I generally have no clue. If I need to use a highway, I can often picture a map in my head to determine whether I should get on, say, the 101 West or East, but that’s about it. I would have to stop and look at the sun under other circumstances and vastly prefer left/right.
If the sun is rising or setting, I’ll know. Midday or night, as far as I’m concerned, north could be anywhere. I do know where the cardinal directions are relative to each other - so if I were told “you’re facing SSW, head NW,” I could absolutely do that. But I never know where I’m facing in the first place. Along the same lines, I’m quite good with maps. If you give me a map, I can figure out where I am, figure out where I want to go, and get there. My mother, OTOH, always knows her cardinal directions and is pretty good at knowing where she is relative to a place she’s already been. She cannot navigate by map at all.
Nope, not a major highway like 93, 95, or even 1 or 16. It does cross some state lines, but it’s still a 45-50 mph deal without big on or off ramps.
I’m not sure how to vote. I know I don’t have an innate sense of direction, and I did learn in scouts how to orient myself based on the time of day and stuff like that. But I would still have found directions that use the cardinals to be pretty much useless. I don’t have time while driving to orient myself.
I could with extra mental effort keep track if roads were straight and only made ninety degree turns, but that’s not the case around here. I can only keep track of directions based on which road I’m on. It makes far more sense to me for maps to just tell me which direction to turn on which road.
I guess I could go with landmarks, but those are so unreliable. There just aren’t enough landmarks for every street. Though I do like directions that mention how many traffic lights to go through. Or, at least, I would if I could trust them not to be wrong. A lot of people are bad at that.
I have a good inate sense of direction, if I know where I am, I can get wherever I need to go. However, I have to think for a second to know the cardinal direction or for that matter left or right. My wife however, you turn her around and she is lost. When I’m drunk and my wife is my DD, I have to give her directions, and I give them in terms of “turn my way”(for right) or “turn your way” (for left) since she is in the driver seat, and I’m in passenger seat.
Being on the Front Range of Colorado, everyone uses cardinal directions. I once had a job that took me to Utah a couple of time a month - that really messed me up. East is towards the mountains?
I need to orient myself, but that’s pretty easy. Driving locally it’s pretty well ingrained in me. On the highway it’s flatly obvious, well it is to me anyway, I can’t imagine getting on a highway that I’ve never seen on a map. So it’s usually in a big city when I don’t know which way I’m going already. Even then you’d have to have some pretty weird city roads for me to lose track and have to re-orient (I’m looking at you Boston).
I am pretty good at knowing my N S E W directionality but I have a ton of practice. I have driven almost the entire Interstate Highway system and know it well. Sometimes a city the is oriented oddly or opposite of the last one ( one North South, next East West) will throw me off for a bit but I can usually get it quickly. OTOH my hometown Houston can throw me for a loop. It is sorta on a N S axis but some streets drift and downtown is oriented towards the NNE. Giving directions here can be a chore.
Capt
I generally know my directions with a bit of orientation. I’m better at following where I am when I’m the driver than when I’m a passenger, though.
My husband is very good with directions - I think I’ve seen him disoriented once in 13 years. My mom is the opposite - she never, ever knows where she is direction-wise or how to get anywhere else.
I’m okay anywhere I can see the mountains or the ocean, providing I know which mountains or ocean I’m looking at.
I’ve got the innate ability. I like to think it’s because I grew up in a house that was a stone’s throw from a major freeway - All sound and motion in my life traveled north, 24/7.
I don’t know why but whenever I think of east or west I think of “towards the Atlantic” or “towards the Pacific” even if I am just thinking about which way to turn out of my driveway (which faces south). North is “towards the lake [Erie]” and south is either “towards Akron” or “past Grandpa’s” (south of Akron).
I was just thinking about asking this question.
I’m like your baby sister. I can get all spun around and instantly tell the direction I’m facing even indoors. It’s kinda like my X Power is sensing the magnetic field.
By and large I’m very good with orientation. I couldn’t tell you which way was north if you blindfolded me and drove me to a strange city during a cloudy night, but if I got somewhere myself, I’d have a pretty good idea of directions. Whenever I check into a hotel one of the first things I usually do is look at an area map which is usually provided somewhere in the room and that helps a lot.
