Authors: Colin Ellard
You Are Here (2 page)
Psychologists and other social scientists have long understood that there is much more to space than a set of points drawn on a graph or a map. Our language is inundated with spatial metaphors (“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” “The case is under review,” “His behavior was over the top”), and our everyday understanding of space often departs from Euclidean order in spectacular fashion. Think of the way that your understanding of a new and unfamiliar space—a new home or place of work—changes over the course of your experience. The space itself does not change, but the mental representation of it is transformed dramatically.
Throughout much of this book, we will be preoccupied with questions related to navigation and wayfinding. Where am I? Where are
you
and how do you know? We will explore some of the details of the tools that both we and other animals use to find our way through spaces from one location to another. Though we will find much common ground between ourselves and other creatures of field and forest, some stark differences will emerge between our abilities and those of the many other animals with whom we share the planet. Some animals possess specialized senses and abilities that help them to know where they are. We do not. But we have come to an entirely new type of relationship with physical space. This new relationship, the markings of which are literally written into parts of our brain, not only allows us to cope with the problems of space but also in a way liberates us from space. It is as if our prodigious brains have grown to allow us to stand outside of space so that even as we struggle to find ways to survive in it, we can
reflect on it at a distance, even reduce it to a set of mathematical formulas and abstract maps. It is this ability to stand outside real space mentally that has allowed us to conceive, develop, and use the technologies—rapid transit and communication, mass media, virtual reality—that have allowed us to further unshackle ourselves from space. In the chapters that follow, we will look at some of these space-bending technologies and the influence they have had on the way we live our lives, effects that extend from the way we design our homes and cities to the ways that we work, communicate, and play with one another.
In the first part of the book, we will survey the types of spatial information that are available to all animals as they move about the planet, and how they take advantage of them to find their way. We will begin by exploring the very simplest forms of navigation: how do we make our way from our current position to a target that we can see? At this early station point in our journey, we will see that we share much with all animals, from single-celled bacteria to lumbering bears and buzzing bees. In later chapters, we will explore more complicated navigational routines. Landmarks aren’t always the targets of our movements, but they can be used to lead us to our targets (“Just keep the mountains on your left and you can’t miss it”). Maps are endemic to navigators, but there are different kinds of maps. The maps we find in the glove compartments of our cars can be very different from those we hold in our minds as we try to give a set of directions. In turn, our maps can be different from those put together with a handful of neurons in the speck-sized brain of a bee. When we are trying to find our way through unfamiliar terrain, we may try to maintain our orientation by attending to and memorizing our outbound route (“Two lefts and a right at the next light”). We share this ability with many animals, but some animals, such as the desert ants of Northern Africa, can manage this kind of trip with exacting
precision over staggering expanses of space, as if they possess tiny odometers that click off the miles with clockwork precision.
As we explore the details of these different means of wayfinding, we will gradually mark out the boundary that separates human abilities to deal with problems of space from those of other animals. Some animals rely on special senses, such as magnetic field sensitivity or the ability to analyze special properties of light waves that we cannot see. Other animals possess prodigious talents for memorizing their paths or the appearance of thousands of subtle landmarks in a seemingly featureless expanse of forest or meadow. Human beings follow a somewhat different course. Though some of us, particularly ancient wayfinders in preliterate societies, have been able to train ourselves to be sensitive to subtle perceptual cues about locations and routes, we more commonly find our way by connecting different types of images of places with stories that link one image to another. This kind of navigation can sometimes get us effectively from one place to another, but we sacrifice much of our understanding of how places are connected, the geometry of the world, in favor of a simpler view of the spaces we inhabit as a series of connected nodes. We can learn
what
is connected, but our command of the hows and wheres of such connections is shaky at best.
