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In another climate entirely, the Bedouin, a nomadic desert culture, are renowned for their feats of wayfinding and tracking. Donald Cole, a literary traveler, described having experienced these abilities at first hand during an adventure that involved crossing the Great Empty Quarter, a massive expanse of desert in the Middle East, with a group of Bedouin. He described an oft-repeated episode in which he was left in charge of steering a camel while the rest of his group rested. One of his companions would awaken, glance briefly at their surroundings, and then, with a sure and gentle hand, correct Cole’s course. In addition to a detailed mental inventory of landmark locations similar to those possessed by Inuit and Aboriginal navigators, Bedouin navigation relies upon extensive knowledge of the positions of the stars. Indeed, many stars were named originally by Middle Eastern observers keen to make sense of the night
sky. Even backyard astronomers will have noted the large number of stars identified by their Arabic names.
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If anything, the tracking skills of the Bedouin exceed their wayfinding abilities. In the past, Bedouin trackers were routinely attached to police departments in villages in Saudi Arabia. In his classic travel book
Arabian Sands
, adventurer Wilfred Thesiger describes an experience that illustrates nicely Bedouin tracking abilities:

In this example, much of the information was carried in the patterns of camel tracks. A good tracker can determine the origin
of the camel that made the tracks based on the size, shape, and depth of the tracks, the recency with which the camel fed and drank based on its stool, and the terrain over which it has traveled by the state of its hooves. This knowledge, combined with an intimate understanding of the surrounding terrain and an understanding of local politics, will allow a tracker to put together a detailed story from a few marks in the sand. In other circumstances, trackers have been known to build similar stories by examining human footprints. It is said that excellent trackers can identify a person based on tracks they have made wearing shoes—even if the shoes belong to another person!

Though the Arctic and the deserts of Arabia are vastly different places, the people who live there show similarities in navigational legerdemain. These similarities include heightened attention to subtle environmental details, a tendency to weave these details into the mythology and spiritual life of the culture using stories, and an ability to use inferences about the social life and local politics of other roving groups to judge position and movement, even when available information is sketchy.

For any animal, the holy grail of navigation is the possession of an accurate map. When animals have specialized sensory systems, such maps can be effectively written into the terrain in the form of gradient maps. It is almost as if an animal that can read gradients can measure its current coordinates, compare them with the coordinates of the goal location, and plot a course. Lacking such specializations, we humans can sometimes turn what sensory resources we possess to novel uses, as in the analysis of swell patterns and sastrugi to locate ourselves in space. When even these rudimentary forms of gradient mapping fail us, those whose
lives depend on an ability to maintain their sense of place at all times fall back on image, memory, and story to bind themselves to the landscape. Some evidence from the planet’s most accomplished human navigators suggests that, when pushed to the outer limits of their abilities, they may not even
know
how they are solving difficult wayfinding problems.

The illustrations of the wayfinding feats of the Puluwat, the Inuit, Bedouin trackers, and others as well suggest that when our ability to know where we are in a natural setting becomes a matter of life and death, we may have access to subtle signals in the environment much like those used by homing pigeons or turtles. Although finding such signals is certainly possible in some cases, it is a skill that has been almost completely lost to modern human beings. One cost of such a loss is the fact that, unless heavily supported by signs, guide ropes, trails, and roadways in our environment, we become lost. We have already seen some examples of such disorientation, and more are on the winding path ahead of us. But a deeper cost to such losses will also emerge as the story unfolds. Losing such wayfinding skills has helped propel a dangerous trend whereby our connections to our natural environment have become seriously severed. The breaking of such connections has consequences for everything from our attachment to nature to the kinds of houses and cities we live in and how they make us feel.

When solving everyday wayfinding problems, we often feel that we are consulting a kind of mental map. Everyone is familiar with this idea. When our favorite route home from work is blocked by road construction, we can quickly conjure an alternative route. When a hapless tourist stops us on the street to ask directions, our eyes may turn skyward for a moment as we whip up a bird’s-eye view, a cerebral streetscape that we can use as a tool to guide the
stranger to the area’s best breakfast or a chic gallery on the other side of town. It seems incontrovertible that minds possess maps, yet the shapes and forms of these maps in different types of animals, and especially in human beings, hold some surprises.

E
dward Tolman appeared on the scene in experimental psychology in 1918, when he took up a post at the University of California at Berkeley that he kept for his entire career.
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The experiments he conducted using rats served as the beginning point of a modern cottage industry in using rats to understand how minds deal with space. Tolman began his work at a time when psychology in North America lay heavily in the shadow of a radical theory that seemed to deny the existence of mind itself. John Watson, the father of the behaviorist movement, had published a manifesto in which he claimed that all human behavior could be accounted for as sets of learned associations between stimuli and responses. Like Pavlov’s famous dogs, we were doomed to go through life
responding more or less automatically to tolling bells and flashing lights, doing only what we had learned brought pleasure and avoided pain.

Though it seems incredibly brutal by today’s ethical standards in psychology, one of Watson’s most influential papers demonstrated that it was possible to train a young child to fear a white rat using simple conditioning methods. Watson showed the rat to the child while making a loud and startling sound immediately behind the child’s head. Not surprisingly, the child quickly learned to fear the rat, and Watson made the bold claim that all human phobias had a similar genesis.

Tolman, in contrast, was reluctant to cast away the idea that human heads contained things called minds, whose composition was much more interesting than the collection of associations envisioned by psychologists like Watson. Not only did Tolman take the then radical view that human beings had minds but he wondered whether his collection of rats might possess such things as well. To test his idea, he devised laboratory tasks to assess how much his rats knew about space.

Rats can be trained to do tasks with great ease using methods much like those you might employ to train a pet to perform a trick. In the beginning, they are given a simple task to perform (leave the start box) and are rewarded with food. As they become more accomplished, they are given greater challenges until, eventually, they can complete the whole task. To begin, Tolman placed his rats in a small, square box and trained them to cross a round chamber to enter a narrow alleyway. After a short run in the alleyway, the rats were required to make three right-angle turns into a final alleyway, at the end of which they would find a tasty food reward. The basic setup is illustrated in Figure 4.

Maps in Mouse Minds

Figure 4
: Tolman’s special orientation maze for rats

Once his rats had learned their way to the reward, Tolman made a critical change in the shape of the maze. First, he closed off the alleyway leading out of the central chamber partway along, and next he opened up a large number of alleyways radiating from the chamber in the shape of a starburst, as shown in Figure 5. The location of the reward remained unchanged.

Figure 5
: Variation on Tolman’s original maze

What will the rat do? According to a behaviorist, Tolman has broken the chain of simple behaviors that the rat has learned. When
it crosses the central chamber, enters the usual alleyway, and finds its way blocked, either it will bash into the closed door in frustration or it will wander aimlessly with no clear plan. But what Tollman observed was something much more interesting. Most of his rats chose the alleyway that led most directly to the reward—which, remember, hadn’t moved. What this clever response suggested was that Tolman’s rats possessed an understanding of the spatial relationship between the start box and the food reward that allowed them to follow a route they had never seen before. Indeed, before Tolman made the changes, the route simply did not exist. It was as if the rats had stored an overhead view of the scene in their minds that they could consult to find the best way to respond to an unexpected turn of events.
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For Tolman, the discovery of this “cognitive map” was a major victory in his attempt to demonstrate that simple associations between stimulus and response did not adequately explain all behavior—even the behavior of a laboratory rat. For our story, the main importance of this finding was its implication that rats must possess something like a map in their minds that they can consult to solve the problem.