Wayfinding

The physical world is infinitely complex, yet most of us are able to find our way around it. We can walk through unfamiliar streets while maintaining a sense of direction, take shortcuts along paths we have never used and remember for many years places we have visited only once. These are remarkable achievements.In Wayfinding, Michael Bond explores how we do it: how our brains make the 'cognitive maps' that keep us orientated, even in places that we don't know. He considers how we relate to places, and asks how our understanding of the world around us affects our psychology and behaviour.The way we think about physical space has been crucial to our evolution: the ability to navigate over large distances in prehistoric times gave Homo sapiens an advantage over the rest of the human family. Children are instinctive explorers, developing a spatial understanding as they roam. And yet today few of us make use of the wayfaring skills that we inherited from our peripatetic ancestors. Most of us have little idea what we may be losing.Bond seeks an answer to the question of why some of us are so much better at finding our way than others. He also tackles the controversial subject of sex differences in navigation, and finally tries to understand why being lost can be such a devastating psychological experience.For readers of writers as different as Robert Macfarlane and Oliver Sacks, Wayfinding is a book that can change our sense of ourselves.

“Michael Bond's fascinating, incisive account of how the human brain evolved to keep us orientated throws up intriguing questions about how we live today . . . Beautifully written and researched; I hugely enjoyed this book .”

Fascinating . . . Bond offers stories of phenomenal feats of navigation . . . Ultimately, “we are spatial beings” and Wayfinding skilfully and at times movingly makes the case for how deeply that is true. Sunday Times
In this fascinating book about our gift for what Michael Bond calls wayfinding, he makes a compelling case that our ancient abilities to get from A to B aren’t just a matter of geography. New Statesman
Michael Bond’s fascinating, incisive account of how the human brain evolved to keep us orientated throws up intriguing questions about how we live today . . . Beautifully written and researched; I hugely enjoyed this book. -- Isabella Tree, author of Wilding
To understand anything, we first need to put it in some sort of order. A sense of direction is essential to the development of intelligence. Does this mean our world of automated travel and route-dictating apps is making us stupid? Michael Bond investigates in Wayfinding. New Scientist
One of the most fascinating books I have read for a long while, not least because of how it opens up so many other subjects. Scotsman
I hope this book will inspire people to explore and experiment with [their navigational] abilities, for if they do, they will be in for a wonderful surprise. -- Robin Knox-Johnston
An excellently researched popular science book which explains how people — including experienced travellers — get lost, and why some individuals have superior navigational skills than others. Spectator
A fascinating excursion into the very nature of exploration. Absorbing stuff. -- Benedict Allen
Compelling . . . Don't be afraid to lose yourself in these pages: you won't be disappointed. The Lady
If this was only a science book about how we navigate — Inuit methods, explorers’ feats, extraordinary animal abilities, brain scans, men v women — it would be compellingly good. However, Michael Bond goes further: he weaves in stories of people who got lost, from long-distance walkers to dementia sufferers, looking at what happens in the mind. And threaded through the book is a thoughtful argument about how our ability to find our way is integral to our nature — and how it is being undermined by technology Sunday Times

Michael Bond, who won the British Psychology Society Prize 2015 for The Power of Others, is a freelance journalist and former senior editor and reporter at New Scientist.

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