In the second part of the book, we will explore the implications of the differences between human beings and other animals for problems that involve our understanding of where we are. How do the sizes and shapes of our dwellings, offices, factories, civic buildings, and cities reflect our abilities (or inabilities) to come to terms with physical space? How does our unique conception of space as a topology of connected nodes influence the way that we interact with colleagues at work? How has modern technology, especially instantaneous communication using everything from the telephone to
the Internet, changed our understanding and use of physical space? Has the fact that our minds are fuzzy about the geometry of the everyday world accelerated the extent to which such technologies have penetrated our lives? Would an animal that understood in its bones the meaning of space have been able to adapt to the hyperspace of the World Wide Web and virtual environments spanning the globe?
There can be little doubt that our ability to stand outside of real space and look back into it, reflect upon it, and shape it to our own designs and purposes has been responsible for much of the form of modern life. We have used technology to adapt the world to our purposes, and our own ability to adapt to technology is made possible by the way our brains perceive space. At the same time, our ability to step outside of the world’s geometry mentally has resulted in a sad kind of detachment between us and the rest of the planet. This state of detachment may contain some important clues about another of the great paradoxes of human nature: how can a being whose mind is capable of such dramatic acts of understanding and creation wreak such havoc on its own home that its very future stands in some doubt? Perhaps the more pressing question is whether understanding where mental space comes from and what is done with it can help us to find solutions to such vexing problems. Can we rethink our relationship with space to make us more aware of the effects of our actions on the state of the planet? Can the artful design of buildings and cities encourage us to make connections to our spaces and places that will help us to take more responsibility for them? Could the secret to recapturing our sense of environmental stewardship reside in recapturing some of the connections with the planet that were possessed by
ancient human forebears whose lives depended at every moment on their understanding of
where
they were? Can we co-opt some of the same technology that has helped us to conquer space in our personal lives to make us more aware of the wider sweep of space that is beyond the purview of our senses?
I hope you will find this book an optimistic one. It would be sad to think that a species that can produce Einstein, Mozart, Mother Teresa, and Shakespeare could short-circuit its own future, and the future of its home planet, because of a curious cerebral glitch that has simultaneously allowed us to conquer the wide spaces of the solar system but to become lost in a shopping mall. It seems more important than ever that we recognize that the most important impediments to our survival and flourishing are not technological barriers but psychological ones. More than anything else, moving forward in time and space will require that we understand not just who we are but
where
we are.
WHY ANTS DON’T GET LOST
AT THE MALL
H
OW
H
UMANS AND
A
NIMALS
N
AVIGATE
S
PACE
LOOKING FOR TARGETS
S
IMPLE
T
ACTICS FOR
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INDING
O
UR
W
AY
T
HAT
W
E
S
HARE WITH
A
LL
O
THER
A
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Following the light of the sun, we left the Old World
.
CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS
W
e’ve all done it. At a meeting, a conference, a wedding, or a simple potluck gathering with friends, the food appears. Though manners may prompt us to restrain ourselves for a few minutes, our antennae wave, our restless feet shuffle, and we make a beeline for the tables. If a scientist were to hover above us and measure our movements, it would be easy to show the average guest-to-plate distance as a steadily decreasing mathematical function. This class of behavior, called taxis, is the simplest kind of spatial behavior that can be imagined. All that is required is a target (that magnificent roast of beef), a sensor or two (our well-tuned nostrils and eyes), and some kind of motive force (sore feet squeezed into formal shoes will do nicely).
Life does not always treat us so kindly, though. On our way to the table, Longtalker Larry makes a perfect intercept course. How to rearrange the missile trajectory so as to home in on the canapés while avoiding verbal entanglement with Larry? The buffet table has two rows of food. On the closest side is Aunt Betty’s famous potato salad, but it looks a little bland. The better bet is Sarah’s Spicy Potatoes, but they’re just out of reach. We’ll need to thread our way through a crowd, momentarily losing sight of the target completely, in order to plan the return foray to starch Valhalla on the distal side of the room. What’s the quickest way? Perhaps the party is in a building we’ve never seen before. The sweet aromas are everywhere, but compared to what vision gives us, they don’t make much of a spatial cue. Which way do we go first? How do we conduct an efficient search?
