I’ve always assumed that this is something inborn instead of learned—hopefully, that assumption (which come to think of it I’ve never really questioned) is wrong—but I have a very hard time orienting myself.
When I’m walking up the stairwell in my apartment, I have no idea whether I am walking towards the road, away from the road, or perpendicular to it. I can sit down with a pencil and paper and draw it and figure it out by looking at it from a ‘birds eye’ perspective. But when I’m standing in a room with opaque walls and trying to imagine what room is on the other side, I just get really confused.
This weekend I finally finished my compass anklet. It’s pretty impressive how quickly the human brain can include a new sense. I’m looking forward to taking it geocaching!
What do you do with the knowledge of which way North is? Are the motors continuously vibrating or pulsed? When you take it off do you feel the absence (absense?) like an amputation?
When I wear the device, there are eight motors positioned around my ankle. The one pointing most closely to north vibrates. As I move, there is sometimes some lag before a motor changes state, but when I’m still, there is always one motor buzzing, or else two motors kind of taking turns. (Actually, one of the motors doesn’t work, because I burned the circuit board at its contact >< But that still tells me something.)
I’m not totally used to it yet—the buzzing is a little uncomfortable when it goes on for too long in one spot (like sitting in a car driving straight for several minutes). I think it might be an improvement if the motors were pulsed instead of continuous. But, if I am walking around, changing directions, it feels just fine. But I haven’t been using it enough for me to feel a strong absence or blindness when I take it off.
How do I use the knowledge? One of my hobbies is geocaching. In geocaching, I usually need to look at a GPS receiver and a compass alternately, while also not tripping over roots and while looking around for my goal. I haven’t gotten to try it yet, but with the ankle device (it’s called North Paw), I’m hoping to reduce my visual burden by transferring some responsibility to my tactile modality.
I could use this sense. I imagine it is similar to up and down feeling. I could use many more such. Where is my car for example. Which direction and how far. A combined device for several informations of this kind should equip and serve me well.
Nope, not me. But the video on that site looks a lot like a bigger version of the inner guts of the North Paw. Just to be clear for any who didn’t follow the link in my comment, I put together a kit that Sensebridge sells—I did not design the anklet.
My own spatial reasoning abilities are very similar to what bogdanb describes, but ever since reading that Wired article I have thought about building one of those for myself.
I do not know if this is a practical, general or transferable solution, but it worked for me: throughout my childhood I couldn’t orient myself, and I finally taught myself at the age of 24.
Start from a place where you can see quite some distance in all (or most) directions. Outside is best. If you can see, but are not within, a downtown core, you’re in a good spot. Ditto mountains, or other tall landmarks.
Now ignore those landmarks. They’re untrustworthy. If you can see them, they’re close enough that sometimes they’ll be north and sometimes west and sometimes right on top of you. They can be a good marker for your position, but not for your orientation. You need an orientation marker.
So instead, look in the other direction, the most featureless cardinal direction you can find. Then imagine a huge, fictional geographic element just over the horizon, and tell yourself it’s in that direction: living in Edmonton at the time, I used the mantra, “The desert is west.”
This is a fictional desert. (Or sea, or taiga, or forest.) It is always west. (Or east, or southeast, or north.) For this process to work, you can’t actually pick a real landscape, or it becomes possible to walk around it, at which point your directions are confused again. If you’re like me, a fictional landmark will help you orient yourself — but please don’t make the mistake of believing it’s real.
Now take a few minutes to walk around, keeping the desert in your awareness. Which way are you facing when it’s straight ahead? Which way are you facing when it’s behind you?
After a remarkably short time, you’ll find that you always know where the desert is. And that will tell you where all your directions are. And then you’re oriented. And now you can look at that downtown core and notice, “When I am standing at Broadway & Commercial, downtown is to my northwest.”
Repeat this process in a few different outdoor locations, and you’ll be ready to try it indoors. Just before you walk into a building, note where your imaginary forest is. As you turn corners, keep it in mind. Since the forest is fictional, you’ve never seen it anyhow; the fact that there are no windows in this university won’t matter so much.
Oh, and if you’re driving, remember that the centrifugal force you feel is proportional to your speed! The faster you’re going, the more quickly you feel as though you’re turning — at highway speeds, it takes quite a long time to turn 90 degrees, and a 270-degree cloverleaf seems to go on forever. Unless your city is laid out with perpendicular streets and no freeways, it’s a lot easier to orient yourself when you’re walking or cycling than when you’re driving. On a mountain highway, I’m still lost. I navigate by the sun or use a map.
