Often, we talk about it as fatality or in the tone of joke. But scientists have shown that this trait would have a very precise origin.
“Not everyone has a sense of orientation”. This sentence, we have all already heard or repeated almost mechanically in certain situations. Like when you go around in a parking lot, unable to find where you parked your car. Or when you follow the GPS to the letter … but you still end up taking the wrong outing. This feeling of disorientation, many live it on a daily basis, without understanding where it comes from. What if it was neither a personal defect, nor a lack of attention?
To dig the issue, an international team of researchers conducted a study, which was published in the scientific and technological journal Nature On March 30, 2022. They analyzed the performance of nearly 400,000 people from 38 countries, to a mobile game called Sea Hero Quest. The objective of the game is simple: pilot a small boat on unknown seas to find sea creatures, guiding from a card. But behind this fun decor, it is actually a life -size scientific test, designed to measure our spatial navigation capacities. By crossing the data from the game with the childhood environment of the participants, the scientists discovered an unexpected factor: it is neither age, sex, nor even the country which explains the differences in performance … but the place where we grew up.
The results have shown that people who spent their childhood in the countryside or in cities on irregular streets, like Paris or London, succeed much better than those that grew up in cities in very structured levels, such as Chicago or Montreal. The more the streets are winding, the less the environment is readable, the more the brain is stimulated from an early age. And this early stimulation has lasting effects. “It’s a key period”said Antoine Coutrot, researcher at the CNRS and co-author of the study with the New York Times. Our sense of orientation is therefore shaped from childhood, over the more complex journeys, paths that we learn to memorize, detours that we end up anticipating. Clearly, the apparent disorder of a neighborhood or a village helps the brain build more effective mental cards.
Conversely, growing up in a quaited, predictable environment, limits these adaptation efforts. And leave traces, even years later. The study also reveals that the current environment, the one in which we live today, has little effect on our sense of orientation. Everything is played in the first years. Hence this question asked by Amber Watts, professor at the University of Kansas in the American daily: “Does that mean that we will have to create more complicated environments so that they are more stimulating for our brain?”. Not sure that the idea pleases everyone, but for those who are permanently lost, the news has a reassuring side, it is not your fault, it may be just where you grew up!
