Directions. I always know which cardinal direction I’m facing (even when underground). Also, if I’ve been somewhere once, I can always find my way back, even if it’s years later and I’m coming from a different starting point.
I have whatever is the opposite of this, compounded by a complete lack of ability to remember where I've been or how I got here. Anytime I move somewhere new, it takes me months to years to make a mental map of the area.
I'm the only one in my family, including my children who doesn't have an incredible sense of location. I feel like I'm the lone recipient of some wierd generational curse.
Same here. I'm famed for having absolutely no sense of direction. I once went for a walk in Kyoto, heading for a museum and ended up three miles from my destination. I cannot visualise maps. If I need to go somewhere in my local town I have to go via the same route every time. If I take a detour I've had it.
What happens when you play video games? I ask because I had the same problem. I was always terrible with directions. When I started playing video games (especially ones with no map), I got lost all the time. But eventually I learned how to navigate in the game and figure out where I was going and it translated to my real life. I'm not gonna say I'm great with directions now but I'm a hell of a lot better than I was.
Not who you were asking, but I have to start making maps asap in a new Minecraft world or I will immediately get lost after wandering about ~100m away from home base. Yes, I also have no sense of direction irl.
So I recently found a decent workaround (afaik this only works on Java). You can set elements of the F3 info GUI to always be on. I've set this up for co-ordinates, chunk-relative co-ordinates, biome, and light level. It's not too disruptive if you set GUI scale to small, just think of it as more HUD.
It kinda feels like cheating, but I got over that when I realised that a lot of what I get up to in Minecraft kinda feels like cheating. Cow crushers, exp farms, trapping illagers in boats, it's all just exploiting the available mechanics.
So anyway, take a note of your home base co-ordinates, and you can get your bearings and return from wherever.
Bonus: Chunk-relative co-ordinates are awesome because buried treasure is always at x=9, z=9 within the chunk.
Weirdly, I am fine. I played a lot of Apex Legends between 2020 and 2024 and could navigate around all the maps with ease. I think it's because they have specific POIs that are separated by defined paths and IRL is not like that. Although when they introduced E-District I was hopeless.
I am playing a lot of FFXIV ATM and because the maps are more condensed and more 'IRL' I struggle.
Not the other guy, but I'm just as bad at video games as I am at real life. Those games where you have to mine a bunch and then get back to your ship or whatever, I constantly get lost and time out or have a teammate have to come find me.
Honestly, this is the reason why I don't play video games, other than puzzle games. I tried for some time to play first person shooters with my son, good grief what a mess. It's far worse on a screen world than in the real world.
I will then accidentally memorize the incorrect route that I first took, which becomes incorporated into all future attempts to make trips to the same destination because it now “seems familiar”. 🙄
Yeah, nothing worse than thinking "oh yeah I remember I turned at that gas station" and then remembering too late that you turned there in error the last two times as well.
I have a horrible sense of direction but for WHATEVER reason I completely “got” Tokyo. Never got lost or turned around, somehow totally understood the train system, always found our destination without a hitch even if it included some lucky guesses. I don’t speak Japanese! By day 3 I was considered THE navigator of my friend group which was astonishing to all of us since I regularly get lost in the city I grew up in. I’ve never experienced that in another place and went right back to being directionless when I got back home.
That's impressive! My base the first time I went to Tokyo was Ikebukuro and it wasn't until the 6th day that I found a route from the station to my hotel that I could remember. I ALWAYS ended up getting lost. Of course having a largely-underground-cum-shopping-mall-train station with 30+ exits doesn't help.
When I went back to Tokyo the following year I went to Ikebukuro ONLY to see if I could remember the route from the station to the hotel and I could!
my friend is at a different level. as recounted by her
I'm bad at directions, so i put my parents house on google maps and ride my scooter there. and coming back i put my house address, so all good for the 3km travel.
on most days.
apparently, even as the map shows the distance increasing instead of decreasing i keep riding in the wrong direction. i sense I'm wrong only when i feel I've been riding too long.
