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.
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.