# Do all your cognitive maps have a "north" on them? **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [August 24, 2015, 6:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-all-your-cognitive-maps-have-a-north-on-them/728750 "2015-08-24T18:55:23Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [August 25, 2015, 11:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-all-your-cognitive-maps-have-a-north-on-them/728750/41 "2015-08-25T23:57:46Z")
> [@Morgenstern](#): > > It could be worse. You could live in Oahu where the ocean is N, S, E and W. As I understand it directions there are mostly towards the ocean (in any direction) versus towards the center of the island. Plenty of places have non-standard coordinate systems. In NY I always thought of directions as toward the city (Manhattan) versus away from it. In the city it is uptown/downtown, towards the Hudson and towards the East River (which conveniently was East.) ---
**Author:** ![Cub\_Mistress](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/ea666f/32.png) [@Cub\_Mistress](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cub_Mistress)\ **Post date:** [August 26, 2015, 12:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-all-your-cognitive-maps-have-a-north-on-them/728750/42 "2015-08-26T00:14:42Z")
> [@SpoilerVirgin](#): > > 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. Exactly. No maps in my head. I’ll think “okay, post office in X town” and see a picture of it. From that I can think about which roads to take to get there, but I could never point to the right direction. If I approach an address from an different direction that the previous visits, I am often surprised by the proximity of another address I visit. GPS changed my life. ---
**Author:** ![Broomstick](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/broomstick/32/246_2.png) [@Broomstick](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Broomstick)\ **Post date:** [August 26, 2015, 1:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-all-your-cognitive-maps-have-a-north-on-them/728750/43 "2015-08-26T01:19:56Z")
I have plenty of mental maps in my head, and pretty much start a new one whenever I find myself at a new location. When I was in Oak Creek, Wisconsin recently I arrived during a heavily overcast day so my initial head map was skewed in the wrong direction - but unlike some people I don’t seem to have a problem correctly such maps later. I can mentally re-adjust/re-map to have directions line up with reality and from that point forward not need to adjust further. What really knocks out my sense of direction is alcohol - just a single drink and I can’t find my way down the block reliably. Which is yet another reason to never, ever, drink and drive. ---
**Author:** ![garygnu](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/garygnu/32/2924_2.png) [@garygnu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/garygnu)\ **Post date:** [August 26, 2015, 1:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-all-your-cognitive-maps-have-a-north-on-them/728750/44 "2015-08-26T01:34:57Z")
I always know which way is north, so all my maps have it. The only exceptions are 1. My overall mental picture of the San Francisco Bay Area is tilted so that SF is much closer to ‘north’ of San Jose than it actually is. I know it’s off and correct when I need to. 2. My path from my childhood home outside of Portland, OR to relatives in Springfield is closer to a path along the ground than an overhead map. I don’t know the names of the highways, exits, streets, their address. But I could drive there in my sleep. Someone mentioned ski slope trail maps. I don’t really think of that as a map, but in any case, I consult the printed trail map upside down because, damn it that’s the direction I’m going. The only two I have the least bit memorized is Mt Rose and Heavenly. ---
**Author:** ![panache45](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/panache45/32/64_2.png) [@panache45](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/panache45)\ **Post date:** [August 26, 2015, 2:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-all-your-cognitive-maps-have-a-north-on-them/728750/45 "2015-08-26T02:15:29Z")
Venice, Italy. Not only cognitive maps, but actual printed-on-paper maps. I normally have a good sense of direction, but in Venice I was like a rat in a very complicated maze. I thought I was headed in a particular direction, then found myself going in a right angle to where I was headed. After a few days of this, I just said the hell with it, and wandered around without direction. That’s when I really began to enjoy the city. ---