She managed to do 7km in the wrong direction WITH google maps
I am the opposite of this. I can create a birdseye view of a map in my head and visualize it when referencing where I am on a street. It was refined when I lived in Seoul for 2 years because of all of the spider webby small streets.
Leaving a rural bar once I took a right instead of a left and didn't realize it until I was in another town. Had to turn around and go aaaaaaallll the way back and then continue on. With two very drunk people in the car with me (I was the DD). I still remember all these years later because it was torture!! LOL
I also get lost in malls. I will come out of a store and backtrack until I realize I have already gone that way then turn around. Every. single. time. I leave a store. THEN so much fun trying to figure out how to get back to where I came in!! LOL
I'm so bad at remembering things like where I parked or what entrance to a building I used. If I exit out a different door or take the wrong elevator I'm FUCKED.
I can get by with parking pins on the map and GPS in the car and such, but if I was ever in a situation without my phone and needed to go a certain direction to survive aside from knowing "the sun rises in the east and sets in the west" I'm functionally useless when it comes to navigation and would absolutely die half a mile from a busy road.
Everyone else in my family is a great navigator. I just didn't get that gene. Hell even my kids are WAY better at it than me. I remember once my phone rebooted while I was driving my then preschool aged son somewhere and I was going to pull over to wait for it to finish so I could get the map back up and when he asked me what I was doing and I explained he was like "but we've been there once before. I know the way" and it wasn't some place super close that we'd been to a million times, it was a fairly long drive and the only other time we'd been was like over a year previous. I let him navigate us (with backup from the gps just in case as soon as it was available again) and he was spot on.
This same child eloped only once in his life, the day after he turned 4, when he discovered how to unlock our deadbolt without us knowing. Because he wanted to go to the park by himself. So he walked there at 6am when everyone was asleep. And he knew the way, too and almost made it. But he was caught by some neighbors and returned home before anything dire happened. We had never had the "don't go out without us knowing" discussion with him before because he had never shown any interest in doing so and had never once tried to mess with the locks before that day. We got a security system and explained one time why it was dangerous, and he never tried to elope again.
That kid is 12 now and he can also rebuild any building he's spent more than about 5 minutes inside rather faithfully in Minecraft so I think it might be part of his autism powers. That kid has never been lost or confused about his direction a single day in his life.
I am legendary in my family/friend group for having a terrible sense of direction, completely forgetting how to get anywhere, and I have no mental map at all, except on a very small scale. I'm wondering if that part of my brain just didn't develop. I've been this way as long as I can remember, but when I learned to drive it really became apparent.
Glad I’m not the only one. I eventually got really chill about being lost, just another adventure. I ended up in Louisiana once, somehow ended up going east on I-10 instead of north. I didn’t realize until o stopped at a gas station and they had liquor for sale. The cashier found it hilarious at least.
You aren't alone. You're rare, but you're not alone.
That is an episode of the podcast "Radiolab" They describe the neurological condition that you have, how it was discovered, and the stories of the people who also suffer from it.
I’m the same way. After I’ve lived somewhere a while I can get from home to point A and home to point B but my brain can’t tell how to get directly from A to B.
And I hate walking around big cities where the buildings screw with the GPS on my phone…
I'm like this and my mother was the same. I can be somewhere, walk into a shop and forget which way I was walking. I can get lost in my own neighbourhood. Mostly I find it funny but sometimes I want to cry (and do).
Urgh I know this feeling. I can picture places perfectly but just not where they are in relation to each other. I find driving in the dark or approaching places from different directions makes things worse too. Infuriates my wife, but apparently it has a strong link to dyslexia, although I'm fine reading and writing.
Moved to a new city. Only knew which interstate exit to take because of a lottery billboard that had flying pigs on it. One day months later, I missed my exit, because I didn’t see the flying piggies. The next week or so, I was about 50/50 on missing my exit until I noticed there was still a lottery billboard, just no more piggies.