So…this strategy worked for me. I’ve never taught it to anybody else; I have no idea which bits of it are necessary and which are superfluous. Although it uses magical thinking, I’ll point out that it’s easier to imagine a specific, concrete object — like a wide desert just over the horizon — than to imagine an abstract notion like “west.” My problem was too much abstraction; this strategy makes the compass real.
I grew up just east of the Rocky Mountains, which are, being in my area more or less straight north-south, always to the west. No fictional landmarks required. You might be able to do something similar with a coastline, though that’s quite a bit less visible.
From what you say I think my orientation skills are quite a bit better compared to yours, though I’m not one of those people who always know where they are and which way is everything else.
As far as I can tell, based on just introspection and comparing my “success rate” for various orientation tasks, there are quite a few different more-or-less specialized mechanism in the mind that handle this, and when they are employed differs with the kind of task. As far as I can tell, my brain at least deals very differently with, for example, navigating a well-known territory and navigating in places I don’t know personally (even though I may have seen a map).
When I go through places I know well—the areas I frequent around places I lived a few days in—I navigate and pick routes almost instantly; I can walk or drive quite complex routes, even routes I never followed before (but through places I know), without ever thinking or paying attention (I mean, I pay attention to the road, not to the route). But this seems to be based on a type of memory that associates the directions relative to where I am with destinations. For example, it often happens that I don’t remember, say, what places follow after the next turn, but I know that I have to go that way to reach some destination; once I turn I’ll remember the “next step”. But it’s not a memory of “routes”, because I can and do on occasion do the same thing with routes that are not common, as long as they pass through places I know. (E.g., I might do a detour that never happened before unconsciously.) Also, it’s not quite spatial memory, because for places like this I don’t have any awareness of their relative location on a map. (That is, I can follow an instinctive route between two distant points, even a route I never followed exactly before, but I can’t tell afterwards if the destination was north or south of the starting point.)
However, in places I’m not yet familiar with things seem to be very different. Generally I can look at a map and remember the interesting points. I can’t remember the map photographically, but I kind of remember the relative orientations of points. Then, if I need to navigate alone, I need to pay attention to the cardinal points and remember approximately the direction my destination is. (Mentally this feels like looking at a graph of interconnected dots, with the vector of the direction I’m looking at superimposed.) It works surprisingly well, and the reason I mention it is that this seems to be a trained skill; when I was younger I relied entirely on the first method above, and I had no hope of orienting myself. This method seems to have appeared after I was forced (by moving alone) and I worked on it; it clearly improved with trying, so I think it’s a learned skill.
As far as I can tell the trick is to learn to “get your bearings” (the “vector” I mentioned above). This is usually easy, I just use the sun to establish (vaguely) direction. It’s easy: in the morning it’s towards the east, midday it’s towards the south, evenings west. If you can model basic astronomy in your head you can make adjustments for date and the like. (If you learn to recognize the big dipper and follow the stars around, it’s easy enough to find the north star at night.)
The trick is to consistently try to do this. I remember at first I failed completely, but if you keep forcing yourself to think “which way is north” often enough, odds are that whatever part of the brain handles that task will start paying attention and work quite well. (Note: try to think in terms of an absolute direction, not in terms of your direction. That is, when I take a turn, in my mental image the map stays the same and the vector for “my direction” rotates; I don’t rotate the map the way a GPS navigator does. So, for example, if I’m going north and turn right, my mental model doesn’t say “destination is now forward”; instead, it always says “destination is east”, and “my orientation is east”; it’s much easier to mentally rotate a line in a map than to mentally rotate a map.)
(A hint: if I’m led by someone between two places, I almost never remember the route, even if I try. But if I force myself to check a map and try to navigate by myself once, I almost don’t have to try to remember it.)
It’s quite clear that the two systems are distinct; whenever they need to interact, for example when navigating between an area I know well and one I don’t, it feels very strange; I get a very clear sensation of knowing the familiar area in a way and a very different sense of the other area (like a map), it feels like they don’t connect. I have to visually “mark” the familiar spots on the mental map of the unfamiliar place, and consciously figure out the relationships and connections, before I can route between the two “modes”.
Orientation in a place is very similar; the two methods apply the same on familiar/non-familiar places. However, in buildings I don’t think in terms of north/south, I usually think in terms of the entry point. However the mental operation of figuring out which way that is after a few turns is the same as that of remembering which way north is. In familiar places I can’t tell immediately which way is everything, I have to imagine me moving through the place, step by step, using the “familiar” system and construct a mental map in parallel using the other “map-like” system.
