Montshire Minute: Following Directions

Originally aired during the week of April 3, 2000

Monday

Quick, can you give me directions to your favorite restaurant? I'm not in a rush to get an early dinner - I'm just trying to get you to think about the process you use to find your way from one place to another. If you are a navigator on an airplane, you need very precise instruments to locate the airport. But if you're giving directions to a friend to meet you at the restaurant, a hand scrawled map on the back of a napkin will do the trick. You don't have to draw a masterpiece. As long as the spatial relationships on the map are basically correct, your friend will find her way. But scientists believe our brain carries around maps in our minds - and that even some of our memories are stored in map form. This information helps us get from "from here to there" and provides the information we need to communicate spatial relationships to other people.

Tuesday

Maybe you've heard the old Yankee joke about the motorist who asks the local farmer how to get to Weston, Vermont. Or maybe it was East Sandwich, New Hampshire. Anyway, the farmer gives a very complex set of directions. The man writes them down, follows each instruction flawlessly... and ends up exactly where he started. "I thought you were going to tell me how to get to Weston. Or East Sandwich," says the somewhat put-out tourist. "Just wahnted to see if you could follah directions," answered the farmer. "Now heah's how you get theah." Young children, like the motorist traveling in an unfamiliar part of the world, don't have highly developed cognitive maps. They may be able to identify cues or landmarks on their route to school, for instance, but aren't certain how they are all connected. They need to memorize directions to get from point "A" to point "B."

Wednesday

American Edward Tolman discovered that rats quickly learned the fastest route through a maze in order to reach food at the other end. But Tolman also observed that rats found new ways to get through the maze even when the familiar pathways were blocked. His research suggested that over time the rats had built up some kind of internal intuition, or a cognitive map, of the layout of the maze. Tolman reasoned that the ability of animals to make use of these internal maps would strengthen their ability to survive in real world environments where change happens all the time. Cognitive researchers believe that humans carry around visual images embedded with information about spatial relationships. In other words, we develop complex "mental maps" that help us navigate through familiar territory. Which doesn't prevent us from making a wrong turn once and a while.

Thursday

The cartoonist Saul Steinberg drew a now famous map for the New Yorker magazine expressing a tongue-in-cheek "world view" of the typical Big Apple resident. Almost the entire drawing is taken up by the dramatic city skyline, while distant and relatively unimportant landmarks (to a New Yorker) like Texas, Chicago and Los Angeles recede into the background. There is a vague suggestion of an ocean off the coast of California. The map isn't useful to a traveler unfamiliar with US geography. But it suggests the maps we carry around in our minds, while not geographically precise, reflect our world view. Researchers asking subjects to draw maps of their home town notice that people included important landmarks - a particular building or a geographical feature like a lake or river - as reference points.

Friday

We've learned on the program this week that maps are more than just highway travel guides. Scientists have created maps from data that they collect, and this information can tell us lots of things about the natural world. For instance, we can't really "see" subatomic particles. But special detectors can track them when they collide in huge particle accelerators. From these traces, researchers can create maps of the particles and learn about their mass and movement. The Human Genome Project - an effort to catalog the complete DNA code of human chromosomes - is one huge, mapmaking exercise. Paleontologists studing the fossil record, create maps that move through time as well as space as they attempt to reconstruct the story of long extinct creatures. And astronomers continue to create maps to the very edges of the observable universe.