Me too. I can read a map, and I handle math and science just fine; I have an engineering degree. But I can get lost in the mall. With a map I can find my way. Without one, I’m completely lost, with no instinct for east or west or even which direction I came from.
Female. I read maps, with north pointed in any old direction. Don’t give me landmarks, please. I will never find my way and probably crash the car looking for the flower shop on the left just after the gas station on the right. For some reason I can spot itty bitty street signs with no problem, but have a devil of a time seeing a big box Walmart or other landmark.
I use cardinal directions. In fact, if I land in a city on a cloudy day and don’t know where north is, I get completely disoriented and can’t navigate at all. Once oriented, however, I have a very good sense of direction, even after making bunches of turns, etc.
Female. Make maps and study the relationships between events at various levels of defined space. Using math. For a living.
(neener neener)
And yes, it helps if I turn the map so that it points the way I’m going - but I can find my way back without a map 95% of the time.
We do what we do - we know what we know. Why, especially here, does it have to be about gender?
It isn’t any dumber to turn a map to read it than it is to hold it upright.
However, if you HAVE to turn a map to read it then YOUR map-abilities are inferior to MY map-abilities, because I can do both.
And likewise if you have to hold a map with North UP.
Bow down.
Reading a map and understanding what is says is two different things.
Getting the necessary information is the name of the game.
If you like to have or give directions with ‘left’ here and ‘right’ there, the problem is that if any one step breaks down, the information left becomes useless. You must get back and restart somehow assuming the directions are good to start with. Adding information, names, cardinal direction, vectors, distances, travel times, landmarks etc. all give the user a better chance of getting it right.
As user, if you can only receive information in one format, or style and that is not possible, then ‘Huston knows you have a problem’.
So, the person who can use all the information and from any sorce or orientation, while facing or traveling in any direction is the best equipped to lead the parade.
As long as everything is cool, all is good. When the gremlins get in the act, then it can be a problem.
Just as it is good to know all the different ways to get an ‘enter’ command done on a keyboard / mouse combination so that with failing technology, you can still function is better than a ‘one trick pony’.
On the ground, it is bad enough, but in the air or on the sea, a “one trick pony” does not last long. Practice, Practice, Practice …
Someday you will be glad…
YMMV
To the OP, people who can not do maps well seldom make good pilots, or sailors…
To stereotype it, I have found that male pilots and sailors can be anywhere between good and bad. (average is the norm) Female sailors and pilots tend to be either very good, or very bad. Few are average…
I’m an old pilot because I quit being a bold pilot in time to become an old pilot.
I really wonder if that isn’t a large part of it. I remember my brother telling me about how his friend disappeared for a summer, and reappeared being able to play guitar. I know Eddie Van Halen said that people thought he had this glamorous childhood, but there were a lot of nights alone playing to records, or he would never have gotten that good.
I think the number of girls who are willing to blow off their friends to geek out on something to such an extent is just lower.
Well… not really, but I may be a little weird. Except for one-way streets or mega-super-stores, I don’t get lost. I’ve tried (wanted to check out my new GPS) and can’t do it.
Living in the shadows of the Rocky Mountains, I do directions by NESW rather than left-right most of the time (and many streets around here are laid out NS or EW) and tend to think that way as well. It might be different in those flatland states, but it takes a special type of person to live here and not know which way is west.