Many years ago before we moved to where we now live, I’d visited here coming by plane. I oriented myself with a hotel room map showing the part of the city I was in. A couple of years later I drove into the city for the first time and was almost immediately lost trying to get to this place I “knew” was east of where I was. This was incredibly unusual and therefore frustrating to me. It seems the partial city map I’d looked at years earlier had east at the top and I’d never noticed that.
My wife and baby sister are absolutely miserable at this. Even when they’re navigating with a map, they can’t tell me right turn or left turn. It’s not that they can’t read maps, but they do not instantly know right from left. They have to tell me a cardinal direction or “turn my way” or “your way.” Both of them are quite ambidextrous. I believe they were natural lefties who were trained to use their right hands, and that this has “confused” their natural sense of direction.
My antennae were broken off at birth, or so says my BF. But it’s relatively easy in Phoenix. South Mountain is south, North Mountain is north, the Superstitions are East, and the White Tanks are West. Look up, and figure it out, at least I can.
But good lord, please don’t confuse me with lefts and rights. And it’s always hysterical to give or get directions when the other person uses lefts and rights.
I’m a “conscious orienter”, like Skald. I’m a fairly visual learner, and the places I go frequently, I pretty much have the map in my head, north up, south down. Hate “girly” directions (landmarks) - tell me the points of the compass! I do find it fairly easy to get “turned around” going around a maze of unfamiliar streets though. My orienting is not really built in to me, it’s a conscious process.
My husband, OTOH, is a freakishly good internal orienter. Even at night, in unfamiliar territory, he always knows which way north is. I have no idea how - there’s just a little compass in his head.
There’s a downside to that though. When we were travelling in the UK his direction sense completely deserted him … because everything was turned around! The sun was in the wrong place! The only way he could navigate in Britain was “ok, which way feels right for heading north? Now go the OTHER way.”
I remember talking to a taxi driver years ago and he told me that it is amazing how many people have no idea about direction, including left and right. He told me that earlier that evening a guy had told him, “turn right at the bottom of the street,” and when he commenced turning right the guy grabbed the wheel to try to turn left.
If I know the place/city fairly well I will know if we need to head North, or are heading North, stuff like that.
I wouldn’t inherently know if I didn’t know where I was, I have to check the sun. Only I wouldn’t do that just to know that I’m heading North. It’s fairly useless information for trying to find your way through a town. It only works if your directions to where you were going have some relevance to compass points, which they might not. And usually you get to fairly close to the place, but then you still need to actually find it. “North” isn’t going to help.
I’m terrible at left and right, but in the car my SO, my papa and my BIL will use port and starboard for me. That really helps, I find that much easier. I think left and right just seem really unstable to me. Turn around and it changes! Everyone has their own left and right! How can that have any real meaning? Port and starboard make more sense in a car. I don’t mind if people just talk to me like I’m stupid while driving, saying things like “towards me”, at least that’s concrete. Let them think it’s me. I know they’re just crazy to think that left and right make any sense at all. 
When I lie down to sleep, I ‘know’ which way is north. Now that may sound kind of obvious, but I sleep other places than just in my bed upstairs in the Wizard’s Lair. I can tell if my feet are pointing East or if the bed is (perversely) set at some unnatural angle off of the cardinal directions. This comes in handy at times. So I am similar to Skald’s younger sister in that I can orient myself naturally. This ability is diminished by fatigue and inebriation.
Research into how this actually works is ongoing.
Here is a scholarly paper produced by the giant brains at Wikipedia: Magnetoreception - Wikipedia
In Tucson, I can tell if I orient myself in relation to the University campus (namely: what direction am I from the computer science building?), from there I can get my bearings. Even that said , when I got in an accident and was asked whether it was on the North or South side of the intersection, and which cardinal direction each of us was travelling, I couldn’t figure it out under pressure. I’m pretty hopeless in general, though I’m sure if I needed to I could divine it in the early morning/late afternoon without too much difficulty.
I have no sense of direction, but I do understand cities and routes I drive in terms of compass points, usually from studying a map. (My wife is one of many who do not cope with compass points, despite that the Thai words for West and East mean sunset and sunrise. :dubious: )
Since so many turns are 90-degrees, I often just count to four when running an errand: Left, Left, Left, Right and I’m back on the main road heading the opposite way. This caused great confusion for me when I tried to learn my way around the nearest big city: a key route enclosing the town’s center is a pentagon, not a rectangle! (Until recently good maps were hard to find in Thailand.)