenly I’d cross a familiar intersection about 5 miles away from my assumed position and pointed about 90 (or 120!) degrees off the direction I thought I was going. :eek:
For a more-or-less linear city along a sea coast that place had some serious subspace wormholes cross-connecting various side streets that were really miles apart. Eventually the feeling subsided. But I wasn’t the only person who reported that sensation.
Very few of my mental maps have a North. They’re almost always oriented around major roads, coastlines, rivers, etc.
I did have a lot of trouble adapting to suburbia north of Seattle because of this kind of flaw in my mental map. I kept thinking of I-5 as running N-S, but once you get up in this neck of the woods, it’s actually NE/SW. I also kept thinking of it as parallel to another N-S road but of course it isn’t. Until I realized this, I kept running into conflicts between the mental maps and real maps. It only took about six years to figure that out.
How about something like the inside of a Target store?
For the longest time I only visited our local Target and the front of the store faced west. Having visited it so many times I had the layout memorized with north being to the left when I walked in.
Now many years later and having visited Target stores all over the damn place I still have them memorized with north to the left. So much so that when I walk into one that doesn’t have the left side of the store facing north, my mind will rotate my surroundings so the store is in that familiar position.
The store will stay in that mental position (which feels like reality) until I walk out the front of the store. At which time I am briefly dis-oriented by the non-correctly oriented outside world until it “snaps” back into position.
I am usually very good about sensing direction. But I found one recently that dates to early childhood. So maybe not so good as a little kid.
There are 3 towns on the main road in the region where we lived. We first lived in the southernmost, then the middle one. We went to the northernmost one from time to time. The road was generally N-S. So I thought of it as passing mostly N-S thru all 3. Not so upon looking at Google Maps. For the northernmost, it is locally E-W. So my mental image of that town is rotated almost 90 degrees from my internal map. No matter how hard I try, looking at aerial and street views, I can’t alter my internal compass for this town.
In most places, I have an intuitive sense of which way is north, which gets incorporated into my mental maps of those places. And most of the time, my intuitive sense of north is correct. Some places, though, it’s consistently wrong. I grew up and now live in Cleveland, so I’m used to “lake = north”. In Toronto, I can sense which way the lake is, but it’s easy enough for me to flip 180 degrees, so it’s not a problem. Chicago, though, always throws me off, because I have to stop and think which way I need to rotate.
Places without a lake, I usually still have the sense, but I don’t know what it is I’m actually picking up on. My direction sense works correctly in Bozeman, MT, but it’s significantly off at my grandma’s old house in the mountains of Pennsylvania. And in Philadelphia, I found that I have no sense of direction at all, right or wrong.
My best guess is that my direction sense is based on the lay of the land: Land slopes downhill to the North. This usually works fine in the Cleveland area, and is also true of Bozeman, but Philadelphia is mostly just flat.
If I don’t know which way is North when I’m forming my mental map (or if I don’t bother to reason it out), I generally go with an uphill-downhill system. Once I find out which direction is North, if it isn’t uphill, that does throw me off. I can still navigate the region, but I have to think a bit to correlate it to other locations.
Most do have a north, but some have a different orientation due to how the original map was presented. Ski areas I cognitively map as the trail map appears, usually with the summit as the top. Other places likewise the starting location is the bottom (including stores).
I’ve mentioned before that I am extremely spatially challenged. Not only do I not have a nice directional map in my head, I don’t even have right-left coordinates. In the city of San Francisco, if I can see landmarks that indicate the direction of the Bay or the Pacific Ocean, I can then deduce North or other compass directions. But it’s an exercise, not something that is already present in my head. I find things either by memorizing a pre-set route, or by wandering around until something looks familiar. Don’t ask me to read a map, either – I can’t translate it into the real world at all.