**Author:** ![GusNSpot](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gusnspot/32/436_2.png) [@GusNSpot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GusNSpot)\ **Post date:** [August 26, 2015, 5:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-all-your-cognitive-maps-have-a-north-on-them/728750/46 "2015-08-26T05:10:36Z")
> [@Morgenstern](#): > > They need a good map to fly IFR ( **I F** ollow **R** oads). Well, legal IFR maps are pretty useless for anything else. Actually Texaco road maps are are really good for actual IF RR. 😃 In Kansas & Nebraska, most small towns are the same size, sit on the same side of a E-W railroad track with the same grain silos and you pretty much have to go look at the water tank to know where you are. :mad: Mapped Kansas for the TaxMan and the high altitude spot shots were a bear. I had to count sections for miles and if I lost eye contact with the correct place, I had to go back to a place I could identify and count sections again. This was before LORAN or GPS. Now any idiot can do it. ☹ ---
**Author:** ![gallows\_fodder](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/8c91f0/32.png) [@gallows\_fodder](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gallows_fodder)\ **Post date:** [August 26, 2015, 12:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-all-your-cognitive-maps-have-a-north-on-them/728750/47 "2015-08-26T12:21:42Z")
When I lived in Boston, I didn’t have a car and only walked or used public transportation to get anywhere. The consequence of this was that I had no sense of orientation wherever I was. I could look up in the sky and figure what direction I was traveling in, but I didn’t know where landmarks or neighborhoods sat in relation to one another. When people in cars stopped me on the street and asked me how to get to , I always said, “Sorry, I’m just visiting,” because I couldn’t even point them in the right direction. I could tell pedestrians how to get to the nearest T stop and then how to get the destination, but as the crow flies, I had no idea where was in relation to me. It was really unsettling, and looking back on it now, I have no idea why I didn’t just pick up a damn map and learn the city layout once and for all. Three years I lived there like this! ---
**Author:** ![LSLGuy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lslguy/32/5813_2.png) [@LSLGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LSLGuy)\ **Post date:** [August 26, 2015, 1:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-all-your-cognitive-maps-have-a-north-on-them/728750/48 "2015-08-26T13:19:54Z")
@ **GusNSpot** : It’s extra tough when you come up on a town and see this: [https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&site=imghp&tbm=isch&source=hp&q=hot+and+cold+water+tower](https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&site=imghp&tbm=isch&source=hp&q=hot+and+cold+water+tower) Everybody’s a comedian. ---
**Author:** ![septimus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/septimus/32/410_2.png) [@septimus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/septimus)\ **Post date:** [August 26, 2015, 1:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-all-your-cognitive-maps-have-a-north-on-them/728750/49 "2015-08-26T13:51:53Z")
My mental maps have North at the top, but I can get very confused if I’ve never seen a map of the area … and when I first moved to my present location, maps of the area were hard to find. The main road for traveling North snakes around and is actually almost due East when it reaches a main interesection 20+ miles away, though I still “think” I’m heading North. Sometimes I just count turns. If heading North, after three left turns I’m Eastbound, right? But I navigated the large city an hour away without a map and got very confused until I noticed that the main roads I was using to circumnavigate formed a pentagon, not a square! (Looking at Google Maps right now, I see that it’s a very lopsided pentagon, and that, once again, the relevant part of the main road I thought of as North-South is more East-West. :smack: ) ---
**Author:** ![Miss\_Mapp](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/miss_mapp/32/369_2.png) [@Miss\_Mapp](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Miss_Mapp)\ **Post date:** [August 26, 2015, 3:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-all-your-cognitive-maps-have-a-north-on-them/728750/50 "2015-08-26T15:36:02Z")
I have an idea in my head that 270 and 355 in northern Maryland go north, when really they’re both north-northwest. So this throws off my related idea that the street I live on heads off from them in an easterly direction when it’s really north-northeast – sort of a big Y on an actual map. Sometimes I’m still surprised driving into work in the early hours of the morning at where the sun is rising or the moon is setting in contrast to where I think they should be. ---