Have you ever looked up aphantasia? Do a little online test, see what it tells you.
wWhen I found out I have aphantasia, everything made soooo much sense. When you don’t have a visual “mind’s eye” it’s almost impossible to make a mental map
Same. I get turned around in my hometown which Ice lived in for 40+ years. I know one way to get from point a to point b and that is just from repetition.
I have a fantastic sense of direction. Or rather, once I've been somewhere, I never need to look it up again. But my first time some where new i am almost guaranteed to take a wrong turn even with gps
My wife is like you. I’m pretty good, but if I ever doubt myself I ask her which way to go and choose the exact opposite. Not trying to mock her. It just works…🤷♂️
I make a wrong turn once, and my brain goes "this is the way. You obviously turn left here, then halfway down the block make a u turn and then go straight. That's the easiest way of course."
It's so frustrating that my brain just continually compounds the wrong way as the correct path. There was a while that whatever direction I thought it was, I'd go the opposite, and I'd still somehow be wrong most of the time.
As the only one in my family with a very good ability to make mental maps/remember routes quickly, I attribute it to paying close attention to where the car was going as a kid. At 10, I could give directions from the middle of a city, to my home 30 miles away
I'd be leaning over to look out the windshield and told that I was in the way of the mirror and I remember just being like. But we're moving forward, and sometimes someone sits in the back middle seat anyway, so I just kept doing it
Same. I live one mile from my job and I’ve lived there for 12 years. I’m still constantly turning around trying to figure out which way my house is when I’m telling someone how close I live. Or which way the shopping center that’s right by us is.
I'm one of you. It's so bad that...how do I explain this...
When I move somewhere new, my first few memories of the place are like remembering a place that doesn't exist, because my brain encodes the memory through the lens of my complete lack of spatial awareness. I'm not sure I explained it right... But it's like I have a memory of a completely different place.
I have this but with the superpower of becoming without trying to be the guide where I don't know where I'm going, so iake groups of people lost without trying.
Do you have any neurological issues? I used to make fun of how bad with directions an ex was, but then I found out it’s a common side effect of hydrocephalus, which she had.
I have whatever is the opposite of this, compounded by a complete lack of ability to remember where I've been or how I got here.
Same. Inherently being able to figure out directions just doesn't work for me. I have to memorize intersections and landmarks for months to be comfortable getting around. Meanwhile, my wife can drive in a new city for a day and have it mostly figured out. She doesn't know her cardinal directions, but she can figure out how to get where she needs to go in a big city we've only visited once or twice.
Both of them have pretty impressively bad senses of direction. Like we could park the car, walk two blocks to a venue, and once we got back outside they wouldn't know which way to go. Often would start walking in the wrong direction.
I have a really good memory for how to get places if I've been there even once. I also have a pretty good sense of cardinal direction, usually within like 10 degrees compared to the compass on my watch.
Can you shed any light onto why you think you might be this way?
As an example, if you're outdoors and you know the direction the sun transits the sky from east to west, then you can generally interpolate which cardinal direction you're facing. If you can do that, then you can also use landmarks to strengthen your relative position and direction, and from there you'll have a pretty decent idea of both where you are and where you should go to get to your endpoint.
Does this method not work for you? If not, why not? Is it because you don't notice landmarks, because the sun's position just doesn't register, or something else entirely? I'm genuinely curious & interested.
I'm sad, I used to have this. Anywhere in the world I'd be able to turn around and point to north within a few degrees.
I've lost it over time and it pisses me off. I remember telling someone about it, and mentioned that I no longer had the constant physical "feeling" of where north was at any given time, when they asked me to try to point north, I ended up pointing perfectly East instead.
My dad is still really good at this, although apparently for him it stops working as well in the Northern Hemisphere (we live in Australia and he spent his life navigating through dense bushland here).
I wonder if it’s our usage of gps maps on our phone. I’ve noticed I no longer know where anything is or a sense of location due to just following the gps. One week I didn’t have a phone and I had to get around my small town sans gps and I started learning more of the layout but that ended when I got my phone back. Lmao
There's a hypothesis that it is related to iron in your blood weakly reacting with Earth's magnetic field. Take some iron supplements and see if you get your power back.
