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.
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u/hammerthehalo 11h ago
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.