**Author:** ![LSLGuy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lslguy/32/5813_2.png) [@LSLGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LSLGuy)\ **Post date:** [August 26, 2015, 4:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-all-your-cognitive-maps-have-a-north-on-them/728750/51 "2015-08-26T16:23:13Z")
> [@Miss\_Mapp](#): > > … Sometimes I’m still surprised driving into work in the early hours of the morning at where the sun is rising or the moon is setting in contrast to where I think they should be. You have to be a little cautious with using those too. Between June & Dec the azimuth of sunrise at any given location changes ~45 degrees. If you think sunrise is due East every day of the year you’d be wrong. The Moon is offset by a further ~5 degrees in either direction, for a total of up to ~55 degrees variation over the course of the year. That’s bigger than the difference between, say, Northeast and east. Or more to the point, between ENE and ESE. ---
**Author:** ![TriPolar](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tripolar/32/3008_2.png) [@TriPolar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TriPolar)\ **Post date:** [August 26, 2015, 4:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-all-your-cognitive-maps-have-a-north-on-them/728750/52 "2015-08-26T16:35:20Z")
I would have just said yes, but I actually do get thrown off by cities sometimes. I have a natural sense of direction outside of the concrete jungle, inside big cities I seem to lose that. ---
**Author:** ![Kiros](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/439d5e/32.png) [@Kiros](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kiros)\ **Post date:** [August 26, 2015, 8:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-all-your-cognitive-maps-have-a-north-on-them/728750/53 "2015-08-26T20:07:13Z")
I’m really good with directions on an intuitive level, both in a compass/map sense and in a getting-there-from-here sense. Crazy Boston roads? Not a problem. Road trip? I’m your navigator. Old cities in Europe? Let me look at Google Maps for a few minutes before we go out, and we’ll get there. Often because of the exact internal “north” symbol we’re talking about here. … My parents’ rural house, where I grew up and lived eighteen years? No freaking clue unless I stop to think about sunrise/sunset and orient things from there. The other side roads on the way to the highway, I’m completely hopeless. Maybe I just learned the area before my directional sense developed. ---
**Author:** ![Hampshire](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hampshire/32/4887_2.png) [@Hampshire](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hampshire)\ **Post date:** [August 26, 2015, 8:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-all-your-cognitive-maps-have-a-north-on-them/728750/54 "2015-08-26T20:35:11Z")
I’ve read the book [Inner Naviagation](http://www.amazon.com/Inner-Navigation-Lost-World-Find-ebook/dp/B003ODJ1AU/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1440621170&sr=8-2&keywords=inner+navigation) on the subject and found the authors insights fascinating. ---
**Author:** ![GusNSpot](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gusnspot/32/436_2.png) [@GusNSpot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GusNSpot)\ **Post date:** [August 26, 2015, 8:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-all-your-cognitive-maps-have-a-north-on-them/728750/55 "2015-08-26T20:56:42Z")
> [@LSLGuy](#): > > @ **GusNSpot** : It’s extra tough when you come up on a town and see this: [hot and cold water tower - Google Search](https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&site=imghp&tbm=isch&source=hp&q=hot+and+cold+water+tower) > > Everybody’s a comedian. I was not aware there were so many labeled that way. I wish the ‘Britten’ one was really used for water. But it would have to be way stronger built. Or less angle. Thanks for the smile… 😃 ---
**Author:** ![Arabella\_Flynn](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/8491ac/32.png) [@Arabella\_Flynn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Arabella_Flynn)\ **Post date:** [August 28, 2015, 6:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-all-your-cognitive-maps-have-a-north-on-them/728750/56 "2015-08-28T06:58:33Z")
> [@gallows\_fodder](#): > > When I lived in Boston, I didn’t have a car and only walked or used public transportation to get anywhere. The consequence of this was that I had no sense of orientation wherever I was. I could look up in the sky and figure what direction I was traveling in, but I didn’t know where landmarks or neighborhoods sat in relation to one another. > > When people in cars stopped me on the street and asked me how to get to , I always said, “Sorry, I’m just visiting,” because I couldn’t even point them in the right direction. I could tell pedestrians how to get to the nearest T stop and then how to get the destination, but as the crow flies, I had no idea where was in relation to me. > > It was really unsettling, and looking back on it now, I have no idea why I didn’t just pick up a damn map and learn the city layout once and for all. Three years I lived there like this! I