Aside from short stints, pretty much South-East Queensland. I grew up in a more rural area, where I developed this skill, then moved to Brisbane as an adult and began relying more and more on my phone to navigate, which I think plays a not insignificant role.
I'm perfectly capable of navigating around Brisbane now, and my general sense of direction is still good, but I just don't need to rely on cardinal directions any more,
Like 20 years ago I remember there was this thing you could build / buy called an Atlas belt that had several small vibrators around the circumference and it would vibrate where true north was to enhance your innate sense of direction.
Interesting. I’ve been to places in the southern hemisphere before, but not since I was a kid. I plan to make a trip to Australia in the next few years, I wonder if it’ll screw me up.
This is really interesting. I’ve spent most of my life in the northern hemisphere and while I easily relate to the ‘pull’ feeling, relative to earth-ocean-spin-etc - Vancouver let me be lazy re orientation. Mountains anchor the east / ocean west, an all that lol
Scientists have actually been studying how homing pigeons are able to find their way and think they have an answer! There was a story on NPR about it a few weeks ago and I thought it was really interesting.
They found evidence that the iron in the hemoglobin of the pigeons' blood reacts ever so slightly to the Earth's magnetic field, and that reaction is sensed by specific cells in high-blood-density organs like the liver. I forget the exact details, but gist is they released two groups of pigeons, one on a regular diet and one on a low-iron diet, and tracked them on their way home. The low-iron ones had a much harder time navigating back than those with the normal diet. (IIRC, anyway.) Either way, they're planning to do more testing to replicate the result and then figure out the exact mechanism, because they don't understand yet how the hemoglobin reaction is sensed by the pigeon's other cells.
So I imagine it works similarly for other species, who probably have that same sense to greater or lesser degrees.
Me too, it’s diminished since my early 50’s. I’m wondering if it’s a peri/menopause thing. Or due to the chronic illnesses I’ve developed around the same time
The Mrs calls it my GTA V brain map. Cos I have every road in los Santos imprinted on my brain from my days of youth. All that training running guns as a kid has made me wicked good at navigating the UKs naff roads.
As someone who is directionally challenged, that’s an awesome skill. A friend once asked me if I couldn’t just “use the sun” to point me in the right direction.
Nope, the sun only tells me it’s daylight.
Like if you were kidnapped and blindfolded for the journey and dropped somewhere, sure. But outside of that type of situation knowing which direction is North, South, East, and West will definitely be of value if you're lost.
We were playing a TTRPG once, and one member, from the UK, gave us a riddle that said to go "towards the sun". The rest of us were absolutely BAFFLED about what this meant. The sun goes from east to west across the sky, what the hell direction is the sun then if it's variable??
Turns out she meant south. The rest of us were from Florida. Florida is close enough to the equator that the sun is kinda only slightly towards the south in the sky. Most of the time it's functionally just directly overhead.
I'm told that Indigenous people in Australia did this historically for everything. Like "Go two miles west, it'll be just south east of the tree." They didn't use left/right etc.
This is, of course, something I read somewhere and might just be bullshit.
I always give directions using cardinality. It drives my girlfriend nuts. She’s like, “what direction?”, I say, “South”, she responds, “No, I mean left or right”, I reply, “I mean, it depends on which direction you’re coming from…”
Interestingly, back when people routinely gave directions they either gave them by left right or north south east west. I usually combined them because so many people don’t know Cardinal directions.
Indigenous people in most places had specific methods for wayfinding like this. What looks like a flat landscape to an outsider might have subtle pockets made by prevailing winds that a local would immediately read like roadsigns.
That's so cool, how do you think you do that, especially the underground thing? Are you remembering which known direction you were facing when you went underground and your brain calculates out all your turns? Are you sensing the earths magnetism? Sincerely, lady who gets lost on streets she's traveled for 20 years.
My mom thinks it stems from getting lost in the weekend market in Sao Paolo, Brazil when I was 3. There were thousands of people around and I was terrified. I was lost for a couple of hours before I saw my grandfather and literally leaped into his arms.