It’s both inborn and learned. (Like a musical ear: you get what you get, but you can make it better if you work at it). A bird’s eye view is the way to do it, there was an interesting bit on Radiolab recently about languages that rely on dead reckoning, and people keep track of it with a bird’s eye map in their heads. If you can figure it out with pencil and paper, do that often. Eventually you will be able to do it without the pencil and paper. If you aren’t generally good at mental representations of spatial or visual things, it will take longer.
I’m quite incapable of doing that too. I find the confusion an interesting experience, because the reasoning required seems quite simple—but I can’t do it. I suspect it’s a module that’s under-developed in me.
I also am bad at visual thinking in general. A simple test for any readers who want to indulge me: close your eyes and think of your kitchen. How would you count how many cupboards do you have in it?
I have to think of what’s in the separate cupboards, and do other similar kinds of reasoning. Most people seem to be able to call to mind an accurate picture of the kitchen, and count as though they were standing in it.
On the back wall: One over the sink, with two doors and one shelf-surface. (Does one usually count the bottom surface of a cabinet as a shelf? I’m doing so.) One over the bit of counter space with the dishwasher under it, narrow, with one door and three shelves. One over the stove, with two doors and one shelf.
On the front wall: Two under the counter, two doors each, and each one has a half-depth shelf in addition to the bottom surface.
Some of how I do it is visualization, but some of it isn’t—for the cabinets I don’t usually notice by sight, it’s more a kinesthetic, ‘how would I position myself to get to this’ kind of thing. I also asked myself ‘if I had a thing to put away, where could I put it?’, to help bring up the relevant information and make sure I didn’t forget anything.
Since you are bad at orientation, I suggest that you use tools to help you. For instance, carry a map of your usual roaming area with you, physical or virtual. One of the great things about tiny handheld tablets like the Archos 28 is that you can you can just put an image into it and readily have access to it at all times, or use google maps if you are in an area with wireless internet. If you have a large physical map you wish to digitize, scan it in sections and stitch it together with an image editing program. Or make a map of places like your apartment building yourself that you can use. Also, carry a compass with you for help in unfamiliar locations.
For unaided orientation, you can use the sun and/or shadows as a way to determine rough estimations of east and west (the sun raises from the east and sets in the west, so any shadow in the morning should point west and shadows in the afternoon should point east). This is specially useful in places where streets are oriented North South and East West, since an approximation is all that you need in order to know which orientation is which.
Personally, I liked maps since I was a little kid and have always been great at navigation and orientation. I automatically make a bird’s eye view mental map of whichever outside area I am in and a 3D model of any buildings I happen to enter. These mental copies often contain errors in small details and scale/distances, but become more accurate as I retread the same place again and again. I don’t know if this is possible to learn to do that, but you could try building a mental map by noticing what is around you and noticing where it is located in relation to other stuff.
This depends on the season more than the latitude. At the equinox, the rising or setting sun should appear due east or west (modulo various small corrections), wherever you are. In June, it will appear farther north than this; in December, it will appear farther south.
You write
In Philadelphia, the sun is a little bit south of east-west.
What I do is I pick one direction that I care about and identify it—that way is north, or that way is towards the street, or whatever. Then I notice where that key direction is relative to my body, e.g. the street is behind me. Then when I’m walking, every time I turn I keep track of which way that key direction is now—I turned left and now the street is to my left, I turned left again and now I’m facing it, etc. It can help to think about the part of your body that is towards the key the direction—e.g. if the street is to my left I pay extra attention to my left arm and maybe even imagine pointing or gesturing to my left with it.
I don’t go through this full conscious routine that often—a lot of it I can do intuitively—but I do use it in some cases, like when I’m getting off a train at an unfamiliar station. I’ll notice when I plan my trip that the train is going east and I need to head north when I leave the station. Then when I get off the train I note which way it was headed, and I keep track of that direction as I wind my way out of the train station. Then once I get outside I’ll reorient myself to identify which way I want to go (the train was going in that direction, so I want to go left relative to that direction).
I’ve always assumed that this is something inborn instead of learned—hopefully, that assumption (which come to think of it I’ve never really questioned) is wrong—but I have a very hard time orienting myself. When I’m walking up the stairwell in my apartment, I have no idea whether I am walking towards the road, away from the road, or perpendicular to it. I can sit down with a pencil and paper and draw it and figure it out by looking at it from a ‘birds eye’ perspective. But when I’m standing in a room with opaque walls and trying to imagine what room is on the other side, I just get really confused.