started out thinking of the T as an incredibly slow, noisy teleporter that took me from overworld map to overworld map. I could find things relative to the nearest T station, but I had no idea where anything was in relation to anything else. Half the time, I still don’t. A friend with whom I happen to be sharing an apartment these days came to pick me up at Logan when I first got here, and we stopped at a Starbucks on the way from the airport to Medford, where I was staying. This was in 2011, and we were discussing _this afternoon_ how we still have no idea where in hell that mystery Starbucks was. Cambridge is, if anything, worse; I somehow got turned around trying to find something in the general vicinity of Harvard once, early on, and to this day my map of the things strung along Mass Ave is rotated 180 degrees from where it ought to be, with Porter “south” of Harvard. Learning the damn map is not necessarily going to be a help, unless you have an eidetic memory. Aside from Back Bay, where the streets are a perfect grid and in alphabetical order to boot, there is nothing anywhere in the Greater Boston Area that makes a lick of sense from either an aesthetic or city planning perspective. I’m told that when cars were invented, they just paved the cow paths. I liken it to walking around inside the English language. It looks like it does because 400 years ago, someone made a completely arbitrary decision, and now we won’t change it because we’ve all memorized it this way. Logical directions were always much easier. I think I made it two, maybe three, months before I figured out that if someone wearing every piece of Red Sox paraphenalia ever made walks up to you in Park Street Over and starts out with, “Excuse me…” the answer is, “Any train but E, get off at Kenmore, there are big signs that say ‘To Fenway Park’.” ---
**Author:** ![amarinth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/3be4f8/32.png) [@amarinth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/amarinth)\ **Post date:** [August 28, 2015, 7:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-all-your-cognitive-maps-have-a-north-on-them/728750/57 "2015-08-28T07:13:31Z")
No and no. For the most part, in my internal maps, the most important street is horizontal with the place where I’m most likely to approach the area on the right. Unless there’s a major hill. Then, sometimes, the top of the hill will be be at the top of the map. Unless the sun is rising or setting or I’m in a traditionally built church, I’ve no idea which way is west or north or whatever. I don’t think I could orient an internal map based on cardinal directions. ---
**Author:** ![Balthisar](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/balthisar/32/2825_2.png) [@Balthisar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Balthisar)\ **Post date:** [August 28, 2015, 8:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-all-your-cognitive-maps-have-a-north-on-them/728750/58 "2015-08-28T08:38:03Z")
> [@Voyager](#): > > 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. I have to remember to think about east/west for similar reasons. To me California has always been the west, but that’s to the east of me now. While I know Europe is the “western world,” home to me is “the west,” which is east of me. ---
**Author:** ![BigT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bigt/32/12044_2.png) [@BigT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BigT)\ **Post date:** [September 8, 2015, 6:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-all-your-cognitive-maps-have-a-north-on-them/728750/59 "2015-09-08T18:20:58Z")
My mental maps are just based on the direction I’d most often be facing. Sometimes, I have more than one mental map, and it’s when they merge that I think I have an idea of how things are really laid out. ---
**Author:** ![leahcim](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/b4bc9f/32.png) [@leahcim](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/leahcim)\ **Post date:** [September 8, 2015, 8:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-all-your-cognitive-maps-have-a-north-on-them/728750/60 "2015-09-08T20:29:29Z")
When I lived in New Rochelle, my “mental north” was just about 180 degrees out of sync with reality, but my mental north in Manhattan, where I work, is more or less correct (or at least consistent the same fiction that everyone else has that the Avenues are exactly north-south). When I’d take a half-hour train ride every day from one location to the other and back, at some point I could “feel” my mental model readjusting. I’d start on a train going “mental north” out of New Rochelle and follow a straight track to end up going “mental south”. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-all-your-cognitive-maps-have-a-north-on-them/728750.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-all-your-cognitive-maps-have-a-north-on-them/728750.md?page=4)