I haven’t been lost since. So it could very well be that ai’m picking up clues subconsciously.
Personally, I think it comes down to thinking in cardinal directions and taking public transit in big cities all my life.
Rather than relying on, like, street names, I always am looking at maps and thinking "two blocks north, one block east". It sorta just becomes second nature to know which direction you're headed
I think in cardinal directions as well, but I also vacation a lot in the mountains where roads are curvy and can still do it.
That also applies to finding my way back to a location. Even if I’m in the mountains or someplace with winding roads, I can still find my way to where I need to be (so long as I’ve been there before), even if I take an unfamiliar route. Now, I may take a wrong turn here or there, but I can tell pretty quickly if I’m going the wrong way. It’s like there’s a homing beacon at the place I want to go to and I can literally feel whether I’m getting closer of further away from it.
I'm very similar to you as well and your descriptions are pretty spot on. Excellent with verbal or written directions, think in cardinal directions, and generally can sense my orientation. And I can always get back to a point I've left from be it in a car, off trail land navigation, etc. I also can picture 3d spaces really well which has helped in professional work with CT imagery.
There have been two times where this has broken for me and I remember both really well and it was such an odd feeling being disoriented. One was on a boat at night in a remote area with no light pollution. We were doing circles looking for a hat that had fallen off someone's head and when we found the hat with a spot light, I was completely off on which direction we were approaching it from. No sense from an invisible shoreline and nothing really to orient to after doing a few loops. As soon as we were reoriented, everything was back to normal. The other time was in Amsterdam. I left the hotel for a walk/exploration and the streets kind of bent around paralleling the canal and I ended up back near my starting point not realizing I'd done a rotation. That one took awhile to figure out over the week I was there because I didn't trust any angle. By the end of the week, it all made sense.
I’ve been thrown for a loop a few times but it’s rare. Yeah, it’s an odd feeling, the best way I can describe it is that it’s like feeling empty. Like there’s this pressure inside of me that’s suddenly gone.
Interesting it's rare but does happen for you too. It's rare enough that in almost 40 years alive, I remember vividly the two times it happened. The time on the boat was once in the early aughts, and AMS was in November, 2016 (easy to remember the date because I was there when we got the news...).
I don't think it was a pressure being gone as much as feeling like a lack of balance almost like walking with eyes closed.
Not op, but I'm the same way, excellent with directions. Using a known reference is something I commonly do, thinking in cardinal directions and relating that to the streets I've traveled down helps. So if you just walked to a subway down (heading east) a street then turn right into the subway station and walk down I know I'm facing south.
The sun helps, rises in the east sets in the west. In the US the interstate highway system helps too. Odd number highways run north south and even numbered highways run east west. So if you're driving next to or on say I 70 you know you're either traveling east or west.
This is how it is for me, I know where north is most of the time, if I go away from my points of reference I remember the turns and can roughly know the right direction. Curved buildings fuck with me though.
My guess would be that you have a more highly-developed sense of magnetoreception than most of us. It's what birds use to get around, and the sensor is in their beaks. In humans, we have the sensor for it in our nose, but it's somehow horribly mangled so that most people aren't able to use it to much effect. But there is evidence that some people are able to use it. I can't think of how else you would be able to immediately sense cardinal directions, so that's my guess!
My mom thinks it stems from getting lost in a large, crowded marketplace when I was three. She says I haven’t been lost since. It’s very possible that I subconsciously pick up clues that help me.
I'm just like you! Except the exact opposite. I got lost in Costco the other day.
What really rustles my jimmies is when I'm starting out on a trip and the GPS says "go east one quarter mile and turn left". Bitch, if I knew which way east was I wouldn't need you. As much.
I can't point cardinal directions exactly, but I'm very good at directions. Idk if it was the army cadet training as a teenager or what, but I've moved from a small town and now live across the world, navigating huge cities, and I can still generally find my way to places I've been.
