Our Sense of Direction
The realization that my sense of direction is not all just a matter of north, south, east and west has been discombobulating. Is it just me?
By Lisa Louis
Our Sense of Direction
Lisa Louis
When we are very young, before language powerfully reshapes our thoughts into specific organizing systems, our brains are already processing and forming ways to functionally navigate through life.
One of the most important functions we learn early on is how to get from Point A to Point B. A baby at crawling stage who is highly motivated to reach a desired object exhibits impressive levels of determination and creativity in navigating across a room. A favorite stuffed bear on the far side of the carpet generates resourcefulness.
We add complexity and sophistication to this skill as we grow. As a young kid living in a rural area of the Adirondack foothills in Upstate New York, going to my best friend’s house meant walking a mile: Half a mile straight down my road, turn right and walk another quarter mile, cross the metal grate bridge, and then turn left and walk another 100 yards to my friend’s house. This knowledge of how to get to my friend’s house is etched in a linear series of images with reminders of where to turn next.
Our brains retain more information about where we are and how to get where we want to go as we mature. In middle school I rode my bike seven miles to visit another friend. I did not yet have a map-based sense of north, south, east and west even for long bike rides. Images from driving trips to that friend’s house also appeared in linear sequence in my head.
I knew to ride to our village square, turn right and ride five miles straight, with cars whizzing by on their way north to the Adirondacks. I coasted down the very steep hill into the next village (I had recurring nightmares about losing my brakes on that steep hill), turned left, and then road along a busy highway connection for a short stretch. From there it was a long straight ride through a magical tree tunnel, past horse stables with scenic fence lines, and over a historic bridge and roaring creek up the hill to my friend’s house.
Kids in cars retain a sense of location and direction as parents drive. On the one-hour drive to my grandma’s house, I knew every farm, every town, every long open stretch of corn fields, every old farmhouse with a hand painted sign, “Fresh sweet corn here.” My dad always said we were driving north to grandma’s, but “north” was just a word in my head at that point.
It was only when I was old enough to start thinking about where I might go away to college or had to help plan a road trip that I looked intently at maps. I learned from a map that my college in the Berkshires was a couple hours’ drive east and slightly south. As my travel range expanded, I honed my sense of direction between places, consciously relating my current location to other destinations north, south, east and west.
It’s not that I never thought about directions when I was younger. Social studies classes meant looking at maps highlighting historical events and locations. I knew that the glorious red sunsets I saw from my house growing up were in the west. I also had a nightmare-inducing level of concern for being able to find north using moss on trees in case I got lost in the woods. In the thick forested region I grew up in, shadows that might help indicate east or west were not easily apparent in our frequently overcast skies. Getting lost in the woods was a real and scary possibility.
Then I moved to Japan to live for several years in my twenties. I traveled around Asia every time I had a break from work. I studied maps and distances to plan trips to the Philippines, China, Thailand, Bali, Malaysia, and Myanmar (called Burma at the time). I navigated Kyoto and Beijing bus systems using maps. Maps and the north, south, east, west relationship they represented became a dominant functional force as I traveled.
Oddly enough, within many Japanese cities, my old childhood sense of linear segments to get from Point A to Point B came into play again. Older cities are not laid out in grid form, and a taxi ride in Osaka or Tokyo meant telling the taxi driver to turn at the next convenience store, temple or shrine to reach a destination.
My husband and I moved back to the U.S. from Japan over thirty years ago, and have lived and worked in San Francisco ever since. We collected paper maps for the many road trips we wanted to take. My sense of north, south, east and west sharpened with each driving trip we took, one person navigating with the map while the other drove. In the Bay Area where I live, major landmarks like the Pacific Ocean and inland mountains provide easy directional markers to navigate from without using maps.
Then something happened. With GPS, people didn’t bother looking at maps as much. I never go anywhere without setting a clear picture of direction and location in my head using a map, but many people these days just click their GPS and listen to instructions. If they were asked later using a map to show where they started and where they ended up, would they be able to identify the places and relative direction easily?
The jolting reality change for me came with the advent of rideshare services such as Lyft and Uber. I love driving, even in downtown San Francisco, but there are times when parking and congestion lead me to call a rideshare service.
I confess to finding myself completely discombobulated in the early days of using these services. I would be someplace downtown, in the middle of a street standing on the south side. The app would ask me to click and confirm my pickup spot. The location dot would float where I thought I was, lower side of the street on the app map, which was the south side I was standing at. Or so I thought.
