sense of direction

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sense of direction

Postby everything on Sat Jun 16, 2018 2:29 pm

what is it? why do some people have it? and some people are so bad with it?

After wandering around an unfamiliar part of town, can you sense which direction to travel to get back to the subway or your car? If so, you can thank your entorhinal cortex, a brain area recently identified as being responsible for our sense of direction. Variation in the signals in this area might even explain why some people are better navigators than others.

The new work adds to a growing understanding of how our brain knows where we are. Groundbreaking discoveries in this field won last year's Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for John O'Keefe, a neuroscientist at University College London, who discovered “place cells” in the hippocampus, a brain region most associated with memory. These cells activate when we move into a specific location, so that groups of them form a map of the environment.


https://www.scientificamerican.com/arti ... direction/
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Re: sense of direction

Postby KEND on Tue Jun 26, 2018 11:06 am

I have found that I have to consciously memorize landmarks to drive through an area a second time, I don't appear to have an 'intuitive grasp of direction.
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Re: sense of direction

Postby Trip on Tue Jun 26, 2018 8:20 pm

everything wrote:what is it? why do some people have it? and some people are so bad with it?


The lingual scientist Lera Boroditsky has a theory on this subject.
She studied an Aboriginal community called Pormpuraaw.

it turns out humans can stay oriented really, really well, provided that their language and culture requires them to keep track of this information.


what's cool about languages, like the languages spoken in Pormpuraaw, is that they don't use words like left and right, and instead, everything is placed in cardinal directions like north, south, east and west. So the way you say hi, is to say, which way are you heading? And the answer should be, north, northeast in the far distance; how about you?


So you might say, there's an ant on your northwest leg.



https://youtu.be/05iRv_AfKLQ?t=29m45s

Lera speaks for about the Pormpuraaw at the - 29:45 mark.

She also talks about here at the 4:30-ish mark
https://www.npr.org/templates/transcrip ... =581657754

and in a Ted Talk here the 2:20-ish mark

https://youtu.be/RKK7wGAYP6k?t=2m20s
Last edited by Trip on Tue Jun 26, 2018 10:27 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: sense of direction

Postby Trick on Tue Jun 26, 2018 9:01 pm

Subconsciously memorizing landmarks or areas/roads or just smaller things along the way, smells might also be included.
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Re: sense of direction

Postby Bao on Wed Jun 27, 2018 12:31 am

Well, many animals as well as earlier humans had a in-built "compass" in their noses, so to feel the directions. I don't know if humans have any sort of reminiscence of this, but there are quite a few interesting research about this subject.
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Re: sense of direction

Postby Trick on Wed Jun 27, 2018 3:22 am

Since childhood I remember being able to easily locate myself in bigger areas(towns/parts of a city)that I just spent some time and walked around in for a day. Just take a glance at a city map I can easily take myself by foot from the point where I am to the point I’ll going to......I think most people can do like this, but maybe many get distracted by the city’s hustle and bustle and not focus the right way.....Or maybe I do have an compass in my big nose :)
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Re: sense of direction

Postby wiesiek on Thu Jun 28, 2018 5:20 am

compass is in the brain , even biggest nose can`t handle it, :)
for example:
pigeons has ferrofluid in the small area of their brain, its works like classical humans constructed compass ,
but brain has to read the data and interpret it.
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