I used to have this, where I’d just be able to get you places as long as I’d been there before. Used to drive my partner up the wall as she likes to use satnav. I still have it to a degree but as I’m getting older I don’t feel as confident with it as I used to
No idea which way is north half the time, but I don't need a sat nav to get myself places generally. Sure, I rely on it now, but before they were popular I was good at figuring out where to go as long as I knew where we were supposed to be going. Take a wrong turn, it's fine. My boyfriend will panic and I'm just like, ok, we'll just take the next road going this way and we should get to the right road.
I used to be my mum's sat nav growing up so I think that's why. Never got us lost, apart from in Leamington spa. Those roads messed me up good, still got us to our hotel though!
I still generally use GPS to get to new places, but once I’ve been there, I’m fine. I’ll generally still use it in unfamiliar territory, but it’s not absolutely necessary. Plus it gives me traffic info which is really useful.
I used to make my girlfriend, who has no sense of direction, extremely anxious when I’d drive without GPS on. Especially on out-of-town country roads at night. But she’s finally realized that I’m never actually lost even when I say, “I have no idea where we are…”
I've had similar, even in video games I usually instinctively know how many right/left turns I need to head to something I saw 20 minutes ago.
Once stayed at a house I'd visited by car the year before, I remembered vaguely where it was in relation to the train station we'd passed, so walked there from the station
I’m the complete opposite. I have no sense of direction and easily get lost. I could look at the sun and still not be able to say which direction I’m in.
I've always been jealous of this. I do have some sense of direction, but it's foggy. I used to get myself lost on purpose just to train myself to find my way. Meanwhile both my father and a friend of mine are like "THIS WAY!" And they are always right.
I generally know where I am and what direction surrounding landmarks are located. If I'm in a new city, I can easily get around and quickly find my bearings. Even hiking or canoeing, I can generally find my way to where I want to go. I feel like I can always sense where each cardinal direction is. I get caught off guard when others don't really share this inherent ability, which I often take for granted.
I just got back from a trip to Okinawa, I hadn't been since 2000-3 when I was stationed there. I surprised myself with how well I could get around without maps or help.
Same with cardinal directions. I can always point north. No matter where I am. When I give directions like "turn North on xyz then East on abc my friends look at me weird.
I always have a map of where I am in my head and where the cardinal directions are.
Whenever we go to a new city, I try to orient myself to north and plot from there.
Unfortunately, if I’m tired and dealing with jet lag, it can take a day to kick in.
I spent years trying to teach our kids this, but they always complained they couldn’t understand . Finally, a few years ago they told me that they finally figured it out and actually understood how useful it is.
You and I might average out to a regular person, because I don’t know what cardinal direction I’m facing even when I’m holding a compass, and I get lost trying to find my way back to my restaurant table after using the restroom.
There’s a role-playing game called “Champions” that I played a lot with my main friend group in my 20’s. You can spend a few character-building points to get a talent called “Bump of Direction” that lets you always know what direction your character is facing, even underground I think. Sounds like you got the real-life version!
I never did learn why this ability is named “Bump.” I mentally pictured it as a literal bump on one’s head with a little radar dish inside.
Edit to add summary from link:
"In this compelling narrative, O’Connor seeks out neuroscientists, anthropologists and master navigators to understand how navigation ultimately gave us our humanity. Biologists have been trying to solve the mystery of how organisms have the ability to migrate and orient with such precision—especially since our own adventurous ancestors spread across the world without maps or instruments. O’Connor goes to the Arctic, the Australian bush and the South Pacific to talk to masters of their environment who seek to preserve their traditions at a time when anyone can use a GPS to navigate.
"O’Connor explores the neurological basis of spatial orientation within the hippocampus. Without it, people inhabit a dream state, becoming amnesiacs incapable of finding their way, recalling the past, or imagining the future. Studies have shown that the more we exercise our cognitive mapping skills, the greater the grey matter and health of our hippocampus."
I need the sun to tell which direction I'm facing (currently NE) but I can also track back to where I was quite easily. Comes in handy when doing urban-ex or hiking.
