Getting Lost

I’m one of those people who always gets lost. I have no sense of direction. Can’t even read a map. And don’t ask me which way is north, south, east or west. I dunno. Is this because I’m a woman? Let’s ask Google, shall we?

These links describe the area of the brain that’s involved:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2879485/So-s-no-sense-direction-Scans-reveal-brain-signals-determine-good-navigating.html

http://www.medicaldaily.com/sense-direction-where-am-i-get-lost-378977

Many studies have found that, on average, men outpace women at spatial processing — organizing and reshaping visual information in the mind to solve problems. That ability appears to lead to slightly better navigation skills.

As a general rule, though, supposedly innate differences between men and women, especially those attributed to our brains, tend to turn out to be the result of faulty logic. A 2012 review of the subject found that scientists too often rely on the convenient narrative of natural selection to explain away the spatial gap…

Rather than our biology, one of the biggest reasons for our flailing navigational skills may be the maps we use. As external GPS units have become ubiquitous in our cars, smartphones, and even glasses, they’ve subsequently eased our reliance on the internal maps we carry around inside our heads. A 2010 study by McGill University researchers found that older adults who reported regularly using GPS to navigate had less activity and less grey matter in their hippocampus compared to those who didn’t; they also performed slightly worse on a cognition test. As a corollary, a 2008 study found the hippocampuses of London taxi drivers were on average larger than those of the general population…

Now, for the funny side of always getting lost:

https://www.buzzfeed.com/laraparker/things-only-people-who-have-no-sense-of-direction-will-un?utm_term=.rbZxGOOYM#.ssa3WeeEo

9. You get confused when people go through mazes for fun because you’re like… this isn’t fun, this is my life.

14. You have 100%, most definitely driven the wrong way down a one-way street.

15. You are constantly in awe of people who know their way around, because it feels like a superpower to you.

I hate getting lost. I’ve never gotten used to it. It makes me all anxious and hyper. Like I’m a traffic accident waiting to happen. I try to laugh about it, but it’s really not funny to me. Did you know that if you laugh for 15 minutes a day, you can burn up to 40 calories? Call that an incentive to laugh at yourself. 🙂

13 thoughts on “Getting Lost”

  1. I always joke and say “I can’t even find my way out of my own driveway!” When my GPS tells me to head North…I scream at it and say “how the fuck am I supposed to know which direction is North?”
    I actually had to call my oldest daughter once to ask her which way I would turn out of my driveway if I was headed to the landfill. I told her she could make fun of me later….and she did….to her entire crew. She said “this is the woman who knew every back road and alleyway in Seminole County when she was taking us to soccer practice and she can’t find her way out of her own driveway!”
    My middle daughter is just as bad. She called me crying one day because she hadn’t been able to find the hospital without having to turn around several times. (Luckily the patient in the back of the ambulance was stable.)
    I told her to do what I did when I was driving one. “If it’s the morning and you are driving straight into the sun, you know you’re headed East because the sun always rises in the East. If it’s afternoon…same thing, except you’ll be headed West because the sun always sets in the West.
    She called me later and said that had actually helped her a lot.
    I don’t know how I made it anywhere before I got my GPS. I guess my grey matter is slowly going away….that’s okay. I didn’t have all the much before. LOL.

    Liked by 1 person

    • What if it’s the morning and you’re not driving straight into the sun? How do I know if I’m looking directly at the sun? I could be at an angle. What if it’s dusk and you’re heading away from the sun? No, forget it, don’t bother. I have very little spacial acuity. It was a hindrance when I was a gymnast — when you’re twisting upside down, you need to have some idea of where you are in space. I suppose it’s part of the reason I like my feet on solid ground. Those who live in California don’t care that much about solid ground. 🙂

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  2. #14 (Driving the wrong direction down a one-way street) reminds me of the old joke about the motorist who was pulled over for that very infraction: “But officer, I was only going one way.” (OK, I didn’t say it was a good joke, just an old one.) 🙂

    Liked by 1 person

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