I think that this sounds like too much work to learn manually, so I am embracing transhumanism and making a compass belt.
This weekend I finally finished my compass anklet. It’s pretty impressive how quickly the human brain can include a new sense. I’m looking forward to taking it geocaching!
What do you do with the knowledge of which way North is? Are the motors continuously vibrating or pulsed? When you take it off do you feel the absence (absense?) like an amputation?
When I wear the device, there are eight motors positioned around my ankle. The one pointing most closely to north vibrates. As I move, there is sometimes some lag before a motor changes state, but when I’m still, there is always one motor buzzing, or else two motors kind of taking turns. (Actually, one of the motors doesn’t work, because I burned the circuit board at its contact >< But that still tells me something.)
I’m not totally used to it yet—the buzzing is a little uncomfortable when it goes on for too long in one spot (like sitting in a car driving straight for several minutes). I think it might be an improvement if the motors were pulsed instead of continuous. But, if I am walking around, changing directions, it feels just fine. But I haven’t been using it enough for me to feel a strong absence or blindness when I take it off.
How do I use the knowledge? One of my hobbies is geocaching. In geocaching, I usually need to look at a GPS receiver and a compass alternately, while also not tripping over roots and while looking around for my goal. I haven’t gotten to try it yet, but with the ankle device (it’s called North Paw), I’m hoping to reduce my visual burden by transferring some responsibility to my tactile modality.
I could use this sense. I imagine it is similar to up and down feeling. I could use many more such. Where is my car for example. Which direction and how far. A combined device for several informations of this kind should equip and serve me well.
Very interesting. I keep a list of haptic-compass links and I recently added http://www.monkeysandrobots.com/hapticcompass to it—was that you?
Nope, not me. But the video on that site looks a lot like a bigger version of the inner guts of the North Paw. Just to be clear for any who didn’t follow the link in my comment, I put together a kit that Sensebridge sells—I did not design the anklet.
Wow, that’s pretty cool! I just carry a marching compass in my purse for extra help in orientation.
My own spatial reasoning abilities are very similar to what bogdanb describes, but ever since reading that Wired article I have thought about building one of those for myself.
I love that that site is called “Monkeys And Robots”.
I do not know if this is a practical, general or transferable solution, but it worked for me: throughout my childhood I couldn’t orient myself, and I finally taught myself at the age of 24.
Start from a place where you can see quite some distance in all (or most) directions. Outside is best. If you can see, but are not within, a downtown core, you’re in a good spot. Ditto mountains, or other tall landmarks.
Now ignore those landmarks. They’re untrustworthy. If you can see them, they’re close enough that sometimes they’ll be north and sometimes west and sometimes right on top of you. They can be a good marker for your position, but not for your orientation. You need an orientation marker.
So instead, look in the other direction, the most featureless cardinal direction you can find. Then imagine a huge, fictional geographic element just over the horizon, and tell yourself it’s in that direction: living in Edmonton at the time, I used the mantra, “The desert is west.”
This is a fictional desert. (Or sea, or taiga, or forest.) It is always west. (Or east, or southeast, or north.) For this process to work, you can’t actually pick a real landscape, or it becomes possible to walk around it, at which point your directions are confused again. If you’re like me, a fictional landmark will help you orient yourself — but please don’t make the mistake of believing it’s real.
Now take a few minutes to walk around, keeping the desert in your awareness. Which way are you facing when it’s straight ahead? Which way are you facing when it’s behind you?
After a remarkably short time, you’ll find that you always know where the desert is. And that will tell you where all your directions are. And then you’re oriented. And now you can look at that downtown core and notice, “When I am standing at Broadway & Commercial, downtown is to my northwest.”
Repeat this process in a few different outdoor locations, and you’ll be ready to try it indoors. Just before you walk into a building, note where your imaginary forest is. As you turn corners, keep it in mind. Since the forest is fictional, you’ve never seen it anyhow; the fact that there are no windows in this university won’t matter so much.
Oh, and if you’re driving, remember that the centrifugal force you feel is proportional to your speed! The faster you’re going, the more quickly you feel as though you’re turning — at highway speeds, it takes quite a long time to turn 90 degrees, and a 270-degree cloverleaf seems to go on forever. Unless your city is laid out with perpendicular streets and no freeways, it’s a lot easier to orient yourself when you’re walking or cycling than when you’re driving. On a mountain highway, I’m still lost. I navigate by the sun or use a map.