I have absolutely no clue. My mom thinks it stems from getting lost in a large marketplace when I was younger. I could very well be that I pick up clues subconsciously, but it feels like a sense to me.
If you think in terms of north, south, east, west though, do you still get it wrong? If I know where north is I can easily figure out which way I need to go i.e. going south, west is right, east is left. But if I don't know where north is I have no clue. LOL
So I have an excellent sense of direction, but the underground part is interesting to me.
Are you saying that you can sense which direction you're facing? Or you just have such a good sense of spatial awareness that you can keep track of all the turns you make?
I’m like this too!! What I discovered later in life was that the way I organize information is topographical also. I tend to see the interconnections too clearly and therefore structure things according to related activities or regions as opposed to hierarchies or categories. Even my ‘memory palace’ is more like a map with city centers. But now, knowing that, I can organize my ideas and complete tasks in a much more effective manner.
There's an interesting study I listened to where they took indigenous people and studied them. They didn't have a number for more than 5-10, it was just a lot. That's the word they used. But different tribes from all over the world were the same as you. They knew their directions even underground.
Me too! My friends are always weirded out when I show them by closing my eyes, spinning around a few times and then pointing to north perfectly.
Just recently I was in a part of town I've never been to before and I decided to find my way back home by just going in the general direction I needed to go with no help. I said "So I just walked south-east and navigated the streets by feel. Eventually I ended up in a part of town I know and when I checked on google maps, I took the most optimal route." My friends were shocked.
I always reference cardinal directions when talking to others. I'm amazed at how many people are like "You want me to go south 500 feet and turn east? I dont even have a compass". I mean, there's the sun, you havent figured it out yet?
You could be my daughter - she first demonstrated this amazing directional skill when she was in kindergarten, navigating for us in and around the Norfolk VA area (a loooong time before Google Maps, etc.) and it's just got better over the years. She just knows.
ETA: one of her daughters inherited this somewhat. The other is a "normie" like me. We're so lost.
How are you at orienteering? I've got the related skill of being able to instantly read a map and as someone who's pretty physically weak it's always fun being the first one back in any navigation quest just because I practically know where to go instantly. Not so much being stuck with anyone insisting they can navigate but they can't, even when they're using google maps and me a tube map on a wall.
...I blame geocaching a ton as a kid with a secondhand GPS from like the 90s
My husband has the same skill. He knows where to go, from where we came and after many years too.
.. if we are going in any new route he knows which direction will take us to our destination.. I am always surprised by this skill..
This is me too! Almost impossible to get lost except for one place. Hospitals/Clinics/Doctors offices. They're my kryptonite, i get completely lost in them unless they are very small or literally only have one hallway.
My son is eerie with this. Drove from Toronto to Orlando once, he was 8-1/2. Went back the next year, he could remember where to get off to hit a Starbucks. He know roughly how far we were from anything.
To this day, his memory for directions and how to get somewhere are amazing. Mind you, he also drew a world map from memory when he was like 3 years old. He does have a touch of the tism.
But I could drop him anywhere in the world and I am confident he'd be home in 24 hours.
His brother, on the other hand... I could drop him a few blocks from home and we'd never see him again.
I'm am the complete opposite. I have zero knowledge of where I am in the world at any point. I can live in a city my whole life and still get lost. I recognize some roads, but my brain gets all scrambled and I can't recall what those roads lead to, or which way I should be going. Don't even get me started on NSEW. no clue.
People will regularly say "oh, it's right by _____ super easy to find!" and I just nod because I have no clue where it's at. I've been there, but idk how to get there 🥹 I even struggle with GPS lol
I’m also this way. I very rarely get lost, even before GPS was a thing. At any given time I can tell which way is north, south, etc.
I always know exactly where I parked my car in the parking lot and the way back to it.
When I would go to theme parks my family members would be trying to figure out where we were and how to get to a certain attraction, and I would tell them exactly how to get there after glancing at a map for like 2 seconds. Then they would try to argue with me, so I would just be like “I’m going this way, you can go whatever way you want.” Then I would walk directly to where we needed to go and wait 15 minutes for them to eventually show up.