Turns out that these applications don’t always orient their pickup spot screens with north at the top of the image. I’ve had to run across busy streets more than once when I thought I had confirmed the spot I was standing at, only to find that the app wanted me to wait on the other side of the street.
This shift away from north at the top of a map has really thrown me for a loop. In recent years I see favorite nature reserve and park areas depicted in printed map image form with highlight locations I know to be at the north end flipped around at an unexpected angle. North is now on a diagonal, or perhaps located at the bottom of an image where I assume south should be.
Am I the only one who has been thrown off by this? Or are younger people who grew up with GPS and rideshare apps not tethered to my “north at the top” orientation?
My guess is that there are entire cultures that have a sense of direction not based on this north, south, east, west concept. My severely autistic son has a powerful sense of direction and remembers detailed routes of everywhere he’s ever been. He even loves looking things up on map applications online, but I’m quite sure he is not thinking in terms of north, south, east and west. I wish he had the language to tell me, but he’s not there yet.
Readers, have any of you experienced a changing sense of how we navigate the world as technology changes away from the basic north-at-the-top map concept? Do you remember how you processed a sense of direction as a child? I would love to hear your reflections!
Note: As I was writing the draft for this piece, I stumbled onto a short article by a neurologist (“I’m a neurologist-to keep my brain healthy, I avoid 4 things people do all the time,” Baibing Chen, CNBC, Apple News) that said research shows that taxis drivers are less likely to die of Alzheimer’s disease, and that the hippocampus—the memory center of the brain—is larger in taxi drivers because they memorize complex street layouts, using spatial and navigational skills in real time, rather than those who use GPS and have lost the ability to use a paper map, environmental clues and spatial reasoning to navigate the world. Apparently I’m not the only one pondering this!
I would love to hear readers’ thoughts on this issue!
“Our Sense of Direction” ©2025. Lisa Louis and The Renaissance Garden Guy
Readers can check out Lisa’s website HikingAutism.com to enjoy the Insights blog posts for weekly uplifting messages, look at the ever-growing list of Hikes to see the over 200 hike descriptions, and check out the photo galleries under the hikes which adds up to well over 2,000 nature photos. Lisa and her family lead other special needs families on monthly hikes in the San Francisco Bay Area in collaboration with the Autism Society, and she is currently editing the manuscript for her book Just Get to the Trailhead: An Autism Journey, which depicts her son’s transformation from being trapped at home by autism-related challenges to hiking rugged mountain trails. Readers can find Lisa at facebook.com/HikingAutism, twitter.com/HikingAutism, instagram.com/lisalouis777, and HikingAutism.bsky.social
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Lisa, I enjoyed reading about your experiences! It’s so cool that your early routes are still in your mind as physical experiences (hills, what the streets were like, etc.).
I grew up in a city that’s fairly easy to navigate (Phoenix…the central parts are on a square-mile grid that was easy for me to visualize). In early adulthood, I moved to an older city with a more idiosyncratic street layout; that was an education. One of the first things I did was to buy a paper map. I still rely on north being at the top; for online maps, I tend to use Google Maps, which is consistent about that.
I rely on both maps and landmarks because I tend to be place-blind. I walk almost everywhere I go, and I know my familiar routes very well and have many landmarks (including favorite trees, gardens, and houses). But some parts of town are still confusing because I don’t walk them regularly. When I visit one of those places, I trace the route on Google Maps before I go (if possible) until I feel pretty sure I can find my way. I have a fairly good sense of N, S, E, W, and those concepts tend to be more prominent in my mental wayfinding than left or right, for some reason.
I recently discovered that I’m autistic (I’m in my 60s), which explains both my difficulty with unfamiliar streets (even in a city where I’ve lived for 40+ years) and my need to understand and visualize my routes using maps and landmarks. I never use GPS. I’m not comfortable with someone just telling me; I need to understand it for myself.
Thank you for this great comment, Mary! Your description of how your sense of direction works, combined with your newfound insights based on your recent diagnosis, make for a fascinating combination. Your description all makes sense to me! Learning directions in a more logically laid out city like Phoenix may have set your sense of direction fairly well from early on. I’m like you, preferring to check things on a map first, and not relying on someone else or technology without checking on my own. Thanks for the great comment!