So…this strategy worked for me. I’ve never taught it to anybody else; I have no idea which bits of it are necessary and which are superfluous. Although it uses magical thinking, I’ll point out that it’s easier to imagine a specific, concrete object — like a wide desert just over the horizon — than to imagine an abstract notion like “west.” My problem was too much abstraction; this strategy makes the compass real.
I grew up just east of the Rocky Mountains, which are, being in my area more or less straight north-south, always to the west. No fictional landmarks required. You might be able to do something similar with a coastline, though that’s quite a bit less visible.
From what you say I think my orientation skills are quite a bit better compared to yours, though I’m not one of those people who always know where they are and which way is everything else.
As far as I can tell, based on just introspection and comparing my “success rate” for various orientation tasks, there are quite a few different more-or-less specialized mechanism in the mind that handle this, and when they are employed differs with the kind of task. As far as I can tell, my brain at least deals very differently with, for example, navigating a well-known territory and navigating in places I don’t know personally (even though I may have seen a map).
When I go through places I know well—the areas I frequent around places I lived a few days in—I navigate and pick routes almost instantly; I can walk or drive quite complex routes, even routes I never followed before (but through places I know), without ever thinking or paying attention (I mean, I pay attention to the road, not to the route). But this seems to be based on a type of memory that associates the directions relative to where I am with destinations. For example, it often happens that I don’t remember, say, what places follow after the next turn, but I know that I have to go that way to reach some destination; once I turn I’ll remember the “next step”. But it’s not a memory of “routes”, because I can and do on occasion do the same thing with routes that are not common, as long as they pass through places I know. (E.g., I might do a detour that never happened before unconsciously.) Also, it’s not quite spatial memory, because for places like this I don’t have any awareness of their relative location on a map. (That is, I can follow an instinctive route between two distant points, even a route I never followed exactly before, but I can’t tell afterwards if the destination was north or south of the starting point.)
However, in places I’m not yet familiar with things seem to be very different. Generally I can look at a map and remember the interesting points. I can’t remember the map photographically, but I kind of remember the relative orientations of points. Then, if I need to navigate alone, I need to pay attention to the cardinal points and remember approximately the direction my destination is. (Mentally this feels like looking at a graph of interconnected dots, with the vector of the direction I’m looking at superimposed.) It works surprisingly well, and the reason I mention it is that this seems to be a trained skill; when I was younger I relied entirely on the first method above, and I had no hope of orienting myself. This method seems to have appeared after I was forced (by moving alone) and I worked on it; it clearly improved with trying, so I think it’s a learned skill.
As far as I can tell the trick is to learn to “get your bearings” (the “vector” I mentioned above). This is usually easy, I just use the sun to establish (vaguely) direction. It’s easy: in the morning it’s towards the east, midday it’s towards the south, evenings west. If you can model basic astronomy in your head you can make adjustments for date and the like. (If you learn to recognize the big dipper and follow the stars around, it’s easy enough to find the north star at night.)
The trick is to consistently try to do this. I remember at first I failed completely, but if you keep forcing yourself to think “which way is north” often enough, odds are that whatever part of the brain handles that task will start paying attention and work quite well. (Note: try to think in terms of an absolute direction, not in terms of your direction. That is, when I take a turn, in my mental image the map stays the same and the vector for “my direction” rotates; I don’t rotate the map the way a GPS navigator does. So, for example, if I’m going north and turn right, my mental model doesn’t say “destination is now forward”; instead, it always says “destination is east”, and “my orientation is east”; it’s much easier to mentally rotate a line in a map than to mentally rotate a map.)
(A hint: if I’m led by someone between two places, I almost never remember the route, even if I try. But if I force myself to check a map and try to navigate by myself once, I almost don’t have to try to remember it.)
It’s quite clear that the two systems are distinct; whenever they need to interact, for example when navigating between an area I know well and one I don’t, it feels very strange; I get a very clear sensation of knowing the familiar area in a way and a very different sense of the other area (like a map), it feels like they don’t connect. I have to visually “mark” the familiar spots on the mental map of the unfamiliar place, and consciously figure out the relationships and connections, before I can route between the two “modes”.