Compared with many of the stories of feats of navigation that I will relate to you, finding your way to and then around a table full of food is small potatoes (Sarah’s if you’re lucky). Nevertheless, all such behaviors, ranging from the trivially simple taxis to the complex wayfinding task, point to one basic truth of biology. Unlike the potted geranium sitting in my window, you and I, like all other animate beings, need to be able to move from one place to another to survive. In order to remain nourished, I must get up from my chair and go to the fridge to find food. In order to avoid a premature demise, I need to leap out of the way of the bus that hurtles down the road toward me. The whole raw biological point of my individual survival is to reproduce. But this, too, requires movement. In order to pass my genes on, I need to be able to get up and walk around until I find a mate. (This, you may argue, is something of an oversimplification.) To survive, we must come to terms with space and time. Whatever the physicists and philosophers might say about these things, movement is defined
as a change in place over some duration of time. Given this, it is not at all surprising that nature has produced a wide array of mechanical devices that produce movement (legs, wings, fins, and so on). In addition, we have evolved an even more impressive arsenal of tools that allow us to know
where
to move—that is, to find our way through space to important goals such as sustenance, warmth, safety, and sex.
The simplest tricks of navigation are perhaps so obvious that we don’t even think of them as being tricks. You are walking down the aisle in a grocery store when, just ahead of you, you see the box of spaghetti you’ve been seeking. With little or no conscious effort, the box is soon in your hand and then in your shopping cart. What’s to explain? This seemingly trivial piece of behavior—moving to a clearly visible target—is something that we do hundreds of times a day. Such behaviors are required of all animals that move, yet they are accomplished in a wide variety of ways.
The most primitive kinds of animals, one-celled creatures such as bacteria, though their needs may be simple, must still possess a basic toolkit that allows them to find their way to conditions that sustain life: light, heat, and sustenance. Sometimes these unicellular denizens of our soil, water, and even our own bodies can employ a search strategy much like a child playing a game of blind man’s bluff. Their rates of movement rise and fall with the activity of sensors tuned to the concentrations of heat, light, or chemicals that surround them, and these changes in movement bring them inexorably into contact with their goal. Other than the movement of a plant bending toward the light, it is difficult to imagine a simpler mechanism by which a living thing can deal with the problems of space.
In other cases, such tiny creatures as these may possess specialized equipment to help them guide their movements. In 1996, a group of scientists, headed by Dr. David McKay of NASA’s Johnson
Space Center, claimed they had discovered fossil evidence for the existence of life on Mars in a lump of meteoric rock that had been collected from the Antarctic.
1
Analysis of the chemical composition of the rock left little doubt that it was of Martian origin, and the peculiar formations inside the rock looked suspiciously biological. Researchers thought they could see tiny cell bodies, reminiscent of our own earthly bacteria.
As some of McKay’s early evidence has been disputed by others,
2
the initial excitement has died down, but he remains convinced that the particles of magnetite that were found in the sample once constituted a part of a Martian life form. Magnetite is found in various places on our planet, but one of the most interesting homes for this magnetic mineral is inside single-celled organisms that employ a unique style of navigation. So-called magnetotaxic animals use particles of magnetite as tiny compasses that orient their bodies with planetary geography. Though these magnetite bodies take advantage of the earth’s magnetic field in exactly the same way that makes the Boy Scout compass face north, in this case it is not to help them to read maps correctly but to do something much simpler: the magnetite pulls these tiny aquatic animals downward into the lakebeds lining their watery homes, where they find food, safety, and comfortable temperatures. The origin of the magnetite found in McKay’s samples is a matter that still swirls in controversy, but if he is correct, not only will his discovery constitute the first evidence of extraterrestrial life but his claim will be based on an elementary form of navigation.