“Our Sense of Direction,” written by Lisa Louis, is quite profound. Beautifully written and with deep meaning and, of course, practical relevance. Excellent piece, Lisa. And thank you, John, for exposing me to another writing by Lisa.
It really is an interesting topic, isn’t it? Lisa does a wonderful job of exploring it. Thank you for reading it, Rick, and for commenting.
Thank you for reading “Our Sense of Direction,” Rick, and for your kind comments! Grateful for your readership!
The other day I had to go to a medical clinic in another town. I didn’t want to drive the freeway [I5] so I asked my husband how to get home from that clinic without going on the freeway. He gave me the directions. Partway through those directions my Asperger brain shut down on some of the instructions but it had absorbed all the instructions anyway.
I got in my car and instead of taking the freeway to get to the clinic – I just worked my husband’s directions backwards and reached my destination with 7 minutes to spare. I was so proud of myself. On the way back I puzzled over something that has been bothering me about living in Washington state for 25 years.
Here in Washington state many of the street names have been changed to numbers. So one can be at the intersection of 78th and 78th and both are two different streets. That’s because one 78th is an avenue while the other 78th is a street.
The Avenues run north and south and the streets run east and west. When one encounters a street that has a name and not a number – it ends in the word “Road.” And then there are those NE – NW – SE – SW additions to road names. That’s another story.
So my dilemma on the way home was – how am I going to resolve the issue of being on 67th and then turning left at 64th? Then partway down the very lonnnnggggg 67th the solution dawned on my Asperger brain. 67th is 67th Avenue NE [it runs north and south so it is an avenue]. 64th is 64th St NE [it runs east and west and is also called Hwy 528].
I made it home in record time – with one brief stop at the local Church to get our Thursday night dinner. On the way to said church I encountered another anomaly of Washington-named streets. To my left was 113th Ave NE yet the opposite side of the road was called 113th Dr NE.
When I got home I cheerfully told my husband of my accomplishments. He was quite proud of me.
You’ve done a better job of analyzing the thoroughfare peculiarities associated with your local travels than I ever could, Annie. Thanks for sharing your experiences here.
Wow! That is quite a story. I’d heard about the confusing street/road names there but had no idea of the level of complexity. Clearly, your brain is functioning quite well in terms of navigating and spatial reasoning! Based on the neurologist article I referenced, your hippocampus is doing well! Thank you for sharing this story!
Thank you Lisa. Washington state IS quite complex. Yesterday my husband and I had to venture to Seattle. The streets are way too complicated there to figure out. We literally crossed Fremont Avenue 3 times in our endeavours to Escape From Seattle. At least leaving Seattle yesterday was a few hours shorter than the previous time. We must have ended up spending 2 – 1/2 hours driving to leave that city. Once one gets into Seattle – it can be challenging to leave.
And often times the map books bear no relation to what one is actually encountering. We needed to get off at a certain exit. But until we got to within 1 mile of that exit – we didn’t know that we needed to be in the far left hand land to exit – and not the far right hand lane. In commute traffic – that was extremely challenging. But people were gracious and let my husband cross those four lanes.
What a nightmare. Traffic situations like that (especially when maps are inaccurate) are very stressful and intimidating to me. The feeling of disorientation is overwhelming.
I can feel the stress as I read your description of trying to navigate Seattle! It’s so odd that some places are easy to find one’s way through, no map needed, and others, with all the maps and navigation tools in the world, are still confusing. We have some freeway exits and lower street connections that throw me for a loop every single time I take them. Thank goodness for drivers who allow tight lane changes! Thanks for sharing!
I must confess… When I look at a map I always assume that up is north. When I travel I always take a map so I know what’s around me and what lies ahead. I also put my destination in my phone. It will get me where I need to be, but I never really know where I’m at – only my map will tell me that!
I agree. Lisa hit the nail on the head with this one. It also makes me wonder if humans have an innate sense of direction and orientation, or if it’s determined by environmental/cultural influences. Her piece is definitely thought-provoking.
I am glad to hear from a fellow north-at-the-top-of-the-map reader, Kevin! I was shocked several years ago to see a specially produced map of my favorite hiking area in Marin County, California, only to see that their paper map was oriented very differently from our assumption. I also received a lovely gift that featured a map of highlights of another favorite hiking area, and realized that north and south were inverted in that as well. Here’s hoping that most of our maps will still follow our inclination to have north at the top! Thanks for reading the piece!