BEARING - Maphead - page 14

We drill relentlessly. “Mindy, you're standing at the Air and Space Museum facing the
NationalGallery!PointtoCapitolHill!Correct.WhichwayistheLincolnMemorial?Cor-
rect!”
Rocky music plays. We jump rope, shadowbox with sides of beef.
This little exercise doesn't take us two weeks; we spend maybe an hour on it. But David
Uttal turns out to be right. In D.C., a well-prepared Mindy successfully navigates me and
the kids to the White House, the Washington Monument, and many, many Smithsonian
food courts. Once, after coming out of the Metro at Federal Triangle, I am disoriented and,
after a moment's hesitation, march us in the wrong direction. Mindy stops and closes her
eyes tightly like a Jedi using the Force. “Aren't the National Archives this way?” she asks,
pointing behind us. I don't believe her, but when we get to the corner I see my mistake.
“Aha, I was right!” she gloats, newly empowered. “It makes me think my sense of dir-
ection isn't actually all that bad. If I cared enough to actually work on it a little.” I imagine
that, like the Grinch's heart, her hippocampus has grown three sizes this day.
Show a map to a three-year-old, and what will the child say? Even without any specific
training, there will probably be a basic understanding that the map represents a place. Gen-
erally he or she will have no idea what place— one researcher noted that a map of Ch-
icago was often mistaken for Africa, while a map of her young subjects' home state of
Pennsylvania was charmingly identified by one as depicting “California, Canada, and the
'NorthCoast.'”Theywillhavetroubleunderstandingangle(anaerialviewofarectangular
parking lot might be mistaken for a door) or representation (the states being different col-
ors won't make much sense to them) or scale (“That line can't be a road! My car wouldn't
fit on that!”). But they'll understand that it's a kind of picture of a place, and that you can
use it to get around. Any younger than three, and children can't even grasp the idea that a
piece of paper can stand for an area. If you show toddlers a two-dimensional object like a
shadow or a photo, they'll reach for it as if it were real and rounded. This makes sense, I
guess—2-D representations like maps and photos are fairly recent innovations. Evolution-
arily, our instincts haven't caught up yet.
The fact that very young children can understand maps with no training led scientists,
for many years, to conclude that there was something innate about the process of map-
ping—essentially, that all people, regardless of culture, were born mappers. But new re-
searchsuggeststhatthisisn'treallytrue—noteveryonemaps.Anthropologistsarenowbe-
ginning to understand that a wide variety of artifacts from all over the world—the quipu
knotsoftheIncas,the toa markerpegsofSouthAustralian Aborigines,the lukasa memory
boardsoftheAfricanLubatribe—didhavesomegeographical import,butthey'refarfrom
anything we'd call maps. One favorite curiosity of map lovers is the rebbelib, or stick
chart, of the Marshall Islanders. These lattices of coconut fronds and seashells look like
something the Professor might use to map Gilligan's Island, but they're actually detailed