BEARING - Maphead - page 13

But you needn't despair every time you get lost in the mall. “There's tremendous evid-
ence that we can learn these skills,” says David Uttal, a professor of psychology and edu-
cation at Northwestern University. “People's potential is grossly underutilized.”
In study after study, lousy mappers and lousy spatial thinkers have “responded well and
quicklytorelatively simpleinterventions,” Uttaltellsme.Thisisacademicspeak for“prac-
tice makes perfect.” Test the baseline spatial cognition of a group of college freshmen and
then repeat the test after they've taken a short introductory course in engineering graphics.
Their scores will improve markedly. A famous 2000 study showed that the brains of Lon-
don cabbies who had passed “The Knowledge,” a licensing exam requiring encycloped-
ic expertise of the city's streets, had a markedly larger hippocampus than those of normal
Londoners. (The hippocampus, a sea horse-shaped structure in the brain's temporal lobe,
is the center of navigational function.) In fact, the cabbies' hippocampi continued to grow
the longer they spent on the job. Apparently size matters.
“When people say they can't read maps, I just think they have a preference not to,” says
Uttal. “There are a lot of things I can't do right now, but I could if you gave me two weeks
to study them.”
I decide to test Uttal's two-week dictum on my wife, Mindy. Mindy, I hasten to add, is
a wonderful woman in every respect. Songbirds fly in through our bedroom window every
morning to help her dress, and her woodland friends whistle cheerfully along with her as
she makes breakfast. But—how do I put this?—a good sense of direction is not foremost
among her many outstanding qualities. On a recent trip to Paris, she took us the wrong dir-
ection on the Métro so many times that I eventually had to take over the pathfinding, even
thoughitwasmyfirsttimeinParisbutsheusedtolivethere.Heruncannyinaccuracydoes
have one useful application, though: if I'm lost while driving, I can always ask her which
wayshethinksweshouldgoatanintersectionandthenturnin the exact opposite direction .
But we have a family trip planned to visit some friends in Washington, D.C., and I'm
determined to give Mindy a second chance. So I haul out a road atlas one Friday night
(weekends can get pretty wild in the Jennings house!) and we study the lay of the land.
Greater D.C. is a bit of a navigational nightmare, with those diagonal state-named avenues
collidingwiththeotherstreetsatweirdangles.(Scientistsknowthathumansaren'tterribly
good at grokking diagonals —we have neurons in our brains that are biased toward hori-
zontal and vertical arrangements, and they vastly outnumber the diagonal ones. * ) But we
plan on spending plenty of our trip down by the National Mall, which is a perfect test case:
small, dense, orderly, with notable landmarks in every cardinal direction. † On the map, we
take careful note of where the monuments are, where the Metro stops are, how the lettered
and numbered streets are ordered.