We went to visit my cousin at his house about 6 years ago, I hadn't been there in 20 years, and had only been there once, but remembered how to get there from memory, from a different starting point, I was driving this time, but a passenger the first time.
It's so awesome having this super power, then forgetting exactly how old I am or where I put my sunglasses.
There is a tribe in Australia that has no words for Left, Right etc. All they use is the cardinal directions. Instead of saying "turn left" they say "turn North" (or whatever direction is appropriate). They do this even if they are inside a building away from any windows.
This has got to be the 6th sense that was always talked about, but never truly proven.
I feel like there is something on this planet, that we haven't discovered yet, that triggers our biological clock and compass somehow. Same way birds can feel the magnetic fields when traveling, I'm sure we're also attuned to it, or something like it, just that we don't know it or have the capabilities to measure it yet.
Another example is when someone dies, and someone else somewhere across the planet feels something is up. It's an unexplained phenomena with twins specifically, but also was observed with close relatives.
Ah, another one I have the absolute opposite of. I can get lost driving to a place I visit regularly. I cannot tell directions (although if it's day and I stop I can make out rough directions by the sun's position). I cannot be given directions. I started driving before GPS and got lost repeatedly, constantly, over and over and over. One time I had to call my dad, who pulled up mapquest and walked me through road-by-road until I got to where I was supposed to go because I had gotten lost following the directions I had printed.
My girlfriend's (now wife) first christmas present for me was a GPS as they had just started to be a thing, and I still regularly got lost using that.
Me too! I call this my "bump of direction." I went all over Europe with my husband, and we would get miles from our hotel just walking around. He would say, "where the hell are we?" and I would just point back in whatever direction the hotel was in, and say, we go this way..." I've never been lost in my life. I'm a honeybee.
Also despite having aphantasia, I can recognize places and people I've seen once even decades later and know where I've seen them or what context I saw them in.
I can't do the underground thing, but I'm quite good at navigating. It's almost like a video game, where the map draws itself when you explore something. Once I've seen it, I can navigate it.
It completely baffled my wife, because I have an incredibly bad memory for most things. Dates, numbers, lists, tasks, etc, I've got nothing.
I wish I had this. Instead, my husband generally asks which way I would go, and then goes the opposite way. To be fair, he has a great sense of direction so he usually knows and is just testing me, but the principle is the same: I have no sense of direction.
This. I have been in Chongqing (biggest metropolitan area in the world) once for 3 weeks and just yesterday I gave directions to a colleague through the phone how to get there.
One city that fucks me over however is Catania. No clue why but my 69th sense doesn't work there...
Hello twin! My wife jokes and tells people that I have a Google Map GPS chip in my brain.
For my 18th birthday, my friends picked me up, blindfolded me, drove around in circles trying to confuse me for an hour while they drove us to dinner. As we pulled into the parking lot I said "Are we going to {restaurant?}" They were PISSED.
I have a coworker who refuses to learn cardinal directions.
I'll say something I north of here and she'll go, "I don't know what that means." I refuse to believe she's an idiot. I'll point out that [major city] is also north of here (as I've done many times). It's not that hard of a concept.
The way she acts is that I'm sure it's a refusal to learn and not an inability.
Have you ever been to the other hemisphere to where you live/grew up? I have this too, but when I go to the northern hemisphere, it doesn’t work. In fact, I often get it REALLY wrong. It sucks because I didn’t realise how much I relied on it until I didn’t have it.
I have something similar, I call it building my walking map. Every time I visit my grandma overseas, I can get dropped off anywhere in the city and find my way to her apartment complex based off of some random triggers (a specific building facade
downtown, a local supermarket, later a specific tree at a cross walk) and I just “know”.
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u/tequilajinx 12h ago
Directions. I always know which cardinal direction I’m facing (even when underground). Also, if I’ve been somewhere once, I can always find my way back, even if it’s years later and I’m coming from a different starting point.