Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks (4 page)

Not everyone thinks this way, of course. We all have our own filing systems. A history buff might mentally index things chronologically. (“Let’s see, that must have been the summer of ’84, because the Colts were already in Indianapolis but
The Cosby Show
hadn’t premiered yet . . . ”) The quiz buffs I met when I was playing
Jeopardy!
excel at trivia because of strong associative memories; they are naturally gifted at storing new facts, and retrieving them, by topic. Some new factoid about, say, peanuts will stick in their mental mesh because it gets
linked to clusters of thematically similar data, facts about circuses and Jimmy Carter and peanut butter, which in turn links to Annette Funicello and George Washington Carver, and so on.

But some of us organize the world by location.

“I wish I had a dollar for every time a student has walked into my office and said, ‘I’ve always loved geography, and I’ve always loved maps, ever since I was young,’” says Keith Clarke, the University of California, Santa Barbara, geography professor who writes the “Ask Dr. Map” column for the American Congress on Surveying and Mapping’s
Bulletin
magazine. “My theory is that these are people who reason spatially.”

Good spatial skills are easy enough to measure; every intelligence test you’ve ever taken probably had a series of headache-inducing rotation and cross-section problems designed to test your spatial cognition. People with these abilities are far more likely than their peers to wind up in math- or science-heavy careers, even when general intelligence is controlled for. They might be engineers, geologists, architects—even dentists, since dental exams ask lots of spatial questions. You don’t want your dentist asking you, in the middle of a root canal, “Wait, which molar was that again? I can’t quite . . . can you turn your head the same direction as mine?”

Machines and molars may come easier to people with keen spatial sense, but maps
really
come alive for them. They engage with the map in a way that others don’t. They can project their viewpoint right into its dots and lines and vividly imagine what the territory will look like ahead. Christopher Columbus’s biographer Bartolomé de Las Casas wrote that the explorer’s first Atlantic voyage was inspired by a nautical chart that the Italian mathematician Paolo Toscanelli had sent him. “
That map set
Columbus’s mind ablaze,” wrote Las Casas. “
He did not doubt
he should find those lands that were marked upon it.” Columbus was clearly one of those people who could see a map once and enter its world immediately, and it changed the course of history.

Not everyone has the knack, of course. If you’ve ever stood in front of a shopping-mall map for ten minutes, craning your head at various angles in a vain attempt to visualize whether Sbarro’s is to your left or
your right, you know it’s a frustrating experience.
^*
People, especially kids, who have that experience over and over aren’t going to want to read maps for fun. They’re going to avoid them at all costs. When cartophiles trace the Zambezi River with one finger on a map of Africa, they can imagine rafting the river’s serpentine jungle curves, the roar of Victoria Falls growing to deafening proportions in the spray ahead . . . but it’s just not the same if the river stubbornly remains just a squiggly blue line on the map for you.

But you needn’t despair every time you get lost in the mall. “There’s tremendous evidence that we can learn these skills,” says David Uttal, a professor of psychology and education at Northwestern University. “People’s potential is grossly underutilized.”

In study after study, lousy mappers and lousy spatial thinkers have “responded well and quickly to relatively simple interventions,” Uttal tells me. This is academicspeak for “practice 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 London cabbies who had passed “The Knowledge,” a licensing exam requiring encyclopedic 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 direction on the Métro so many times that I eventually had to take over the pathfinding, even though it was my first time in Paris but she used to live there. Her uncanny inaccuracy does have one useful application, though: if I’m lost while driving, I can always ask her which way she thinks we should go at an intersection and then turn in
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 colliding with the other streets at weird angles. (Scientists know that humans aren’t terribly good at
grokking diagonals
—we have neurons in our brains that are biased toward horizontal 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.

We drill relentlessly. “Mindy, you’re standing at the Air and Space Museum facing the National Gallery! Point to Capitol Hill! Correct. Which way is the Lincoln Memorial? Correct!”

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 direction 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. Generally he or she will have no idea what place—
one researcher noted
that a map of Chicago 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 ‘North Coast.’” They will have trouble understanding angle (an aerial view of a rectangular parking lot might be mistaken for a door) or representation (the states being different colors 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. Evolutionarily, 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 mapping—essentially, that all people, regardless of culture, were born mappers. But new research suggests that this isn’t really true—not everyone maps. Anthropologists are now beginning to understand that a wide variety of artifacts from all over the world—the
quipu
knots of the Incas, the
toa
marker pegs of South Australian Aborigines, the
lukasa
memory boards of the African Luba tribe—did have some geographical import, but they’re far from 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 charts of ocean swells that were used by Marshallese canoe navigators for centuries. It’s remarkable that these people could pilot from atoll to atoll on the open sea based solely on wave patterns, but it’s also interesting that we haven’t found a single map of the Pacific made by any of the
hundreds of other
island cultures. Some people, apparently, get by just fine without written maps.

“Mapmaking might be innate in the same way that reading is innate,” Uttal suggests. “And that’s a very complex thing: reading text is obviously
not
innate, but the language upon which it is based is.”

So which parts of cartography might actually be as instinctive as language and not (fairly recent) cultural innovations? Well, we all make mental maps, models of our surroundings that we store in our heads. Calling such a construct a “map” might be misleading, though, since our mental maps don’t have much in common with paper ones. They’re not static; they’re not one-to-one replicas of actual topography; they don’t rely on symbols and in some cases may not even involve landmarks. (You also can’t refold them badly and shove them back into your glove compartment.) When I ask my friend Nephi Thompson, who has the best sense of direction of anyone I know, to
describe how he sees his mental map in his mind’s eye, he says, “It’s like a first-person shooter game, an over-the-shoulder perspective. It’s not a bird’s-eye view.”

A Micronesian road map: the tiny seashells are islands and the bamboo strands currents

Humans have been making mental maps millions of years longer than they’ve been making written ones, of course. The very first time some hairy hominid ever decided to alter his hunting route to avoid an obstacle or a predator, he was drawing a mental map. In fact, when the term “
cognitive map
” was first coined in 1940, it wasn’t used to refer to humans at all but to the surprising maze-solving abilities of lab rats.

It’s well known that
animals can perform
navigational feats that make even the canniest human trackers look, in comparison, like blindfolded four-year-olds swinging cluelessly at a birthday party piñata. Baby loggerhead sea turtles, immediately after hatching in
Florida, embark straightaway on an eight-thousand-mile circuit of the North Atlantic, getting as far as the African coast before returning home a decade later. They do it alone, they start when they’re less than two inches long, and they don’t get lost. Scientists have trans-located black bears hundreds of miles from their home in the forests of Minnesota and seen the majority quickly return. In 1953, a British ornithologist named R. M. Lockley heard that a friend, the noted American clarinetist Rosario Mazzeo, was flying home to Boston the following day. Lockley seized the opportunity to give Mazzeo two Manx shearwaters, seabirds whose homing abilities he had been studying. “In the evening, I enplaned for America with the birds under my seat,” Mazzeo later wrote his friend. “Only one survived the flight.” (Note to self: Don’t let a woodwind player watch my pets next time I’m out of town.) He released the surviving bird from the east end of Boston’s Logan International Airport and watched as it flew straight out to sea. Less than two weeks later, the bird reappeared in its British burrow. The shocked scientist, who hadn’t heard from Mazzeo since his departure, assumed that he’d been forced to release the bird somewhere in Britain, but that very day his letter arrived from the United States, describing the shearwater’s brief Boston visit. The bird had made it back home ahead of the mail, traversing 3,200 miles in just twelve and a half days.