Sandra Parshall
I have to tell you about this.
Recently I blogged about my utter lack of a sense of direction and my tendency to get lost even in my own neighborhood. I mentioned studies showing most women navigate well only by using landmarks and context, while men use compass points and mental maps. Whether this is a learned, psychological difference between the sexes or an inborn difference couldn’t be determined by those behavioral studies. Some scientists, of course, have been happy to blame it all on hormones.
Since writing that blog, I have done a little detective work and uncovered information – okay, so I read it in the Washington Post last week – about neurological differences between men and women that affect their ability to find their way around.
It’s not our hormones. It’s our ears.
Luc Tremblay, researcher and assistant professor of physical education and health at the University of Toronto, explains it this way: The inner ear contains three semicircular canals that help track the body’s motion, speed, and direction. Those canals tend to be larger in men’s ears than in women’s, so men get stronger internal cues telling them where on earth they are. Women’s dainty little inner ear canals aren’t quite up to the job, so we depend more on external cues such as that church we just passed and the pet store up ahead.
Tremblay thinks women can correct errors more quickly than men, because they’re constantly cross-checking external information with internal cues. I’ll confess I don’t know what he’s talking about. When I’m lost, the only cross-checking I do is when I pull into a gas station and blurt, “Can you tell me where the heck I am?” If I’m getting internal cues from my ears or anywhere else, I am deaf to them.
Now that imaging devices are so plentiful, a lot of research can be done on the brain without cracking open the skull and taking a look, and some of that research deals with navigational skill. In 2005, Norwegian scientists discovered the brain’s grid cells, which help us create mental maps of the world around us. We face north and a certain cluster of neurons fires in the hippocampus, the brain’s memory center. Face south, east or west and different clusters fire. In June last year, according to the Post article, scientists at Washington University discovered we also have neurons – charmingly named the Purkinje cells – that interact with the inner ear canal “to help us adjust our positioning for gravity.”
Our bodies usually take care of all this without our conscious awareness, but the process doesn’t always work. Put a human in total darkness and he quickly becomes disoriented. Put a pilot in a heavy fog bank with zero visibility and he may end up crashing the plane. The firing of the correct neurons seems to depend on what the person believes. If he’s looking north but is sure he’s looking south, the neurons for south will fire. This may explain why some men can drive quite a distance in the wrong direction, convinced they’re going the right way, before they see their mistake.
The experts on such matters assure us that men and women, through conscious self-training, can develop the best navigational skills of the opposite sex, to add to their own. Women can teach ourselves to determine direction by watching the position of the sun in the daytime and the North Star at night. Men can learn to make note of landmarks. And we can all keep an eye out for the nearest service station so we can pull in and ask for directions.
Compass photo by Scott Rothstein
Sandra Parshall
When I tell people that I can get lost in my own neighborhood, they laugh because they think I’m joking.
I’m not.
I have what is quite possibly the world’s worst sense of direction. What dyslexics suffer through with words on a page is similar to what I endure when trying to find my way through the physical world. When I’m in my own house or yard, I know which way is which – early morning sun hits the front of the house, so that must be east; the back of the house receives late-day sun, so that must be west; our screened porch gets sun for most of the day, so that’s south; and the side where nothing but hostas will grow in the yard – I’m willing to bet that’s north.
When I leave my own property, though, all bets are off. I become disoriented and I’m likely to get lost if I deviate from certain often-traveled routes.
If you’re giving me directions, please don’t say, “Drive southwest for 1.2 miles, then turn east.” This is gibberish to me. Instead, paint a three-dimensional picture. Tell me what businesses, schools, churches I’ll pass on the way. Describe what’s on the corner where I’m supposed to turn. And please tell me whether to take a left or a right.
While my sense of direction is especially bad, I believe most women see the world as a collection of landmarks and topographical features. Have you ever called a doctor’s office or a business and asked directions from the woman who answered the phone? She undoubtedly gave you directions that made sense – “Turn right at the Olive Garden restaurant” or “Go past the building with the arch that looks like a toilet bowl and take the first left” or “Drive past Fresh Fields and turn right at the Wachovia Bank.” In the wilderness, a woman might memorize her route not by tracking it on a mental compass but by noting the big oak tree that’s been scarred by lightning and the jagged boulder with lichen in the shape of Abraham Lincoln’s profile.
Men and women simply don’t see the world the same way. That statement might be heresy to Gloria Steinem, but its accuracy has been confirmed by several scientifically structured experiments. While some individuals of both genders will think like the opposite sex, the majority of women use landmarks to find their way around, while the majority of men use maps, compass points, and calculated distances.
These differences are believed to be evolutionary. For most of humankind’s history, men have been the hunters and women the gatherers. Prehistoric males ranged far afield in search of edible prey, and they had to develop a reliable way to find their way back to their caves. They learned to pay attention to the sun’s position in the sky, and to create a mental map of the landscape. Women stayed close to home, and they learned where the berry patches and fruit trees were. (Even now, according to one study, women learn their way around a food market much faster than men do.)
The differences in the way men and women navigate shows up even when they’re working – or playing -- in virtual environments. Female architects, designers, trainee pilots, and computer gamers all function more efficiently when they use 3D graphics that resemble the real world and view them on wider screens that improve spatial orientation. Tests conducted by a team of Carnegie Mellon scientists and Microsoft researchers showed that when women used wide screens and realistic 3D images, their performance equaled the men’s.
All of this makes me feel marginally better about my pathetic navigational skills and less guilty about the money I spent on a GPS unit. I wonder, though, whether political correctness will ever allow us to honestly depict such gender differences in fiction and make use of them to propel a plot forward. Writing about a woman who can’t follow a map invites accusations of sexism from women, although the men in their lives may think it’s a realistic portrayal. A male character who meticulously states exact mileage and compass orientation when giving directions would make many women roll their eyes in exasperation.
As with so many other aspects of human existence, the facts may be firmly established for decades before people will willingly acknowledge them in everyday life. Fictional heroes and heroines, whom writers tend to present as idealized versions of their own genders, might never catch up with reality. My heroines possess all the navigational skills I lack. They know where they’re going and how to get there. And if some researcher says this isn’t realistic, I have a ready reply: Hey, it’s fiction!
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