Wwe’ve lost direction and our brains are shrinking – at least, our hippocampi are. These seahorse-shaped parts of the brain measure about 5cm, sit just above both ears and power our spatial awareness and orientation. London taxi drivers, famous for taking the Knowledge, a test that involves memorizing the central streets of the capital, have full-sized hippocampi. But in 2011, neuroscientists at University College London discovered that the cabbies’ hippocampi shrank significantly after retirement.
The development of the hippocampus can also be hindered in childhood. Children living in urban environments rarely see the sun rise or set and cannot tell the difference between east and west. When I volunteered at my local school to teach children about directions, I found that they struggled to tell north from south and east from west – although they could if they were allowed to use their phones.
Since 2005, when Google Maps was launched claiming it would help users get from A to B and then, three years later, when the iPhone 3G was released with “live” location, the online tech giants declared that today’s digital native children the first generation that would not know what it means to be lost. But is this a good thing? Their horizons and orientation, like their hippocampi, shrink with the collusion of online providers. In four generations children roamed from up to six miles from home to an average of just 300 metres. Even before Covid, surveys have found that three-quarters of children spend less time outside than inmates. Many parents know that the subsequent 50% increase in agoraphobia has profoundly affected children’s mental and physical health. But it also floats biophobiaan avoidance, even fear, of the natural world. When we approach nature, fear is the result an indifference, even hostility, to environmental conservation.
Wherever children travel, they likely follow the blue dot on their phone screen, showing them the way without reference to the world around them. Cards has never been more accessible in the palm of our hands on our phones, but it is as much a tyranny as a liberation. Our phones are now mapping us, harvesting our online likes and dislikes.
Current studies indicate a connection between these so-called developmental topographical disorientation and mental health, as online experiences lead to a digitally poisoned awareness of space and place. We are becoming, quite literally, disoriented in a digital world where we have given up on tools that enhance our cognitive abilities, such as paper maps and magnetic compasses that have enabled us to navigate and orient ourselves in tandem with the physical world. We have retreated from using the spatial skills that have sustained us for millennia. No wonder our sense of being lost is as existential as it is directional.
To be disoriented means to be “lost to the east”: the word comes from Latin for the sun rising in the east. In ancient history, most societies were oriented with east as their main direction, the source of light, heat and life-giving sun. West, where the sun sets, came next. North and south then followed, as people tracked them by the position of the sun at noon, and visual astronomical observation of Polaris, the North Star. Early polytheistic societies worshiped the sun rising in the east, a tradition inherited from monotheistic Judeo-Christian faith that placed east at the top of their maps as the location of the beginning of Creation and the place of resurrection. In the Old Testament, creation begins in the garden of Eden in the east. The Medieval Mappa Mundi in Hereford Cathedral has east at the top, showing Adam and Eve in Eden, and west at the bottom. It was an orientation that defined European Christianity for more than 1,000 years.
In contrast, early Islamic maps put south at the top, because the people who first converted to the faith lived directly north of Mecca. The easiest way to understand their sacred direction was to orient their maps so that Mecca was “up”. We still talk about going north and down south in the UK, an old hangover from understanding the four points of the compass according to our bodies: up and down, front and back, or left and right. South does just as well as the cardinal direction, as it was for classical Chinese science, which had its magnetic compasses pointing south, not north. They are called luojing“the thing that points south”. Australians know this: in 1979 Stuart McArthur published his Universal Corrective Map of the World, oriented south with Australia at the top.
The compass appeared on European maritime charts in the 13th century, allowing navigators to orient themselves on a north-south axis. But it took another 400 years for these maps to agree to place north at the top, which has always been an unfavorable direction in most societies as a place of cold and darkness. It was crowned as a cardinal direction by the Flemish mapmaker Gerardus Mercator. But Mercator was more interested in enabling pilots to accurately navigate east to west. On his world map (1569), distortion was minimized on either side of the equator, which was ideal for European maritime empires sailing east to west via Cape Horn and the Cape of Good Hope. The north and south poles were projected to infinity, as everyone suspected that they were ice-bound and traveling there seemed pointless.
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So the north won by accident, because no one wanted to go there. As Europe’s imperial mapmakers cemented north as the cardinal direction, other traditions prioritizing different directions were dismissed and erased. The west has succeeded in putting the north on top at the expense of places it has dismissed and labeled as “southern” (America and Africa), or as part of the “Middle East”. When Nasa first saw the image of Earth photographed by the Apollo 17 astronauts on December 7, 1972, they rotated the original photo 180 degrees to show north at the top rather than south. The famous “blue marble” photoone of the most reproduced images in human history, is actually upside down.
Historically, no societies have placed west at the top of world maps because of its associations with sunset and death. But as a political idea, the west has ascended north after centuries of imperial dominance. But will it stay there as India and China reorient our global economy and possibly turn it 180 degrees? Could the use of compasses disappear completely – and with it the cardinal directions?
In my lifetime we have gone from looking up, aspiring to a shared world village inspired by Nasa’s blue marble photo, to looking down, glued to the blue dot on our phones as our hippopotamus shrinks and many of us withdraw from nature. This is probably not the end of civilization. After all, maps and compasses are cognitive artifacts, like the Internet, and we’ve been using them for millennia. But for our sense of well-being, and that of the world that sustains us, we can take steps to not only appreciate nature, but understand how we are a part of it, and recognize that it will always be bigger than us. , in a positive, not phobic way. Many share basic principles of psychotherapy: grounding, breathing, being “in the moment”, imagining ourselves from outside or “above” our bodies. It seems that more than ever we need to explain who we are by understanding where we are. Here are some tips on how to do it.
Take your level. Use a compass (even on your phone!) to work out the four cardinal directions. Time and space are interrelated, so reconsider your attitude to clock time by observing the movement of the sun east to west from sunrise to sunset. As the sun sets, identify north by finding Polaris. We are just a speck in the universe: accept it.
Use a paper map. It’s a declining art, but using paper maps will make you more aware of your surroundings. An archaic English term for map is a plot, just like a story: turn your route into an adventure.
Feel the wind. Thousands of years before the invention of the compass, we understood and identified the four cardinal directions according to winds. Identify the wind’s direction according to your body: is it behind or in front of you? Look up, turn around. Recognize its power. It is a simple grounding exercise that reorients us according to the elements.
Astray. Take a trip, turn off your phone and get lost on purpose. It’s a little scary, but it will heighten your senses and sharpen your appreciation for the world around you. If that’s too scary, read Rebecca Solnit’s A field guide to getting lostbecause as Solnit suggests, who knows what you might find if you get lost on purpose?
Four Points of the Compass: The Unexpected History of Direction by Jerry Brotton is published by Penguin for £20, or buy a copy for £17 from guardianbookshop.com. Jerry is also the host of the podcast what is your card