Orientation in a place is very similar; the two methods apply the same on familiar/non-familiar places. However, in buildings I don’t think in terms of north/south, I usually think in terms of the entry point. However the mental operation of figuring out which way that is after a few turns is the same as that of remembering which way north is. In familiar places I can’t tell immediately which way is everything, I have to imagine me moving through the place, step by step, using the “familiar” system and construct a mental map in parallel using the other “map-like” system.
Not sure if that is actually needed. As long as you find your way, you do not need to know which direction something is in from every position.
It’s both inborn and learned. (Like a musical ear: you get what you get, but you can make it better if you work at it). A bird’s eye view is the way to do it, there was an interesting bit on Radiolab recently about languages that rely on dead reckoning, and people keep track of it with a bird’s eye map in their heads. If you can figure it out with pencil and paper, do that often. Eventually you will be able to do it without the pencil and paper. If you aren’t generally good at mental representations of spatial or visual things, it will take longer.
I’m quite incapable of doing that too. I find the confusion an interesting experience, because the reasoning required seems quite simple—but I can’t do it. I suspect it’s a module that’s under-developed in me.
I also am bad at visual thinking in general. A simple test for any readers who want to indulge me: close your eyes and think of your kitchen. How would you count how many cupboards do you have in it?
I have to think of what’s in the separate cupboards, and do other similar kinds of reasoning. Most people seem to be able to call to mind an accurate picture of the kitchen, and count as though they were standing in it.
On the back wall: One over the sink, with two doors and one shelf-surface. (Does one usually count the bottom surface of a cabinet as a shelf? I’m doing so.) One over the bit of counter space with the dishwasher under it, narrow, with one door and three shelves. One over the stove, with two doors and one shelf.
On the front wall: Two under the counter, two doors each, and each one has a half-depth shelf in addition to the bottom surface.
Some of how I do it is visualization, but some of it isn’t—for the cabinets I don’t usually notice by sight, it’s more a kinesthetic, ‘how would I position myself to get to this’ kind of thing. I also asked myself ‘if I had a thing to put away, where could I put it?’, to help bring up the relevant information and make sure I didn’t forget anything.
Since you are bad at orientation, I suggest that you use tools to help you. For instance, carry a map of your usual roaming area with you, physical or virtual. One of the great things about tiny handheld tablets like the Archos 28 is that you can you can just put an image into it and readily have access to it at all times, or use google maps if you are in an area with wireless internet. If you have a large physical map you wish to digitize, scan it in sections and stitch it together with an image editing program. Or make a map of places like your apartment building yourself that you can use. Also, carry a compass with you for help in unfamiliar locations.
For unaided orientation, you can use the sun and/or shadows as a way to determine rough estimations of east and west (the sun raises from the east and sets in the west, so any shadow in the morning should point west and shadows in the afternoon should point east). This is specially useful in places where streets are oriented North South and East West, since an approximation is all that you need in order to know which orientation is which.
Personally, I liked maps since I was a little kid and have always been great at navigation and orientation. I automatically make a bird’s eye view mental map of whichever outside area I am in and a 3D model of any buildings I happen to enter. These mental copies often contain errors in small details and scale/distances, but become more accurate as I retread the same place again and again. I don’t know if this is possible to learn to do that, but you could try building a mental map by noticing what is around you and noticing where it is located in relation to other stuff.
If you aren’t close to the equator, the sun will be somewhat off the east-west line.
In Philadelphia, the sun is a little bit south of east-west.
This depends on the season more than the latitude. At the equinox, the rising or setting sun should appear due east or west (modulo various small corrections), wherever you are. In June, it will appear farther north than this; in December, it will appear farther south.
You write
in February, but check again in April.
What I do is I pick one direction that I care about and identify it—that way is north, or that way is towards the street, or whatever. Then I notice where that key direction is relative to my body, e.g. the street is behind me. Then when I’m walking, every time I turn I keep track of which way that key direction is now—I turned left and now the street is to my left, I turned left again and now I’m facing it, etc. It can help to think about the part of your body that is towards the key the direction—e.g. if the street is to my left I pay extra attention to my left arm and maybe even imagine pointing or gesturing to my left with it.
I don’t go through this full conscious routine that often—a lot of it I can do intuitively—but I do use it in some cases, like when I’m getting off a train at an unfamiliar station. I’ll notice when I plan my trip that the train is going east and I need to head north when I leave the station. Then when I get off the train I note which way it was headed, and I keep track of that direction as I wind my way out of the train station. Then once I get outside I’ll reorient myself to identify which way I want to go (the train was going in that direction, so I want to go left relative to that direction).